Perhaps a little different take on President Trump’s supposed populism or pragmatism, without an underlying political philosophy. I once spoke to a local mayor, asking him his political philosophy. He got angry and said he didn’t have one. I asked a stupid and insulting question. He was a pragmatist. Yet all his policies were about directing the marketplace and society–socialistic.
As a landscape architect, I am pragmatic. I must make things work. But I am not without underlying presuppositions or philosophy. I am anti-statist. I design with nature as much as possible. I am as economical as possible. Beauty is part of restoring God’s world from its fallen state. Etc.
Every writer writes to an underlying theme–a point of view, a philosophy–whether he realizes it or not. And it is discernible. We taught reading in this way so that young people would learn moral discernment.
President Trump in his pragmatic desire for results clearly nonetheless operates upon certain principles. He abides by existing law as he sees it. He loves America as it once was at some point. But he has a concept of what that was, a design, and that is his political philosophy. I would identify it at as a kind of a Teddy Roosevelt progressivism.
