Doug
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A couple of choice excerpts:
Out of Left Field Richard Rorty's call for a new popular front. By Jacob Weisberg (posted Friday, May 29, 1998)
One does not ordinarily expect a slim volume written by an academic philosopher and published by a university press to cause widespread consternation on the right. But for some reason, Richard Rorty's new book, Achieving Our Country, which is based on a series of lectures delivered last year at Harvard, seems to be having that effect. Writing in Newsweek, George Will commented last week that the book "radiates contempt for the country." (Perhaps more to the point, it radiates contempt for George Will.) And in the most recent issue of the Weekly Standard, David Brooks contends that the book's criticism of the left is merely the latest in a succession of moves designed to advance the author's academic career. Brooks accuses Rorty of being a "pseudo-deviant" who poses as a critic of academic radicals while really congratulating them.
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Isn't this the kind of loyal opposition right-wingers are supposed to want? The harsh response to Rorty may have something to do with his penchant for gratuitous, con-baiting asides, such as the one in which he absurdly states that "we caused the death of a million Vietnamese out of sheer macho arrogance." In the course of the book, Rorty sets even liberal teeth on edge with such outlandish statements, though they are usually contradicted in more sober moments. (He thinks the Cold War was necessary and that Reagan was correct to call the Soviet Union an "evil empire.") But I think that what really alarms the right about Rorty is not his moments of rhetorical excess but rather the buried fear that the left might one day wake up and take his advice. If the alienated theorists of academe transformed themselves into a Rortyan left--a unified, engaged, and patriotic left--conservative columnists could run dry of material in a matter of weeks.
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Personally, I don't think that what stands in the way of Rorty's utopia is the failure of Frederic Jameson and Terry Eagleton to endorse it. It's that there's not enough caffeine in America--and that the whole world is in retreat from all forms of socialism and semi-socialism. Rorty writes about politics as if he'd been holding out in a small cave without newspapers for the past several decades. He has not gleaned anything from the experience that the Atlantic democracies have had in governing themselves over the past 30 years, or from their rather mixed record in dealing with social ills. Nor does he consider the possibility that markets might be effective in dealing with some social problems. Conservatives can quit fretting. Liberals might be out of it, but we're not about to start taking cues from a peacenik philosophy prof. who's still chasing after the Swedish model.