This is a good time to reconsider the thoughts of Richard Rorty, an American philosopher, who 20 years ago published this book: an insightful analysis arguing that the American left abandoned its working-class base and cleared the way for the far right to offer workers an alternative. After the 2016 election, some passages from his book appeared on Twitter and were endlessly passed along:
“[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.”
Rorty argues that American socialism was a potent force a century ago, grounded in the optimistic national pride of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Socialism might have become even stronger after the First World War, but the Russian Revolution offered a fatal attraction for the impatient. The American left broke up in a schism as momentous as Protestant and Catholic Christianity or Sunni and Shia Islam. National pride was out; international communism now set the terms of debate.
Rorty’s parents first chose communism, but returned to the anti-communist left soon after his birth in 1931. He grew up, therefore, in an ignored splinter party while the communists got all the attention (and most of the blacklisting and jailings).
In the 20 years after the Second World War, the trade unions were purged of their communist members, and often taken over by crooks and gangsters. Old-fashioned American socialists, with CIA funding, supported the Cold War and promoted a kind of cultural leftism that ignored the workers.
But unionized workers made a lot of money in those 20 years, enough to buy their own homes and send their kids to college in a rapidly expanding post-secondary system. Long before Justin Trudeau started talking about “people working hard to enter the middle class,” American and Canadian workers’ children were moving into that class. They had a rare chance for social mobility — careers in teaching and other professions.
more
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2017/08/14/Why-American-Left-Failed/
“[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.”
Rorty argues that American socialism was a potent force a century ago, grounded in the optimistic national pride of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. Socialism might have become even stronger after the First World War, but the Russian Revolution offered a fatal attraction for the impatient. The American left broke up in a schism as momentous as Protestant and Catholic Christianity or Sunni and Shia Islam. National pride was out; international communism now set the terms of debate.
Rorty’s parents first chose communism, but returned to the anti-communist left soon after his birth in 1931. He grew up, therefore, in an ignored splinter party while the communists got all the attention (and most of the blacklisting and jailings).
In the 20 years after the Second World War, the trade unions were purged of their communist members, and often taken over by crooks and gangsters. Old-fashioned American socialists, with CIA funding, supported the Cold War and promoted a kind of cultural leftism that ignored the workers.
But unionized workers made a lot of money in those 20 years, enough to buy their own homes and send their kids to college in a rapidly expanding post-secondary system. Long before Justin Trudeau started talking about “people working hard to enter the middle class,” American and Canadian workers’ children were moving into that class. They had a rare chance for social mobility — careers in teaching and other professions.
more
https://thetyee.ca/Culture/2017/08/14/Why-American-Left-Failed/
