Three Dead Canaries
Canary no. 1
Members 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.
Canary no. 2
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. …
Canary no. 3
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.
Achieving Our Country
Richard Rorty
published in 1998
WHO WAS RICHARD RORTY?
On June 8, 2007, American philosopher Richard Rorty died at the age of 75. Rorty is now commonly associated with one of the roster of scare words used to get Americans to vote against their own self-interests: He was (supposedly) that bicoastal monster known as a “relativist.” Take heart, Rorty was also despised by the bien pensant left, who found him a political quietist and, in matters of taste, an airy-fairy Proustian snob. I knew Rorty briefly, when I was a graduate student at the University of Virginia, and to me he was never a relativist, a quietist, or a snob. He was the perfect embodiment of an American Enlightenment founded by Mr. Jefferson. If such words are restorable to their least debased senses, he was a liberal and a democrat—that is, a thinker who wanted America to fulfill its charter, and devote itself to maximum human flourishing. By Stephen Metcalf
2 thoughts on “Three Dead Canaries”
Mr Metcalf has apparently not read Rorty, wherein Rorty is explicitly a nihilist – and the most radical kind of nihilist, advocating that all values are merely the substance of “language games” (Rorty’s phrase). Nor does Mr Metcalf understand the “American enlightenment” by attributing Rorty’s brand of liberalism to Jefferson’s liberalism. Rorty’s liberalism was grounded in continental analytic philosophy and in no way whatsoever reconcilable with the “natural rights” and “natural law” theories of the Founders. Put simply, Mr Metcalf is both historically and philosophically illiterate – but I recognize that it’s fashionable to label those who actually study books as “elitist” when not caricaturing them as “deplorable” for any number of pretentious and demonstrably false reasons.
Steven Metcalf is a staff writer for Slate magazine. He works as a-critic-at-large, and a columnist. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the New York Observer, and New York (magazine) I get it that you disapprove of Richard Rorty. Over the years I’ve found his thought to be quite helpful and have returned to his books over and over. There is more than one way to think about “natural law” and there is no good reason to disallow the Continental Analytical tradition as a lens. Rorty’s prescient words from his 1998 book stand as strikingly descriptive of the outcome of the recently completed election.