What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics by Richard Rorty

"INTRODUCTION THE PHILOSOPHER AND HIS COUNTRY W. P. Malecki and Chris Voparil Richard Rorty (1931–2007) is best known to the wider public as the philosopher who predicted Trump. During the 2016 presidential election, eerily prescient warnings from his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country, that existing forces of American politics might set the country on a road to fascism, went viral on social media. With neither the left nor the right showing concern for the growing economic disparities in America, he contended in 1998, a large swath of voters already experiencing the negative impact of globalization would become acutely disillusioned with the political establishment. Suffering from economic inequality and insecurity, these mostly white, working-class citizens would feel that they had nowhere to turn for advocacy on their behalf, since conservatives had neglected their interests and liberals were rejecting their values. "At that point, something will crack," he prophesied, and "the nonsuburban electorate would decide that the system had failed." They would start looking around for a populist "strongman" who would pay homage to their fears. He would be elected to the Oval Office and ultimately roll back the progressive achievements of the previous decades. "Jocular contempt for women," Rorty predicted, would come back into vogue, along with racial and ethnic epithets thought to have been defeated. "Media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war," would be manufactured to distract citizens from exploitation by the "super-rich" and "the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates" would be stoked. "This strongman leader, he concluded, "will be a disaster for the country and the world." 1 The same premises that led Rorty to predict Trump generated other predictions and warnings: predictions about a new civil war in America, a new feudalism in the West, and a new, brutal world order resulting from global overpopulation. These potential outcomes are universally grim and look even more probable now than when Rorty first envisioned them. He may well turn out to be the philosopher who predicted not only the 2016 election but the political upheavals still ahead of us. This book gathers these and other Rortyan prophecies about the dark and disturbing currents still coursing through the bodies politic in America and around the globe. It also contains essays that show that, if he were alive today, Rorty would be uneasy about the label "the philosopher who predicted Trump." Not because it diminishes the contributions to perennial philosophical subjects that made him one of the most cited American thinkers of the twentieth century. Quite the contrary, he would be uneasy about the label because, judged from the theoretical perspective he advocated, it makes his philosophical contributions look too important. It suggests that he predicted Trump thanks to some superior philosophical acumen and thereby strengthens the traditional image of philosophers as people whose special expertise allows them to see the world more clearly than everyone else. Rorty believed that image to be mistaken and argued that taking it seriously was one of the reasons why the American academic left, which he believed to be "overphilosophized," was failing miserably. These diagnoses and critiques, still of enormous relevance to understanding how the contemporary left, in the United States and elsewhere, has boxed itself into a corner, are included here as well. What Can We Hope For? also conveys Rorty's pragmatic philosophy of democratic change. It contains his recommendations for concrete reforms to ameliorate injustice and inequality and his positive vision for what safeguarding our democracy and our highest aspirations requires. He understood that the integrity of democracy depends on stable and secure institutions like a free press, a free judiciary, and free elections. He also grasped that democracy requires a moral community that must be actively cultivated, grounded in our sense of who we and our fellow citizens are and should become. These essays outline Rorty's strategies—more timely now than ever—for fostering social hope and building an inclusive global community of trust."
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— What Can We Hope For?: Essays on Politics by Richard Rorty
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