It’s an unwritten rule in political journalism today that Amy Klobuchar, the Minnesota senator and Democratic candidate for president, must be described as “pragmatic.”

There isn’t much mystery as to what the press means by this. Politico reported last week that Klobuchar “is pitching herself as [a] pragmatic Midwesterner who won’t over-promise liberal policies to primary voters,” and later described her “tell-it-like-it-is centrism.” The senator probably wouldn’t object much to that characterization. Though she doesn’t appear to call herself a pragmatist with any frequency, her 2015 memoir extolled “a pragmatic bipartisan approach to problem solving,” adding, “The answer, as with so many things in politics, is somewhere in the middle.”



A pragmatist is thus two things at once: a moderate and a realist, with the latter apparently driving the former. This explains why Klobuchar does not explicitly support Medicare for All, saying that single-payer health care “could be a possibility in the future. I’m just looking at something that will work now.” It’s why she calls the Green New Deal “aspirational.” And it’s why she opposes free college. “If I was a magic genie, and could give that for everyone, and we could afford it, I would,” she said. “I’ve got to tell the truth.”



Klobuchar only joined the race a few weeks ago, but already the press has cemented her identity as a pragmatist because she fills a key narrative role in the 2020 race: serving as a contrast to the supposed idealists who are driving most of the conversation (and most of the voter excitement) in the Democratic primary. This is shaping up to be the defining conflict of the race, especially if Joe Biden and Sherrod Brown—who would compete in Klobuchar’s lane—also enter the field. So it’s important to be clear now about what “pragmatism” really means, and why the Democratic Party ought to abandon it altogether.

This is not a new conflict among Democrats, of course. To some extent, it has defined the party for the past half-century.

