On Apr 21, 2:00=A0am, Vngelis <meberr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> 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.
You should read the stuff by Stalin if you want a real kick...
David
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