Thank you, excellent, per usual. Can we exclude from any analysis the changes in our ‘forth estate.” As our first narrators, the obsession with clicks versus discerning the meaning in events, the false equivalence methodology of ‘reporting’, so on and so on... A fourth estate that at the time of Rorty’s writing had begun to honor the republican party as the party of big ideas, ignoring completely the reality that a faulty economics had now superseded politics, as the lens through which to view the world, let alone any notion that morality had a role to play. An example of thoughtless headlines that shape our ‘understanding’ and then ‘our judgments’ is in our recent obsession with the age of Joe Biden. A world leader called Francis is older, yet he is changing a 2,000-year-old organization that spans the globe and is comprised of 1.2-1.3 billion people, all living within a dazzling array of cultures, while being attacked by the theological equivalent of high-ranking officials and theologians of meager ability and vision. I fail to understand the "why can't we be led by someone younger?" argument. Nixon was younger, Reagan was younger, the Bushes were younger...
For me it's Jackson and Marshall who represent the US (and not Whitman and Lincoln), so one could say I'm skeptical about this kind of project. Also (again for me) it's Mike Rogin's analysis over Rorty. Excellent provocations nonetheless
Rorty's advice about how to engage with national identity always struck me as too Sorelian: be the America you want to be and not the America everyone else has known and engaged with up to this moment. And it led him into a pretty incoherent position on what kind of alliances the left should build: he wanted the numbers and masses of the old CIO with the aims and habits of the mature, tenured New Left. Nothing wrong with this on paper: I, too, have those politically correct habits myself and am fine paying more taxes for stronger welfare system and some wage and price controls. But as a matter of the political economy of then and now: you could not really have both social bases represented in one movement, without asking for more sacrifices than any American political movement has really gotten away with, except early Reaganism which lied to everyone about what was going on. The Old Left's social base was entangled with a world-beating industrial economy that could easily finance enough extensive growth and technology development to regularly concede to high wage demands, brush up against genuine full employment, and remain competitive in export markets. Developments in the late 60s, followed by the Oil Shock, made this impossible to balance after about a decade. The middle to upper-middle class section of the New Left's base survived the adaption to these conditions and even came to monopolize parts of the university system that became more and more important as Fordism became more and more a mere memory. Any attempt to re-industrialize the US will involve massive tax levies that will smack the upper middle-classes, and probably parts of the middle-class proper, a massive breach of 'competition', and havok on the equities that make up most pensions. And the other program has already been partially instituted, no one talks happily of the information economy anymore because it turns out to have been quite the dead end. These bases weren't compatible in the early 90s and they aren't now and they probably will not be under all the most likely macroeconomic conditions the country is likely to face. Not sure where this leaves us.
"The New York Times’ 1619 Project was pretty much such a Rortyan effort to reimagine a kind of more inclusive progressive civic nationalism—the infamous Nikole-Hannah Jones’s essay endorsed patriotism but was pilloried as some kind of scary afropessimist, black nationalism."
What?
The Hannah-Jones essay might not *technically* have been Black Nationalist, but the distinction between Black Nationalism and the race essentialism/Black exceptionalism currently in vogue on the left is a trifling one. A project that painted aspect after aspect of American society as the outgrowth of slavery – that literally redefined the nation's birth as having occurred not with the issuance of our progressive Declaration of Independence but with the arrival of the first African slaves – most certainly is not a project that “embraces a kind of pantheon of progressive accomplishment”. To the extent it offered tales of accomplishment at all, they were explicitly *not* accomplishments non-Black Americans could take pride in, except in the cringeworthy and masochistic way of those White progressives who speak of Black people with the mystic awe that would be at home in Donald Glover's Atlanta – exactly the sort of attitude toward the United States Rorty was arguing against.
I'm actually pretty sympathetic to many of the claims made in the project's other essays, especially when they amount to "our social safety net is shit because of anti-Black racism". But the Hannah-Jones essay in particular, which aims to tie the American ethos inextricably to anti-Black racism with facts both true and misrepresented, most certainly is not what Rorty would have had in mind.
Perhaps it’s true that Rorty underestimated how fierce the reaction would be to a materially-minded reformist left that is explicitly and proudly American – the materialist left in this country seems to me too nascent for us to tell, and even Bernie Sanders was never very American with his message (in a land as chauvinistic as our own, “every other major country” is never going to be a winning argument). But let’s not pretend that the backlash against 1619 is some sort of proof that Rorty’s vision of a more patriotic left wouldn’t work.
Sorry for nitpicking, but seriously, this argument is laughable. I'd have an easier time believing you actually agreed with the Stuart Halls quote if you weren't saying things like "the [...] Nikole Hannah-Jones essay endorsed patriotism" with a straight face.
I've taken with moderates and sane conservatives the line: 'We should take it as a point of national pride that we are rich and powerful enough not to have to let people suffer.'
I gather that some, at least, of the neoconservatives (I think they styled themselves 'National Greatness conservatives') were of a similar mind, though for them it was of course parallel to their plea for interventionism and also somewhat Bismarckean in tone, as in 'How can we run the world if our armed forces and managerial elite canʼt recruit from a healthy and educated population?'.
Running against the sadism could be a winning strategy for the left, but as you note sadism is so pervasive in the USA that many on the left would rather scold and sneer than win. Been that way since the Vietnam War at least.
Just run on reducing the cruelty of healthcare, housing, criminal justice, and employment conditions. Articulate a Whitmanesque politics of love. Cornel West is pretty good at it, and uses Christianity in expressing it. The left needs politicians who aren't afraid to go into the reddest counties, talk to people and embrace them as people. Bernie did some of that, who's going to be his successor?
In the paragraph just before the "Is It True" heading:
«while at the same time distancing oneself from some of the undeniable idiocies committed in the of ‘anti-racism’ or ‘anti-sexism’ or anti-homophobia’ by the militants»
a great piece, as always, but isn't the problem that this--"the current issue is . . . the lack of leadership and the feeling of demoralization"--doesn't really have any content? Leadership for/about what exactly?
Great stuff, and I return to this text a lot, too. Having been tousled by a background in professional Democratic politics, specifically spending time on how you change people's minds and how you advance political goals through elections, I admit find the central thesis of Achieving Our Country pretty compelling: there is a tilting-at-windmills necessity to realizing any political vision that transcends, say, the popularity of a candidate or policy--and yes, often that does need a coherent, unifying political philosophy, which is where Rorty fits neatly with some corners of Marxism and socialism.
Still, I guess I took something slightly different from Achieving Our Country. He seems to be suggesting that as a political organizing principle, you can't deny that a robust leftist American government can work, you can't merely accept that that one could work but for x, y, z; you have to believe it can, and even will work--that's, I think, the pragmatic part of Rorty's thesis here. A common vision of utopia not just for the pragmatic realization of an efficient means for organizing ourselves, but something that drives the passions that could possibly impel a megadiverse group of people to animate a movement that, you know, "achieves our country."
In that way, I kinda read Achieving Our Country as a continuation of Baldwin's work, especially The Fire Next Time--probably not a revolutionary thing to say, but if you take them in order I think they converge on a couple of very compelling points. Where Rorty focuses on the future and what an organizing ethos for a new American left could look like, Baldwin focuses more on the problem diagnosis, on the past and the origins of the American ideals/idealism and the systemic failure of our government and politics to achieve those ideals. Central to Baldwin's work is that there is no other path forward, to redemption, to the achievement of country than through the sins and the understanding of the past. That's what makes the 1619 Project, at core, so compelling to me--it's taking Baldwin's prescriptions and creating a new effort to get at them. Somewhere, from Baldwin to Rorty, is a pretty good outline of how to win: a uniquely American narrative of leftism that borrows from a million traditions but ultimately is most accountable to our past and how to redress, not erase, its many sins.
I'm being a bit unfair here, but this is the problem I see sometimes with the left today, kinda copping Rorty's thesis here again: too much skepticism of our origins and how the structures conceived within them have created the problems of the past and the present. It's undeniably true that the structures and political systems we have adopted have created our sins; it's also true that the political tools we have available--in the present moment--are completely insufficient to address our sins. But fracturing our political consciousness to address our injustices won't work, it won't create the popular support necessary for a movement to be credibly democratic. This is why Marxism, Socialism, even Progressivism are not always helpful frames for political action, even if they're incredibly useful for analytic and theoretical purposes.
There is no clean break to engineer from our past. No one would disagree with that, but in the realm of applying political theory to politics, there's no version now of swapping one ism for another. The only answer is to create something new. There's no way out but through, as the memes would have us believe.
What's this new thing, this apple-pie socialism then? What does it look like?
Thank you, excellent, per usual. Can we exclude from any analysis the changes in our ‘forth estate.” As our first narrators, the obsession with clicks versus discerning the meaning in events, the false equivalence methodology of ‘reporting’, so on and so on... A fourth estate that at the time of Rorty’s writing had begun to honor the republican party as the party of big ideas, ignoring completely the reality that a faulty economics had now superseded politics, as the lens through which to view the world, let alone any notion that morality had a role to play. An example of thoughtless headlines that shape our ‘understanding’ and then ‘our judgments’ is in our recent obsession with the age of Joe Biden. A world leader called Francis is older, yet he is changing a 2,000-year-old organization that spans the globe and is comprised of 1.2-1.3 billion people, all living within a dazzling array of cultures, while being attacked by the theological equivalent of high-ranking officials and theologians of meager ability and vision. I fail to understand the "why can't we be led by someone younger?" argument. Nixon was younger, Reagan was younger, the Bushes were younger...
For me it's Jackson and Marshall who represent the US (and not Whitman and Lincoln), so one could say I'm skeptical about this kind of project. Also (again for me) it's Mike Rogin's analysis over Rorty. Excellent provocations nonetheless
Rorty's advice about how to engage with national identity always struck me as too Sorelian: be the America you want to be and not the America everyone else has known and engaged with up to this moment. And it led him into a pretty incoherent position on what kind of alliances the left should build: he wanted the numbers and masses of the old CIO with the aims and habits of the mature, tenured New Left. Nothing wrong with this on paper: I, too, have those politically correct habits myself and am fine paying more taxes for stronger welfare system and some wage and price controls. But as a matter of the political economy of then and now: you could not really have both social bases represented in one movement, without asking for more sacrifices than any American political movement has really gotten away with, except early Reaganism which lied to everyone about what was going on. The Old Left's social base was entangled with a world-beating industrial economy that could easily finance enough extensive growth and technology development to regularly concede to high wage demands, brush up against genuine full employment, and remain competitive in export markets. Developments in the late 60s, followed by the Oil Shock, made this impossible to balance after about a decade. The middle to upper-middle class section of the New Left's base survived the adaption to these conditions and even came to monopolize parts of the university system that became more and more important as Fordism became more and more a mere memory. Any attempt to re-industrialize the US will involve massive tax levies that will smack the upper middle-classes, and probably parts of the middle-class proper, a massive breach of 'competition', and havok on the equities that make up most pensions. And the other program has already been partially instituted, no one talks happily of the information economy anymore because it turns out to have been quite the dead end. These bases weren't compatible in the early 90s and they aren't now and they probably will not be under all the most likely macroeconomic conditions the country is likely to face. Not sure where this leaves us.
"The New York Times’ 1619 Project was pretty much such a Rortyan effort to reimagine a kind of more inclusive progressive civic nationalism—the infamous Nikole-Hannah Jones’s essay endorsed patriotism but was pilloried as some kind of scary afropessimist, black nationalism."
What?
The Hannah-Jones essay might not *technically* have been Black Nationalist, but the distinction between Black Nationalism and the race essentialism/Black exceptionalism currently in vogue on the left is a trifling one. A project that painted aspect after aspect of American society as the outgrowth of slavery – that literally redefined the nation's birth as having occurred not with the issuance of our progressive Declaration of Independence but with the arrival of the first African slaves – most certainly is not a project that “embraces a kind of pantheon of progressive accomplishment”. To the extent it offered tales of accomplishment at all, they were explicitly *not* accomplishments non-Black Americans could take pride in, except in the cringeworthy and masochistic way of those White progressives who speak of Black people with the mystic awe that would be at home in Donald Glover's Atlanta – exactly the sort of attitude toward the United States Rorty was arguing against.
I'm actually pretty sympathetic to many of the claims made in the project's other essays, especially when they amount to "our social safety net is shit because of anti-Black racism". But the Hannah-Jones essay in particular, which aims to tie the American ethos inextricably to anti-Black racism with facts both true and misrepresented, most certainly is not what Rorty would have had in mind.
Perhaps it’s true that Rorty underestimated how fierce the reaction would be to a materially-minded reformist left that is explicitly and proudly American – the materialist left in this country seems to me too nascent for us to tell, and even Bernie Sanders was never very American with his message (in a land as chauvinistic as our own, “every other major country” is never going to be a winning argument). But let’s not pretend that the backlash against 1619 is some sort of proof that Rorty’s vision of a more patriotic left wouldn’t work.
Sorry for nitpicking, but seriously, this argument is laughable. I'd have an easier time believing you actually agreed with the Stuart Halls quote if you weren't saying things like "the [...] Nikole Hannah-Jones essay endorsed patriotism" with a straight face.
Thank you
I've taken with moderates and sane conservatives the line: 'We should take it as a point of national pride that we are rich and powerful enough not to have to let people suffer.'
I gather that some, at least, of the neoconservatives (I think they styled themselves 'National Greatness conservatives') were of a similar mind, though for them it was of course parallel to their plea for interventionism and also somewhat Bismarckean in tone, as in 'How can we run the world if our armed forces and managerial elite canʼt recruit from a healthy and educated population?'.
Running against the sadism could be a winning strategy for the left, but as you note sadism is so pervasive in the USA that many on the left would rather scold and sneer than win. Been that way since the Vietnam War at least.
Just run on reducing the cruelty of healthcare, housing, criminal justice, and employment conditions. Articulate a Whitmanesque politics of love. Cornel West is pretty good at it, and uses Christianity in expressing it. The left needs politicians who aren't afraid to go into the reddest counties, talk to people and embrace them as people. Bernie did some of that, who's going to be his successor?
In the paragraph just before the "Is It True" heading:
«while at the same time distancing oneself from some of the undeniable idiocies committed in the of ‘anti-racism’ or ‘anti-sexism’ or anti-homophobia’ by the militants»
should "in the of" be "in the NAME of"?
a great piece, as always, but isn't the problem that this--"the current issue is . . . the lack of leadership and the feeling of demoralization"--doesn't really have any content? Leadership for/about what exactly?
Great stuff, and I return to this text a lot, too. Having been tousled by a background in professional Democratic politics, specifically spending time on how you change people's minds and how you advance political goals through elections, I admit find the central thesis of Achieving Our Country pretty compelling: there is a tilting-at-windmills necessity to realizing any political vision that transcends, say, the popularity of a candidate or policy--and yes, often that does need a coherent, unifying political philosophy, which is where Rorty fits neatly with some corners of Marxism and socialism.
Still, I guess I took something slightly different from Achieving Our Country. He seems to be suggesting that as a political organizing principle, you can't deny that a robust leftist American government can work, you can't merely accept that that one could work but for x, y, z; you have to believe it can, and even will work--that's, I think, the pragmatic part of Rorty's thesis here. A common vision of utopia not just for the pragmatic realization of an efficient means for organizing ourselves, but something that drives the passions that could possibly impel a megadiverse group of people to animate a movement that, you know, "achieves our country."
In that way, I kinda read Achieving Our Country as a continuation of Baldwin's work, especially The Fire Next Time--probably not a revolutionary thing to say, but if you take them in order I think they converge on a couple of very compelling points. Where Rorty focuses on the future and what an organizing ethos for a new American left could look like, Baldwin focuses more on the problem diagnosis, on the past and the origins of the American ideals/idealism and the systemic failure of our government and politics to achieve those ideals. Central to Baldwin's work is that there is no other path forward, to redemption, to the achievement of country than through the sins and the understanding of the past. That's what makes the 1619 Project, at core, so compelling to me--it's taking Baldwin's prescriptions and creating a new effort to get at them. Somewhere, from Baldwin to Rorty, is a pretty good outline of how to win: a uniquely American narrative of leftism that borrows from a million traditions but ultimately is most accountable to our past and how to redress, not erase, its many sins.
I'm being a bit unfair here, but this is the problem I see sometimes with the left today, kinda copping Rorty's thesis here again: too much skepticism of our origins and how the structures conceived within them have created the problems of the past and the present. It's undeniably true that the structures and political systems we have adopted have created our sins; it's also true that the political tools we have available--in the present moment--are completely insufficient to address our sins. But fracturing our political consciousness to address our injustices won't work, it won't create the popular support necessary for a movement to be credibly democratic. This is why Marxism, Socialism, even Progressivism are not always helpful frames for political action, even if they're incredibly useful for analytic and theoretical purposes.
There is no clean break to engineer from our past. No one would disagree with that, but in the realm of applying political theory to politics, there's no version now of swapping one ism for another. The only answer is to create something new. There's no way out but through, as the memes would have us believe.
What's this new thing, this apple-pie socialism then? What does it look like?
I have no idea.
thanks for this essay. I hope it is widely read. I have read Rorty's book several times and will now read it again.