Philosopher predicted rise of Trump-like figure in ’98 book
The victory of Donald Trump caught countless
progressives and establishment conservatives by surprise.
Philosopher Richard Rorty in 2004. (Photo: Hasan Sarbakhshian/AP)
Since Election
Day, there’s been no shortage of ink spent trying to sort out the
underlying factors behind his startling rise to the Oval Office. But for
late philosopher Richard Rorty, the writing was on the wall.
In 1998, Rorty, who most recently taught at Stanford University, argued in “Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America”
that “old industrialized democracies” are heading toward a period “in
which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional
governments.”
He said the left had embraced identity politics at
the expense of economic justice. Resentment would fester among the
working class as they realized that the powers that be were not fighting
to stop wages from shrinking or jobs from being sent overseas.
He suggested that many would turn to a “strongman” to
flip the script on the smug, overpaid and deceitful who had long
neglected their suffering. The author said the progress made on behalf
of ethnic minorities, homosexuals and women would then run the risk of
being rolled back.
One reason Rorty perceived something many other
left-leaning academics missed might have to do with his chosen
philosophical tradition: pragmatism, which emphasizes practical
consequences. He died in 2007, so we will never know for sure what he
would have thought about Trump’s highly unconventional campaign.
A few days after Trump’s surprise victory, Queen’s
University law professor Lisa Kerr and others posted a particularly
prescient passage from “Achieving Our Country” on Twitter. The three
paragraphs swiftly caught fire on social media and were shared thousands
of times. The New Yorker cited the passage in a profile of President Obama, and the New York Times analyzed the words in-depth.
Here is the slightly condensed version of the passage that Kerr posted online:
“[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.”
Amid the renewed attention, online searches
for “Achieving Our Country” skyrocketed and there was a run on the book
at Harvard University Press, which is reprinting the book and plans to
make it available online as soon as possible.
Lindsay Waters, executive editor for the
humanities at Harvard University Press, recalled having big arguments
with Rorty before the book was published because he thought it was “too
old-style liberal.”
“He thought some of the liberals from the
1930s were really fabulous. He was trying to revive the left with this
book. He was trying to kick them in the rear end so they would stop
doing stuff that was easy and lazy however trendy it looked,” Waters
said in an interview with Yahoo News.
According to Waters, Rorty was a
clear-thinking provocateur who refused to play it safe and retained the
ability to see larger trends, the big picture. He said a lot of scholars
in academia think of themselves as left-wingers but don’t actually do
anything.
‘Achieving Our Country’ was first published in 1998 by Harvard
University Press in Cambridge, Mass. (Photo: Getty Images/iStockphoto)
“Rorty was trying to get people to think.
That’s the philosopher’s job,” he continued. “He was trying to get
people to prepare for being more responsive to the political situation
in America.”
Waters, who started publishing Rorty’s work
in the early 1980s, said his late friend really upset other philosophers
with the 1979 release of “Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature.”
“The reason we love poets and philosophers is
that they almost have some sixth sense. They pick up vibes that the
rest of the world is not sensitive to or refuses to see,” he said. “He
was being Cassandra: ‘If you people don’t wake up, things are going to
get a lot worse. The enemy is going to win. Can I make that any more
clear to you?’”
The crux of Rorty’s thesis in “Achieving Our
Country” is that the sins of the United States past do not need to
define its future. He criticized the American left of retreating into
theory at the expense of taking an active role in civic life.
Rorty lamented that many of his fellow
liberals had come to view American patriotism as an endorsement of past
atrocities, such as slavery or violence against Native Americans. He
encouraged his peers to re-embrace the patriotism of the old left and
work toward a more hopeful future, much like Walt Whitman and John Dewey
had before.
In the relevant passage, Rorty goes on to
suggest that after his “imagined strongman” comes to power he will
quickly make peace with the “international super-rich” and invoke
memories of past military victories to encourage military adventures for
short-term prosperity. But, Rorty continued, the strongman will
ultimately be a disaster for the world and people will wonder why there
had been so little resistance to his ascent.
“[Rorty]
was a big-picture guy,” Waters said. “He was inspired by [Ralph Waldo]
Emerson and William James and was concerned about the soul of America
and what’s happening in America. I suppose that’s one of the things that
makes him the most different from other people. He dared to think about
the country and what’s good for the country.”
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