http://www.slate.com/id/2316/
Out of Left FieldRichard Rorty's call for a new popular front.
By Jacob Weisberg
Posted Saturday, May 30, 1998, at 3:30 AM ET
One does not ordinarily expect a slim volume written by an academic
philosopher and published by a university press to cause widespread
consternation on the right. But for some reason, Richard Rorty's new
book, Achieving Our Country, which is based on a series of lectures
delivered last year at Harvard, seems to be having that effect.
Writing in Newsweek, George Will commented last week that the book
"radiates contempt for the country." (Perhaps more to the point, it
radiates contempt for George Will.) And in the most recent issue of
the Weekly Standard, David Brooks contends that the book's criticism
of the left is merely the latest in a succession of moves designed to
advance the author's academic career. Brooks accuses Rorty of being a
"pseudo-deviant" who poses as a critic of academic radicals while
really congratulating them.
You'd think high-minded conservatives would approve of Richard Rorty
at some level, even if they disagree with him. He is, after all, a
philosopher who writes good English prose in defense of the 100
percent American philosophy of pragmatism. Rorty has no truck with
campus PC and is by all re****ts a humane, thoughtful, and decent man,
not the kind of self-promoter or manipulative careerist Brooks posits.
Achieving Our Country tells members of what Rorty calls the "cultural
left" to come down from their postmodernist ivory tower and think
about how to make the country they live in a better place. Rorty says
radical academicians should wipe that sophistical smirk off their
faces, lose their mocking disdain for America, and view it more as
their progressive ancestors did: as a great, problem-filled country
that must be brought into closer alignment with its ideals.
Click Here!
Isn't this the kind of loyal opposition right-wingers are supposed to
want? The harsh response to Rorty may have something to do with his
penchant for gratuitous, con-baiting asides, such as the one in which
he absurdly states that "we caused the death of a million Vietnamese
out of sheer macho arrogance." In the course of the book, Rorty sets
even liberal teeth on edge with such outlandish statements, though
they are usually contradicted in more sober moments. (He thinks the
Cold War was necessary and that Reagan was correct to call the Soviet
Union an "evil empire.") But I think that what really alarms the right
about Rorty is not his moments of rhetorical excess but rather the
buried fear that the left might one day wake up and take his advice.
If the alienated theorists of academe transformed themselves into a
Rortyan left--a unified, engaged, and patriotic left--conservative
columnists could run dry of material in a matter of weeks.
It wouldn't be good news for Republican politicians, either, if the
left listened to Rorty and joined a common crusade for social
betterment. His book argues not only that academic leftists, the heirs
to the '60s New Left, need to become pro-American but also that they
need to quit knocking heads with the heirs to the Old Left--the Cold
War liberals--and vice versa. Rorty wants to draw a curtain over the
distinction between liberals and leftists. We should all forget about
our past conflicts, he says, and realize that we were always on the
same side, more or less. "It would be a good idea to stop asking when
it was unforgivably late, or unforgivably early, to have left the
Communist Party," Rorty writes. "A hundred years from now, Howe and
Galbraith, Harrington and Schlesinger, Wilson and Debs, Jane Addams
and Angela Davis, Felix Frankfurther and John L. Lewis, W.E.B. Du Bois
and Eleanor Roosevelt, Robert Reich and Jesse Jackson, will all be
remembered for having advanced the cause of social justice."
Some on the right may fear the emergence of a new left-liberal Popular
Front that looks up to all these ancestors. Conservatives achieved a
general unity despite their wide differences during the Reagan years,
and they might think the left is capable of doing the same thing. But
what Rorty proposes is still several decades away, at least.
Disagreements on the left are far more ingrained--and more meaningful--
than he seems to fathom. But even if they were to magically vanish
overnight, they aren't about to dissolve in favor of anything
resembling Rorty's agenda. His political platform, a kind of Swedish
model democratic socialism couched in extracts from Whitman and Dewey,
is about as likely to sweep the country at this point as freemasonry
or theosophy.
In trying to persuade lefties of various stripes to quit fighting,
Rorty borrows a strategy from pragmatist philosophy. He takes
questions that he doesn't find useful to his cause--such as who was
correct about Vietnam or about the Cold War--and rules them out of
order. They aren't helpful to us in moving forward, so there is no
point in discussing them. But the issues that have split the American
left in this century were not the expression of narcissistic small
differences. They represented fundamental splits--between sup****ters
of constitutional democracy and its opponents, between friends and
enemies of human rights, between people who believe in limited
government and those who want an overweening state. Arthur Schlesinger
and Angela Davis were not on the same side, even in the most general
way. For Rorty to brush aside even these conflicts as the nuances of
ancient history is both crude and an offense to those liberals who
were on the right side. In constructing an inclusive tradition of the
American left, he would undermine the sound tradition of the American
left. Rorty, who comes from a distinguished family of progressives and
anti-communist left intellectuals, ought to know better.
But even if these old battles somehow were to cease to seem relevant,
which they might to a generation raised in a world without communism,
it is hard to imagine a revival of interest in the kind of democratic-
socialist program Rorty sees as the essence of national betterment.
Though he is at his most vague on the subject of actual policy, one
gathers that what he wants is a kind of economic third way: A
government that redistributes wealth through the tax system while
providing uniform social benefits, such as health care and pensions.
Unions should be more powerful, cor****ations less so. It's the dull-
but-worthy program of Dissent magazine, circa 1967. Think of Bulworth
without the rhymes. Rorty believes that it is merely the greed of the
wealthy that prevents the country from solving all its problems. They
want to keep their money for themselves! And navel-gazing literary
critics let them get away with it!
Personally, I don't think that what stands in the way of Rorty's
utopia is the failure of Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton to
endorse it. It's that there's not enough caffeine in America--and that
the whole world is in retreat from all forms of socialism and semi-
socialism. Rorty writes about politics as if he'd been holding out in
a small cave without newspapers for the past several decades. He has
not gleaned anything from the experience that the Atlantic democracies
have had in governing themselves over the past 30 years, or from their
rather mixed record in dealing with social ills. Nor does he consider
the possibility that markets might be effective in dealing with some
social problems. Conservatives can quit fretting. Liberals might be
out of it, but we're not about to start taking cues from a peacenik
philosophy prof. who's still chasing after the Swedish model.
If you missed Rorty's slap at George Will, click here.
|
