In a strangely prophetic passage that suddenly began to be quoted widely in 2016, [Richard] Rorty even predicted that a hyper-moralized leftist politics indifferent to material conditions would eventually drive “members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers” into the arms of “a strongman…someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesman, and postmodern professors will not longer be calling the shots.”
To avoid this fate, Rorty argued, “the Left should put a moratorium on theory. It should try to kick its philosophy habit.” And it should “try to mobilize what remains of our pride in being Americans.” In short, Rorty thought that the abandonment of political metaphysics could actually open space for new binding agreements to flower. What he forgot, perhaps by choice, were the vast socially conservative masses whom he could so cheerfully dismiss as “the same honest, decent, blinkered disastrous people who voted for Hitler in 1933 ” who lay outside “the only America I care about.” Somehow, Rorty thought it would be possible to build a political community without paying any mind to such people. Perhaps he imagined joshing them or their children into the fold little by little.
James Davison Hunter, Democracy and Solidarity.
“Perhaps he imagined joshing them or their children into the fold little by little.”
Worse. Given the abandonment of political metaphysics (his insistence on “the priority of democracy to philosophy”), Rorty held that if some were too far from sharing his commitments, it would be as if they were “madmen.” They couldn’t be reasoned with. And when reason fails in politics what is left…?