1/ In 1998, the late philosopher Richard Rorty published "Achieving Our Country," a galvanizing book which predicted a surge in populism and social instability is coming to America because of worsening income disparity and the intense disconnect between elites and the masses.
2/ “This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class, which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900.”
3/ Elite-controlled institutions failed to protect households from the negatives of globalization and technological change, whereas the left—both cultural and political—abandoned economic justice in favor of identity politics, leaving too many people feeling worried or ignored.
4/ From his book: "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..."
5/ "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..."
6/ "The non-suburban electorate will decide the system has failed and start looking for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots..."
7/ "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..."
8/ "All the resentment, which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates, will find an outlet." Rorty thus described an electoral shift that would lead to the rise of a Trump-like strongman.
9/ Ultimately, Rorty wrote, the so-called strongman would be powerless to do anything but “worsen economic conditions,” and “quickly make his peace with the international superrich.”
10/ The corollary is hopes of blue-collar workers for genuine reversal of inequality will prove fleeting. America will remain vulnerable to serious socio-political instability in the future.
