h-a
Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Suggested
Election 2016 Was Coming
The
author Richard Rorty in 2004.CreditHasan Sarbakhshian/Associated Press
What’s so
striking about “Achieving Our Country” is that it blends these theories into a
common argument: The left, both cultural and political, eventually abandoned
economic justice in favor of identity politics, leaving too many people feeling
freaked out or ignored.
Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Suggested
Election 2016 Was Coming
Three days
after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of
three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard
Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country,” published in 1998. It was retweeted thousands
of times, generating a run on the book — its ranking soared on Amazon and by
day’s end it was no longer available. (Harvard University Press is reprinting
the book for the first time since 2010, a spokeswoman for the publisher said.)
It’s worth
rereading those tweeted paragraphs:
[M]embers of labor unions, and
unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their
government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs
from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban
white-collar workers — themselves desperately afraid of being downsized — are
not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone
else.
At that point, something will crack. The
nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking
around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once
he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen,
and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. …
One thing that is very likely to happen
is that the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and
by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back
into fashion. … All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about
having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
Mr. Rorty, an
American pragmatist philosopher, died in 2007.
Were he still alive, he’d likely be deluged with phone calls from strangers,
begging him to pick their stocks.
When
“Achieving Our Country” came out, it received a mixed critical reception.
Writing for this newspaper, the critic Christopher Lehmann-Haupt called the
book “philosophically rigorous” but took umbrage at Mr. Rorty’s warnings about
the country’s vulnerability to the charms of a strongman, calling this prophesy
“a form of intellectual
bullying.”
Donald J.
Trump enthusiasts might dispute the word strongman. But the essence of Mr.
Rorty’s argument holds up surprisingly well. Where others saw positive trends —
say, a full-throated dawn chorus praising the nation’s diversity — Mr. Rorty
saw dead canaries in a coal mine.
Advertisement
His basic
contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all
its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting. Hope was part of its core
philosophy. But during the 1960s, shame — over Vietnam
The result
was disastrous. The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to
passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities,
cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic
justice. By 1997, when Mr. Rorty gave three lectures that make up the spine of
“Achieving Our Country,” few of his academic colleagues, he insisted, were
talking about reducing poverty at all.
“Nobody is
setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park
studies,” he wrote, “because the unemployed, the homeless, and the residents of
trailer parks are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense.”
Photo
Does this
overlooked category sound familiar?
Mr. Rorty did
not deny that identity politics reduced the suffering of minorities. But it
just so happened that at the very moment “socially accepted sadism” — good phrase,
that — was diminishing, economic instability and inequality were increasing,
thanks to globalization.
“This world
economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more
sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American
capitalists of the year 1900.”
Again: Ring
any bells?
This group
included intellectuals, by the way, who, he wrote, are “ourselves quite well
insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization.”
Which left
the white working-class guy and gal up for grabs — open to right-wing
populists, maybe even strongmen. In Mr. Rorty’s view, no one within academia
was thinking creatively about how to relieve white working-class anxiety. This
was a problem. “Outside the academy,” he wrote, “Americans still want to feel
patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of
its destiny and make itself a better place.”
Sounds an
awful lot like Make America Great Again.
At the time,
Mr. Rorty was staring at a slightly different political landscape. But it
wasn’t that different, ultimately. Today’s just has more mature trees.
In “Achieving
Our Country,” he wrote about the perils of the North American Free Trade
Agreement; today, he’d probably have cautioned against the Trans-Pacific
Partnership. In “Achieving Our Country,” Mr. Rorty railed against the
“scurrilous demagogue” Pat Buchanan, who in 1991 talked about building a fence
at the Mexican border; today Mr. Rorty would have railed against Mr. Trump and
his proposed wall.
“Why could
not the left,” he asked, “channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?”
Is his
analysis a bit oversimple? Yes. Even within universities, there have always
been optimistic champions of America
By focusing
only on his own environment, academia, Mr. Rorty’s arguments also seem
strangely parochial. During the 1960s, the academic left may have started to
turn its back on poverty, but actual politicians on the left were still
thinking a great deal about it: Robert F. Kennedy was visiting poor white
families in Appalachia ; Lyndon B. Johnson was
building the Great Society.
Right through
the ’90s and into the 2000s, we had left-of-center politicians singing the
praises of hope, rather than the hopelessness that Mr. Rorty decries. Bill
Clinton explicitly campaigned as the “man from Hope,” and Barack Obama would
later campaign on a platform of “hope” and “change.” In passing health care
reform, Mr. Obama genuinely did something for the immiserated underclass, and
both men, in their ways, rejected identity politics. (Remember Mr. Clinton dressing down Sister
Souljah? Or Mr. Obama declaring on MTV that “brothers should pull
up their pants”?)
But it wasn’t
enough, obviously. “Under Presidents Carter and Clinton,” Mr. Rorty wrote, “the
Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any
mention of redistribution.” Mr. Clinton was particularly guilty of this charge,
passing Nafta, appointing Robert Rubin as his Treasury secretary and
enthusiastically embracing financial deregulation. Mr. Obama pushed the
Trans-Pacific Partnership. And he was one of those fancy elites.
Which brings
us to Hillary Clinton. She may have had a plan to relieve the misery of the
working class, but she didn’t speak about it much. (Bernie Sanders did. And
lost.) She was in favor of the Partnership until she was against it. In a paid
speech to a Brazilian bank, she spoke of a “hemispheric common market” for
energy. And though her slogan was “Stronger Together,” her campaign was
ultimately predicated on celebrating difference, in the hope that disparate
voting blocs would come out and vote for her.
Here, Mr.
Rorty’s most inflammatory words are most relevant, and also most uncomfortable:
“The cultural Left has a vision of an America
People are furiously
arguing about what played a key role in this election — whether it was white
working-class despair, a racist backlash or terror about the pace of cultural
change. It seems reasonable to think that all three played a part.
What’s so
striking about “Achieving Our Country” is that it blends these theories into a
common argument: The left, both cultural and political, eventually abandoned
economic justice in favor of identity politics, leaving too many people feeling
freaked out or ignored.
“It is as if
the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time,” Mr.
Rorty wrote. “As if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on
money, or vice versa.”
You may
quarrel with his argument; you may say that he was projecting onto the larger
world what was happening within his own cloistered, ivied walls. But Mr. Trump
is now our president-elect.
Achieving Our Country
Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
By Richard
Rorty
