There are few times in life when one reads an opinion piece as chilling and myopic as Jim Allard’s latest rant (“Pragmatism not worthy of my vote,” Oct. 15). If Allard had bothered to read John Dewey, William James, Richard Rorty, Cornel West or any other major pragmatist thinker, he would likely have been astonished — or dismayed — by their commitment to a principled defense of democracy. Allard, on the other hand, seems less inclined to support so pluralistic and messy an idea of political association. He scorns efforts of bipartisan compromise on domestic and foreign policy issues, and claims that attempts to tolerate and accommodate opposing views leads, ironically enough, to the very sort of unfavorable “consequences” with which he accuses pragmatists of being so crassly concerned. Allard’s world is one of ideological rigidity and hyper de-politicization.

What, precisely, is Allard’s stance? Intellectually, he proudly revels in “black and white” thinking. We need the intellectual strength to separate “which social systems lead to prosperity and which lead to mass slaughter,” he proclaims. We need the toughness to stand up and become “intolerant of ideas and actions one abhors” in other cultures. Politically, we need the concepts of the invisible hand, not the dull machinations of the political hand, to maximize well-being.

What a courageous stand, Mr. Allard! Like the “egocentrics” he admires in Ayn Rand novels, Allard appears as the lone voice crying out in the academic wilderness, oppressed by the weak-kneed pragmatists who surround him.

And yet, I’m not persuaded. The burden, it seems, is on Allard to show how the previous eight years of American history have not reflected the kind of thinking he champions, and the kind of outcomes he presumably finds undesirable. A “principled” stance on deregulation and tax cuts has resulted in economic catastrophe, the principled spread of freedom and democracy in mass slaughter, and the principled assertion of partisan will and ideology in the vivisection of checks and balances. Another principled assertion of free markets and war in the name of democracy — as Allard says, “dropping food packages” and “sending billions in aid” smacks of weakness in one’s convictions when stacked up against a merciless bombing campaign — is the last thing this country needs to hear.

As Allard’s other columns suggest, the problem with democracy is that we have replaced the natural, principled and apolitical workings of the free market with the mundane business of politics. In a time when our mutual prosperity is under threat in ways not seen since the Great Depression, it will be politics — the injection of political compromises on ideas of fairness, distribution and regulation into markets — that will either save or doom us. That, Mr. Allard, is what democracy is all about.

Robert Gross

Graduate student, history