So now we know, Richard Rorty's work mattered
Some corners of the internet are abuzz right now with news that pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty predicted the future.
Here is the relevant passage from 1998:
[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. (initially tweeted by Lisa Kerr)
Jennifer Senior has written a very readable piece for the New York Times (NYT) that situates the above excerpt within the text in which it is found—“Achieving Our Country”—and describes how various aspects of Rorty's predictions have come true.
Not only did Rorty correctly predict that even an advanced democracy like the US was capable of electing a strongman like Trump. He also anticipated the main class and regional dynamics that would lead to his rise, and hauntingly described whom would be his first victims.
In 1998, Rorty's predictions received mixed reviews. Senior mentions that they led a contemporaneous reviewer in the NYT to accuse him of "intellectual bullying":
Trying to reform the left, Mr. Rorty even resorts to a form of intellectual bullying. He warns that if the cultural left continues to ignore what he calls the declining economic condition of American workers, they will become vulnerable to the demagogy of some fascist strongman, who will play on their fears and prejudices with the result that ''all the sadism which the academic left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.''
In my opinion, Rorty's predictions are a strange aspect of his writings to take umbrage with. If anything, Rorty shares them at his own risk.
There are two ways to read Rorty's predictions, only the latter of which is fair:
First, as an unbecoming distraction from his "rigorous" philosophical investigations.
Second, as a gutsy, even foolhardy, claim that his investigations are so compelling—that his understanding of the material is so complete—that he feels he can employ them to make predictions about the future course of an entire social system.
Rorty wasn't being loose with the truth when he made his predictions. Nor was he sullying his argument with matters of politics and society.
He was, in effect, betting on their merit. He did not just present them out of curiosity, nor for the sake of argument.
Had his predications not come true, they could have easily been forgotten. [1]
A less gutsy philosopher would have hedged. They would not have made any predictions based on their arguments, as untestable assertions are far more difficult to dismiss.
Writing in the late 1990s Rorty was concerned that intellectuals were no longer doing work that mattered to people, and that, as a result, they were no longer shaping society in constructive ways.
Today, history has proven that indeed Richard Rorty's work mattered.
[1] As they arguably had been until the recent election. The book in which they are found has been out of print since 2010—not any more.