Richard Rorty's 1998 Book forsaw 2016, Identity politics has a lot to do with it.

[jg10003]

For those unfamiliar with Richard Rorty, he was one of the most influential philosophers of the late 20th century.





Identity politics has a lot to do with Trump's rise. Those who criticized Bernie Sanders for focusing on income inequality without regard to race and gender should read this.

His {Rorty's} basic contention is that the left once upon a time believed that our country, for all its flaws, was both perfectible and worth perfecting. Hope was part of its core philosophy. But during the 1960s, shame....transformed a good portion of the left....into a disaffected gang of spectators, rather than agitators for change. A formalized despair became its philosophy. The system was beyond reform. The best one could do was focus on its victims.

The result was disastrous. The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice....

Mr. Rorty did not deny that identity politics reduced the suffering of minorities. But it just so happened that at the very moment....was diminishing, economic instability and inequality were increasing, thanks to globalization.

....“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.”.....

....Which left the white working-class guy and gal up for grabs — open to right-wing populists, maybe even strongmen.....

....“Why could not the left,” he asked, “channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?”....

....“Under Presidents Carter and Clinton,” Mr. Rorty wrote, “the Democratic Party has survived by distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution.”....

Which brings us to Hillary Clinton. She may have had a plan to relieve the misery of the working class, but she didn’t speak about it much. (Bernie Sanders did. And lost.) ....And though her slogan was “Stronger Together,” her campaign was ultimately predicated on celebrating difference, in the hope that disparate voting blocs would come out and vote for her.

Here, Mr. Rorty’s most inflammatory words are most relevant, and also most uncomfortable: “The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups.” Mrs. Clinton tried this strategy. It didn’t win her the Electoral College. “This Left wants to preserve otherness rather than ignore it,” he also wrote. That didn’t work either.

People are furiously arguing about what played a key role in this election — whether it was white working-class despair, a racist backlash or terror about the pace of cultural change. It seems reasonable to think that all three played a part.

What’s so striking about “Achieving Our Country” is that it blends these theories into a common argument: The left, both cultural and political, eventually abandoned economic justice in favor of identity politics, leaving too many people feeling freaked out or ignored.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/books/richard-rortys-1998-book-suggested-election-2016-was-coming.html?src=me

[Grey Lemercier]

1. what good is economic justice if we, as PoC, LGBTQ, immigrants, women, non christians of all stripes

etc etc are pounded into the dirt LITERALLY just for who we are????? The way I see it we are in imminent, systemic and/or random (wrong time-wrong place) danger . Our goddamn lives are being threatened, our humanity will be ripped away, and possible our lives as well.

[loyalsister]

5. I agree

I also reject the premise that it has to be either/or.

[DemocratSinceBirth]

2. To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin a society that gives up social justice for economic justice...

To paraphrase Benjamin Franklin a society that gives up social justice for economic justice will end up with neither.

[pampango]

3. Progressive countries combat social and economic inequality simultaneously.

The American left is often guilty of focusing on social inequality while giving less attention to economic inequality.

We should and can address both at the same time.

[jg10003]

4. No-one is saying that civil rights, equal protection, and social justice are not extremely important

and must be defended and advanced. However economic justice is also important and has been ignored by Democrats for the past 36 years (and by the Republicans since Theodore Roosevelt left office). Furthermore, language and behavior should be respectful of all people. But when empathy, courtesy, and respect devolve into picayune parsing of language, then it becomes political correctness. Democrats have spent to much time telling people which noun and pronoun to use while people of all races, religions, and genders have seen the American Dream disappear.