Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America. - book review

Public Interest, Wntr, 1999 by Clifford Orwin

In Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America,(*) Richard Rorty shows that his heart is in the right place, which as anatomists know is on the left. He further shows that the intellectual Left today is in the wrong place. Rorty makes this case eloquently and persuasively. Still, he doesn't seem the prophet to lead the Left out of the wilderness. Despite his good intentions, he offers nothing in the way of policies likely to recapture the allegiance of the American public.

Rorty aims to unite the Left, whose two wings - the rump of the "old Left," on the one hand, and the hypertrophic "cultural Left," on the other - regard each other with suspicion, bemusement, or contempt. This task requires diplomacy of a high order, especially since it cannot be accomplished without criticizing the cultural Left, on the one hand, and defending what it despises in the old Left (e.g., its reformist bent and its complicity in the Cold War) on the other. Rorty similarly attempts to rehabilitate America itself in the eyes of the cultural Left. He notes that a left that casts America as irredeemably sinful lacks any incentive to engage with it politically. Rorty is thus compelled to enjoin the Left to take pride in America.

Not that the Left is to take pride in much that ordinary Americans might value. Rorty's vindication of America is curious. He concedes that it is guilty of every offense of which the current Left accuses it. He insists, however - invoking John Dewey - that "nothing a nation has done should make it impossible for a constitutional democracy to regain self-respect." "To [claim otherwise] is to abandon the secular, antiauthoritarian vocabulary of shared social hope in favor of the vocabulary which Whitman and Dewey abhorred; a vocabulary built around the notion of sin."

Remorseful over the fate of the native Americans? If not a little water then "shared social hope" will wash away the deed. Postmodernism merges with positive thinking. This is very much a philosophy professor's idea of how to get out of a jam. Just revise your vocabulary.

Rorty does not present America's past as entirely black, for the Left has played a part in it. The pride in America that Rorty promotes turns out to mean largely the Left's pride in itself. America has done awful things, but these would have been still worse but for the Left. And America has improved over time, due solely to the efforts of the Left. Offering a rousing litany of these improvements, Rorty opposes leftist sectarianism. Disputes between liberals and socialists, liberals and communitarians, even cold warriors and fellow travelers, pale beside what all sides have always had in common. It is this common commitment - to big government and big labor and bigger income redistribution - that all parties on the Left must renew.

Rorty's attitude toward the newer lefts - academic, feminist, gay, multicultural - is ambivalent. He begins by salaaming to them with an abjectness that has become all too familiar. He extols the campus New Left of the 1960s for having renewed the American Left while saving us from a war in Vietnam - a war that without the Left might still be going on today. (Yes, that is what he claims.) He especially praises the rage of the New Left. (Professors are easily impressed by rage, perhaps because we know that our own frightens no one.) He also endorses the redemptive qualities of sex, drugs, and rock and roll, of which he claims good old Whitman as the prophet. Where were Rorty and his fellow old leftists in those troubled days? Well, they meant well but were "battered and exhausted, too tired ... to experience rage when only rage [would] work" - too tired, therefore, to riot, burn, and intimidate. (Never trust any one over 30.)

My recollections of the 1960s differ from Rorty's. Yes, my generation abounded in "idealism." That's how I learned to distrust idealism. And certainly there were real grievances, first among them an unwinnable war. Still, the notion that free sex, free drugs, and avoiding conscription were lofty moral causes seemed pretty ludicrous even then. I have to think that Richard Nixon understood the New Left better than Richard Rorty: He abolished the draft and, lo, with it disappeared the mass disorders.

Rorty showers equal praise on the motives of the still newer lefts, those active on campus today. As for the persecution, slander, and other excesses meticulously chronicled by (among others) liberals, Rorty prefers to ignore them. He dismisses all "conservative" critics of the university as politically motivated "know-nothings."

Rorty approves of political correctness not because it is not a form of indoctrination but because it is. He presents the rationale of "multiculturalism" as therapeutic: It has healed the scars of the victim while lessening the "sadism" of the broader society. Rorty's pop-Freudian diagnosis of discrimination as sadism is not the least of his gestures to the newer academic Left. But even he doesn't seem to take it seriously. If the problem were one of sexual pathology, the notion of dispelling it by having the adolescent sadist read Toni Morrison in English class, rather than George Eliot, would be just too ludicrous. That there has been a decline in racism and other forms of intolerance in America in the past two generations is clear; that the cultural Left deserves the credit for it is not.