Achieving Our Country: Rorty identifies spectators and agents of our political activities.
The argument between Left and Right about which episodes in our history we Americans should pride ourselves on will never be a contest between a true and false account of our country's history or it's identity. It is better described as an argument about which hopes to allow ourselves and which to forgo. As long as our country has a politically active Right and a politically active Left, this argument will continue. It is at the heart of the nation's political life, but the Left is responsible for keeping it going. For the right never thinks that anything much needs to be changed. pg. 13-14
The Left, the party of hope, sees our country's moral identity as still to be achieved, rather than as needing to be preserved. The Right thinks that our country already has a moral identity, and hopes to keep that identity intact. It fears economic and political change, and therefore easily becomes the pawn of the rich and powerful - the people whose selfish interests are served by forestalling such change. pg. 30-31
We now have, among many American students and teachers, a spectatorial, disgusted, mocking Left rather than a Left which dreams of achieving our country. This is not the only Left we have, but it is the most prominent and vocal one. Member of this Left find America unforgivable and also unachievable. This leads them to step back from their country and, as they say, "theorize" it. It leads them to give cultural politics preference over real politics, and to mock the very idea that democratic institutions might once again be made to serve social justice. It leads them to prefer knowledge to hope. pg. 35-36
Participatory Left as it existed prior to the Vietnam War and the spectatorial Left which has taken its place. Has consequence of that disastrous war was a generation of Americans who suspected that our country was unachievable, that that war not only could never be forgiven, but had shwon us to be a nation conceived in sin, and irredeemable. This suspicion lingers. As long as it does, and as long as the American Left remains incapable of national pride, our country will have only a cultural Left, not a political Left. pg. 38
From 1909 until the precent, the thesis that the state must make itself responsible for such redistribution (the American state will in effect be making itself responsible for a morally and socially desirable distribution of wealth) as marked the dividing line between the American Left and the American Right. We Americans did not need Marx to show us the need for redistribution, or to tell us that the state was often little more than the executive committee of the rich and powerful. pg. 48
The New Leftists gradually became convinced that the Vietnam War, and the endless humiliation inflicted on African-Americans, were clues to something deeply wrong with their country, and not just mistakes correctable by reforms. The wanted to hear that America was a very different sort of place, a much worse place, than their parents and teachers had told them it was. So they responded enthusiastically to the structure of American society makes it almost impossible for criticism of existing policies to become part of political discourse. The language of American politics increasingly resembles an Orwellian monologue. pg. 65-66
Globalization is producing a world economy in which an attempt by any one country to prevent the immiseration of its workers may result only in depriving them of employment. This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalist of the year 1900 had with the immigrants who manned their enterprises. pg. 85
The choice between the two major parties has come down to a choice between cynical lies and terrified silence. pg. 87
The super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere - to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world's population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. It he proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear. pg. 88
Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Let. the first is to insist that the inequalities between nations to be mitigated - and, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two response suggest that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them. pg. 88
The non-suburban 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. A scenario like that may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hinderburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
A renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international super-rich, just as Hitler made his the the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed? pg.90-91
To stand in awe of nothing, Numicius,
is practically the only way to feel really good about yourself.
Horace, Epistles, I. VI. 1 - 2
pg. 125
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