More Rorty trivia from the lbo-talk left/right K-DISH DJ, Michael Pugliese. Richard' Dad was James Rorty, one of the signers of the famous 1932 statement of the "left-leaning" (I hate it when newspapers use that phrase to I.D. lefties that do more than lean in our direction> "Karl Marx, left leaning economist said today that...") intelligentsia in support of William Zig Zag Foster of the CPUSA for Prez.
See Richard's essay in the collection, "Trotsky and Wild Orchids."
Common Knowledge Recent & Forthcoming ... Philosophy WV Quine, Commensurability and the Alien Mind Richard Rorty, Trotsky and the Wild Orchids Clifford Geertz, The Commensuration of Alien Languages ... www.utdallas.edu/research/common_knowledge/brochure.html Catholic Worker Movement - DorothyDay ... under the auspices of the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford " was held at Cooper Union ... James Rorty, a poet, said he was ... www.catholicworker.org/dorothyday/daytext.cfm?TextID=42&SearchTerm=o'Neill,% 20Eugene
Introduction: The Betrayal of Liberalism by Hilton Kramer & ...
... year my father ran a front organization called the League of
Professional Groups
for Foster and Ford (the Communist Party s candidates for president and vice
...
www.newcriterion.com/constant/betrayintro.htm
Kramer is always a hoot!
>...The contrast between The Liberal Imagination and Achieving Our Country
was made especially piquant by the fact that —as Rorty was eager to tell
us—he was himself born into the political and intellectual milieu that did
much to shape Trilling’s thought:
My parents were loyal fellow-travelers of the Communist Party right up through 1932, the year after I was born. In that year my father ran a front organization called the League of Professional Groups for Foster and Ford (the Communist Party’s candidates for president and vice-president). My parents broke with the party after realizing the extent to which it was run from Moscow, and so I did not get to read the Daily Worker when I was a boy. By 1935 the Worker was printing cartoons of my father as a trained seal, catching fish thrown by William Randolph Hearst. But my parents did subscribe to the organ of Norman Thomas’ Socialist Party, The Call, as well as those of the DeLeonite Socialist Labor Party and the Shachtmanite Socialist Workers’ Party. I plowed through these papers, convinced that doing so would teach me how to think about my country and its politics. Rorty continues: As a teenager, I believed every anti-Stalinist word that Sidney Hook and Lionel Trilling published in Partisan Review—partly, perhaps, because I had been bounced on their knees as a baby. My mother used to tell me, with great pride, that when I was seven I had had the honor of serving little sandwiches to the guests at a Halloween party attended both by John Dewey and by Carlo Tresca, the Italian anarchist leader who was assassinated a few years later. That same party, I have since discovered, was attended not only by the Hooks and the Trillings, but by Whittaker Chambers. Chambers had just broken with the Communist Party and was desperately afraid of being liquidated by Stalin’s hit men. All of which is quite interesting, of course. Growing up on what Rorty calls “the anti-Communist reformist Left” had meant, among other things, that he never became a Communist fellow traveler himself. It also meant, in his case, that he takes a very dim view of what he calls “the Foucauldian Left,” if only because it has, as he writes, “little interest in designing new social experiments.” In fact, Foucault and his many followers have shown themselves only too eager to engage in “new social experiments.” Foucault himself never met a revolutionary piety he didn’t like. Maoism got the Foucault seal of approval, as did the Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic fundamentalism. Foucault remained a staunch supporter of that Muslim fanatic even after his followers set about murdering thousands of Iranian citizens. In 1978, looking back to the postwar period, Foucault asked: “What could politics mean when it was a question of choosing between Stalin’s USSR and Truman’s America?” There were also, of course, Foucault’s multifarious “social experiments” with sado-masochism in gay bars and bathhouses not to mention his enthusiastic “experiments” with LSD and other hallucinogens. Perhaps Foucault’s “new social experiments” were not to Rorty ’s taste, but it is disingenuous at best to pretend that the problem with that immensely influential figure was political quietism.
Indeed, Rorty’s experience of the “reformist Left” seems to have left him with a permanent incapacity for critical judgment about anything having to do with its social goals. What those goals amount to, in this account, was little more than a vaguely utopian version of the welfare state combined with the imperatives of 1990s-style political correctness: what Chairman Mao referred to as “the centralization of correct ideas.” Yet Rorty has nothing to say about either the woeful failures of the welfare state or about about the coercive measures needed to perfect the kind of politically correct society he enthusiastically endorses. As a consequence, we are left with the impression that Achieving Our Country is neither a serious exercise in liberal pragmatism nor an attempt at political analysis, but something else: a historical romance.
About the actual history of the political Left in this country, Rorty does indeed have a very romantic—not to say distorted —view. In a passage that seems to call for something like a revival of the 1930s Popular Front, he implores us to “abandon the leftist-versus-liberal distinction, along with the other residues of Marxism that clutter up our vocabulary,” and thus “drop the term ‘Old Left’ as a name for the Americans who called themselves ‘socialists’ between 1945 and 1964.” As for the old Communist Party stalwarts, Rorty asks us to “remember that individual members of that party worked heroically, and made very painful sacrifices, in the hope of helping our country to achieve its promise. Many Marxists, even those who spent decades apologizing for Stalin, helped change our country for the better by helping to change its laws.”
For Rorty, “having been ‘on the Left’”—never mind which Left—is to have received the political equivalent of a mandate from heaven, and among its saintly recipients he lists Angela Davis and Jesse Jackson along with Irving Howe and Arthur Schlesinger—though not, of course, Lionel Trilling. He also has some kind words for such “socially useful thinkers” (really, they are pampered academic radicals) as Cornel West, Fredric Jameson, and Terry Eagleton, whom he grandly forgives for regarding themselves as Marxists. Those whom he consigns to the “reformist Left” version of the outer darkness make an interesting list, too—Calvin Coolidge, Irving Babbitt, T. S. Eliot, Robert Taft, and William Buckley. Well, as Trilling said, “It is one of the tendencies of liberalism to simplify.”
As might be expected from this cast of mind, in which an intellectually exhausted liberalism looks to radicalism in its most extreme manifestations as the only means of renewing its own vitality, Rorty reserves his highest praise for the uproars of the 1960s.
America will always owe an enormous amount to the rage which rumbled through the country between 1964 and 1972. We do not know what our country would be like today had that rage not been felt. But we can be pretty certain that it would be a much worse place than it is. In this philosopher’s considered judgment, “the New Left may have saved us from losing our moral identity.” If the New Leftists “had never taken to the streets,” he writes, “America might no longer be a constitutional
democracy.” And in the name of what ideas or ideals does this champion of the “reformist Left” look to the future?” “Among these ideals,” writes Rorty, “are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed, only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by their results. … When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place.” Yes, and the state will “wither away,” as the Marxists kept promising us, bourgeois capitalism will slide into the “dustbin of history,” replaced by the promised utopia of freedom, virtue, and liberal unanimity on every issue. Rorty’s pathetic exercise in nostalgia for radical pieties old and new reminds us of the intellectual bankruptcy that has overtaken liberal thought and of liberalism’s betrayal of its own vaunted values and goals. It is with a view to reexamining the historical sources of liberalism’s current impasse and its implications for conservative alternatives that the editors of The New Criterion have organized the present discussion. The Betrayal of Liberalism is at once a critique of the liberal legacy and an acknowledgement of the pervasive authority that liberal ideas and liberal programs continue to exert on the politics and culture of bourgeois democracies the world over, including our own. As the subtitle of this volume suggests, one major theme in the betrayal of liberalism is coercion: the tendency of liberalism to pervert freedom in its campaign to impose an ideology of virtue. Of course, this is not a new development. In Du contrat social (1762)—a bible for one strand of liberal thought—Jean-Jacques Rousseau famously opposed what he called “the general will” to the particular wills of individual men and women. “Whoever refuses to obey the general will,” Rousseau wrote in one of his most chilling passages, “shall be compelled to it by the whole body: this in fact only forces him to be free.” Establishing the reign of virtue that Rousseau envisioned was not for the faint-hearted. “Those who dare to undertake the institution of a people must feel themselves capable, as it were, of changing human nature, of transforming each individual … into a part of a much greater whole; … of altering the constitution of man for the purpose of strengthening it.” St. Just and Robespierre were among the first to act on Rousseau’s grandiose plan. They were not the last. How often in the twentieth century have social and moral architects seized upon Rousseau’s words as a license for illiberalism or worse!
One lesson to be learned from the betrayal of liberalism is that the other side of utopia is a tendency to totalitarianism, “soft” or “hard” as the case may be. Richard Rorty may dream about “participatory democracy and the end of capitalism.” But the “ironic liberalism” he champions is much more likely to foster intellectual conformity and a stultifying regimen of political correctness in which every aspect of life is subjected to ideological scrutiny. Not for nothing did Lenin observe that “what socialism implies above all is keeping account of everything.” One cannot be too careful if the object is to force people to be free. The sentimental idealization of the “rage which rumbled through the country between 1964 and 1972” overlooks the impulse to tyranny that lurked beneath much of its emancipationist rhetoric. Herbert Marcuse—neo-Marxist radical, apostle of libidinal utopia, countercultural guru— epitomized this phenomenon with his doctrine of “repressive tolerance.” According to Marcuse, apparently democratic institutions such as freedom of assembly and free speech are really deceptive alibis for oppressive state power. Genuinely “liberating tolerance,” he wrote with Orwellian verve, “would mean intolerance against movements from the Right, and toleration of movements from the Left.” Indeed, Marcuse makes it clear that what he wants is “not ‘equal’ but more representation of the Left,” and he blithely sanctions “extralegal means if the legal ones have proved to be inadequate.”
Different opinions and “philosophies” can no longer compete peacefully for adherence and persuasion on rational grounds: the “marketplace of ideas” is organized and delimited by those who determine the national and the individual interest. In this society, for which the ideologists have proclaimed the “end of ideology,” the false consciousness has become the general consciousness—from the government down to its last objects. No wonder the philosopher Leszek Kolakowski concluded that Marcuse’s entire system “depends on replacing the tyranny of logic by a police tyranny. … The Marcusian union of Eros and Logos can only be realized in the form of a totalitarian state, established and governed by force; the freedom he advocates is non-freedom.” The casual brutality of Marcuse’s program of “liberating tolerance” is breathtaking. But it would be a mistake to think that such fantasies of control are confined to academic radicals who, whatever their status as cultural icons, are without real political influence. The liberal betrayal of liberalism is also evident throughout the policies and attitudes that constitute political correctness, “diversity training,” and the like. Despite the condign ridicule, parody, and satire to which political correctness has been subjected, its dictates are increasingly felt in schools and colleges, in the workplace, and in governmental offices. Wherever one discovers a publicly bruited “commitment to diversity,” one can be sure that policies designed to assure lockstep conformity are not far behind.
Consider, to take just one example, the so-called “politics of meaning.” Coined by the psychologist and left-wing activist Michael Lerner, the phrase was catapulted into the limelight by Hillary Rodham Clinton in a speech she delivered at the University of Texas in 1993. “We need,” Mrs. Clinton declared, “a new politics of meaning. … We need a new definition of civil society which answers the unanswerable questions posed by both the market forces and the governmental ones, as to how we can have a society that fills us up again and makes us feel that we are part of something bigger than ourselves.”
“The politics of meaning” is the perfect PC slogan: seamlessly combining nebulousness and the aroma of virtue, it specifies nothing but can be enlisted to justify anything. According to Mr. Lerner, “most middle-income people” are in “deep pain in their daily lives.” His prescription to alleviate this pain is one that his disciple Hillary Clinton also embraces. It centers on insinuating a “caring” government more deeply into every aspect of people’s lives (and their pocketbooks). “Every workplace,” Mr. Lerner tells us in a policy paper that deeply impressed Mrs. Clinton, “should be mandated to create a mission statement explaining its function and what conception of the common good it is serving and how it is doing so. … The Department of Labor should organize this process and publish the result.”
If Mr. Lerner has his way, the Department of Labor is going to be awfully busy. To combat “stress,” he suggests that the Department of Labor should initiate an annual “Occupational Stress Day” and that “every community should be mandated to create a set of public hearings about stress and work and how work could be reorganized to make conditions less stressful.” Mr. Lerner is deeply fond of the word “mandate”—i.e., force, require, coerce. “The Department of Labor should mandate that every employer allow workers to elect an Occupational Safety and Health Committee empowered to require changes in the organization of work to increase workers’ safety and health, including mental health.” And again: “Federal legislation should be passed to prevent any company from moving or closing its plants in a given area without first making a social-environmental impact report on the human consequences. Companies would be fined, up to confiscatory levels, for those moves that negatively affect the health of the community.” One recalls Tocqueville’s melancholy remarks about “What Sort of Despotism Democratic Nations Have to Fear.” Democratic despotism, he says, “would degrade men without tormenting them,” covering “the surface of society with a network of small complicated rules, minute and uniform, through which the most original minds and the most energetic characters cannot penetrate, to rise above the crowd. … Such a power does not destroy, … but it enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
It would be nice to be able to dismiss Michael Lerner as one more academic totalitarian. What makes this impossible is the fact that he is taken seriously by people like Hillary Clinton: a woman who, although unelected to any office, managed to create untold havoc in the U.S. health care system and who will doubtless be shopping around for other opportunities to intrude herself on the public even if (as seems likely as of this writing) she fails in her bid to win a New York Senate seat. “Federal legislation should be passed …”; “the Department of Labor should mandate …”; “every community should be mandated …”; “Companies would be fined, up to confiscatory levels. …” These are phrases dear to the hearts of the Michael Lerners and Hillary Clintons of the world. <snip, since a little Kramer is to much...> funny that Old Leftists and Neo-Cons both like that, "David Dubinskys of the World, " kinda invective! Michael Pugliese