Twen­ty years ago a strong aca­d­e­m­ic left in uni­ver­si­ties all over the world spoke to polit­i­cal cul­ture the way that a glob­al­ized nation­al­ist far-right seems to now. Among pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als in the U.S., Richard Rorty’s name held par­tic­u­lar sway. Yet in his con­trar­i­an 1998 book Achiev­ing Our Coun­try, Rorty argued against the par­tic­i­pa­tion of phi­los­o­phy in pol­i­tics. A mem­ber of the so-called “Old Left,” or what he called the “reformist left,” Rorty took on the “Cul­tur­al Left” in ways we now hear in (often bit­ter) debates between sim­i­lar camps. In the course of his attacks, he made the uncan­ny pre­dic­tion above.

The cul­tur­al left, wrote Rorty, had come “to give cul­tur­al pol­i­tics pref­er­ence over real pol­i­tics, and to mock the very idea that demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions might once again be made to serve social jus­tice.” He fore­saw cul­tur­al pol­i­tics on the left as con­tribut­ing to a tidal wave of resent­ment that would one day result in a time when “all the sadism which the aca­d­e­m­ic left has tried to make unac­cept­able to its stu­dents will come flood­ing back.”

As demo­c­ra­t­ic insti­tu­tions fail, he writes in the quote above:

[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. A sce­nario like that of Sin­clair Lewis’ nov­el It Can’t Hap­pen Here may then be played out. For once a strong­man takes office, nobody can pre­dict what will hap­pen. In 1932, most of the pre­dic­tions made about what would hap­pen if Hin­den­burg named Hitler chan­cel­lor were wild­ly overop­ti­mistic.

One thing that is very like­ly to hap­pen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Amer­i­cans, and by homo­sex­u­als, will be wiped out. Joc­u­lar con­tempt for women will come back into fash­ion. The words [slur for an African-Amer­i­can that begins with “n”] and [slur for a Jew­ish per­son that begins with “k”] will once again be heard in the work­place. All the sadism which the aca­d­e­m­ic Left has tried to make unac­cept­able to its stu­dents will come flood­ing back. All the resent­ment which bad­ly edu­cat­ed Amer­i­cans feel about hav­ing their man­ners dic­tat­ed to them by col­lege grad­u­ates will find an out­let.

He also then argues, how­ev­er, that this sadism will not sole­ly be the result of “eco­nom­ic inequal­i­ty and inse­cu­ri­ty,” and that such expla­na­tions would be “too sim­plis­tic.” Nor would the strong­man who comes to pow­er do any­thing but wors­en eco­nom­ic con­di­tions. He writes next, “after my imag­ined strong­man takes charge, he will quick­ly make his peace with the inter­na­tion­al super­rich.”

Rorty blamed the Marx­ist New Left for “retreat­ing from prag­ma­tism into the­o­ry,” wrote The New York Times in its review of Achiev­ing Our Coun­try. He felt the cul­tur­al left had aban­doned the “Amer­i­can exper­i­ment as sec­u­lar, anti-author­i­tar­i­an and infi­nite in pos­si­bil­i­ties,” such as “Whit­man ide­al­ized as lov­ing rela­tion­ships and Dewey as good cit­i­zen­ship.” The Times wrote then that Rorty’s pre­dic­tions above were a form of “intel­lec­tu­al bul­ly­ing.” We can take our dystopi­an futures from sci-fi nov­el­ists and film­mak­ers, but when philoso­phers “harus­pi­cate or scry,” as T.S. Eliot wrote in “The Dry Sal­vages,” we tend to dis­miss it as the “usu­al / Pas­times and drugs, and fea­tures of the press.”

The emi­nent Stan­ford pro­fes­sor exhort­ed his con­tem­po­raries to leave behind “semi­con­scious anti-Amer­i­can­ism” and embrace prag­mat­ic civ­il engage­ment, and did so by offer­ing up exam­ples from Amer­i­can lit­er­a­ture and phi­los­o­phy that all had fierce activist strains. Exco­ri­at­ing one kind of life of the mind, Rorty can’t help but offer anoth­er. “What does Rorty offer as a solu­tion?” asked the Times review, “Not real­ly very much.” Per­haps not to politi­cians. But to the post­mod­ern aca­d­e­mics and writ­ers he accused, he offers up as counter exam­ples Walt Whit­man, John Dewey, and—as Rorty not­ed in an inter­view—James Bald­win, whose “use of the phrase… achiev­ing our coun­try” inspired his book’s title, Achiev­ing Our Coun­try.

via Slate

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Octavia Butler’s 1998 Dystopi­an Nov­el Fea­tures a Fascis­tic Pres­i­den­tial Can­di­date Who Promis­es to “Make Amer­i­ca Great Again”

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

Hux­ley to Orwell: My Hell­ish Vision of the Future is Bet­ter Than Yours (1949)

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness.