Jennifer Senior of The Times fascinates us with this article about an eerily prescient book from 1998 which was brought back to life by Twitter and events:
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.
OK, not a bad call. I don't believe for a moment that "the gains made in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out" but obviously our fetally-positioned progressive class does.
Prof. Rorty was a lefty chastising his fellow lefties, the article explains:
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, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change. A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.
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.”
That's debatable and sorta-kinda rebuttable. A recent election analysis I saw recently noted that Bill Clinton was the last Dem candidate to outpoll his Republican opponent among whites. Wild Bill's plan was to position himself as a moderate Democrat with working class appeal to bring home the Reagan Democrats, so as of 1998 the political rift of Dems and the white working class was manageable.
The article links to the original 1998 review; let me excerpt this:
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, over the serial humiliation of African-Americans — transformed a good portion of the left, at least the academic left, into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change. A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.
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.”
That would be the "Blame America First" strand of thought excoriated by Jeanne Kirkpatrick at the 1984 Republican convention, so again, this idea was hardly new in 1998.
Can contemporary progressives back away slowly from identity politics and attract working class whites by returning to their class-based Marxist comfort zone? Some say they must! Here is Mark Lilla in a widely-circulated Times piece:
In recent years American liberalism has slipped into a kind of moral panic about racial, gender and sexual identity that has distorted liberalism’s message and prevented it from becoming a unifying force capable of governing.
One of the many lessons of the recent presidential election campaign and its repugnant outcome is that the age of identity liberalism must be brought to an end. Hillary Clinton was at her best and most uplifting when she spoke about American interests in world affairs and how they relate to our understanding of democracy. But when it came to life at home, she tended on the campaign trail to lose that large vision and slip into the rhetoric of diversity, calling out explicitly to African-American, Latino, L.G.B.T. and women voters at every stop. This was a strategic mistake. If you are going to mention groups in America, you had better mention all of them. If you don’t, those left out will notice and feel excluded. Which, as the data show, was exactly what happened with the white working class and those with strong religious convictions. Fully two-thirds of white voters without college degrees voted for Donald Trump, as did over 80 percent of white evangelicals.
Yes, but... Here is another recent Times piece by Morgan Parker, also in reaction to the rise of Trump. Any attempt of mine to summarize it will seem unkind but - basically, a young black woman is permanently depressed. Why? Because of slavery, Jim Crow, and white cultural ascendance. Her own biochemical issues get short shrift:
How to Stay Sane While Black
I wish I could point to the moment when I first understood I was a thing to be hated. The first “I’m just not attracted to black girls.” The first “Do you work here?”
When I was 15, I was told I have major anxiety disorder and moderate-to-severe depressive disorder.
“Black people don’t go to therapy,” my dad said.
I had been told to pray, but it wasn’t working. I was told to be strong. How strong do you need to be to want to die, and to be certain the world wants you dead, and yet to keep on living? As a little black girl in a little white suburb, trying to smooth down my hair and lick the ash from my elbows, I wondered, do white people have these thoughts? Is something wrong with me?
Thirteen years later, still plagued by the exact same garbage — and worse, used to it — I tell my therapist I never stood a chance of loving myself.
“Look at the ads in the subway,” I plead. “Look at my Tinder inbox. Look at the news!”
And so on. A bit more:
American slavery, the event, begot American white supremacy, the psychology. That psychology provides white Americans with privilege, power and the benefit of the doubt. Meanwhile, black Americans don’t and will never know our real names; commercials for Ancestry.com feel like a personal attack; we are expected to prove to our government that we “matter”; and we fear that, in the event of our death, our life will be scrutinized and we will be presumed guilty.
Sometimes I think my depression is the most normal thing about me. We should all get free therapy. We could call it reparations.
It isn’t just that I’m tired; it’s that my mom is tired, my nana was tired, her mom was tired (whoever she was). It isn’t that I’m single; it’s that society believes that black women are not beautiful, and so maybe I believe that, too.
Obviously the author will be welcomed into a safe space on any university campus, but I don't see her as a leader in a progressive movement away from victim studies and towards reconciliation with whites. "White privilege" is a race based concept, not a class-based one and its proponents aren't interested in the sad stories of middle age white guys who are now stacking boxes at Walmart because they lost their union job to Mexico, or illegal immigrants. The guy is privileged! Even if he doesn't know it.
And Ms. Parker is hardly an outlier. Consider this Times review of the progressive epistle on race relations by Ta Nehisi Coates, "Between The World And Me":
But here we reach a fork in the road. Baldwin, in writing to his nephew, does not deny the pain and horror of American notions of justice — far from it — but he repeatedly emphasizes the young man’s power and potential and urges him to believe that revolutionary change is possible against all odds, because we, as black people, continue to defy the odds and defeat the expectations of those who seek to control and exploit us.
Coates’s letter to his son seems to be written on the opposite side of the same coin. Rather than urging his son to awaken to his own power, Coates emphasizes over and over the apparent permanence of racial injustice in America, the foolishness of believing that one person can make a change, and the dangers of believing in the American Dream. “Historians conjured the Dream,” Coates writes. “Hollywood fortified the Dream. The Dream was gilded by novels and adventure stories”; Dreamers are the ones who continue to believe the lie, at black people’s expense. In what will almost certainly be the most widely quoted passage, Coates tells his son: “Here is what I would like for you to know: In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body — it is heritage.”
Little hope is offered that freedom or equality will ever be a reality for black people in America. “We are captured, brother, surrounded by the majoritarian bandits of America. And this has happened here, in our only home, and the terrible truth is that we cannot will ourselves to an escape on our own.” If his son held out any hope that the emerging racial justice movement on the streets of Ferguson, New York City or Baltimore or beyond might change hearts and minds, Coates seems determined to quash it. “Perhaps that was, is, the hope of the movement: To awaken the Dreamers, to rouse them to the facts of what their need to be white . . . has done to the world. But you cannot arrange your life around them and the small chance of the Dreamers coming into consciousness.”
There is not a lot of seeking of common ground visible here. And where do progressives see this headed? The cultural and physical presence of whites is making black people mentally ill and physically endangered. Where is the road to reconciliation?
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