Richard Rorty posthumously edited

This is a perfect long article for its genre: a foreign policy expert, who also happens to be a professor of literature, on America’s domestic politics. Rabbit’s clever; the insightful parts are two apposite quotes from Max Weber and Richard Rorty. The problem with the latter is that Rorty got mangled in the process. Here’s what Mark Danner wrote in The New York Review of Books:

I recalled a remark that the philosopher Richard Rorty made back in 1997 about “the old industrialized democracies…heading into a Weimar-like period.” Citing evidence from “many writers on socioeconomic policy,” Rorty suggested that “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.

At that point, something will crack…”

The philosopher put it in a rather different way: he was summarizing and rephrasing someone else’s ideas while giving due credit to that person:

Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that 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.

At that point, something will crack…

I have no idea why Danner edited out Luttwak’s name. Perhaps he could not stand the thought of Rorty accepting the arguments of a thinker who would, twenty years later, poke fun at the establishment’s Trumpophobia.

Updated May 19. It probably started with David Brooks’ distorting Rorty big time in the opening of his 1998 longform attack on the philosopher (still living and active) in The Weekly Standard. According to Brooks, Rorty had predicted the US was about to become a dictatorship. The author of Why Fascism is the Wave of the Future failed to get as much as a passing mention. Brook’s trick was shortly exposed by Carlin Romano in Rortyism for Beginners.

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