What united them was a devotion to pragmatic reform there were no purity tests, no totalizing calls for revolution, as was common among Marxists at the time. It included people who thought of themselves as communists and socialist as well as moderate left-of-center Democrats. They were liberal reformers, not revolutionary leftists, and they got things done. These were the liberals who weren’t socialist radicals but nevertheless worked to promote the same causes within and through the system. John Kenneth Galbraith, the liberal economist and public official who served in the administrations of FDR, Truman, Kennedy, and Johnson, is a favorite of Rorty’s. Think of the people who engineered the New Deal or the Ivy-educated technocrats that joined Kennedy in the White House. Reformists believed in the system, and wanted to improve it from within.īefore the 1960s, the American left was largely reformist in its orientation to politics. “I propose to use the term reformist Left,” Rorty wrote, “to cover all those Americans who, between 19, struggled within the framework of constitutional democracy to protect the weak from the strong.” The emphasis on constitutional democracy is paramount here. Steve Pyke/Getty Images The reformist left American philosopher Richard Rorty (1931 - 2007) in Oxford, May 7, 2003. Here’s the case he made twenty years ago. The division has more to do with tactics than it does principles, but those tactical differences, for Rorty at least, carried enormous consequences. The reformist left dominates from 1900 until it is supplanted by the cultural left in the mid-1960s. He sees the American left as split into two camps: the reformist left and the cultural left.
The best way to make sense of Rorty’s argument is to follow it chronologically. But it’s supremely instructive, even when it sputters. The story he tells is compelling, detached, and often oddly romantic. He traces the history of the modern American left to show where, in his view, it lost its way, and how that digression prepared the way for the populist right. So what happened? Over the course of three lectures, Rorty proffers a theory. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking 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. 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.Īt that point, something will crack. Members 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. To read the viral passage is to recognize immediately why it caught fire after Trump’s election:
#LIBERAS ARE ORWELLIAN SERIES#
The book consists of a series of lectures Rorty gave in 1997 about the history of leftist thought in 20th-century America. The author is Richard Rorty, a liberal philosopher who died in 2007. It was plucked from a 1998 book titled Achieving our Country. A prescient passage from a forgotten book made the rounds after Donald Trump’s election.
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