As a Jew in French Algeria, Derrida had been a childhood victim of Vichy discrimination, but he was more alarmed by the nationalist independence movement, the FLN, and did his national service teaching the children of the French occupation forces (Jason Powell, Jacques Derrida - A Biography, 2006, p. 38; others, like Jean Jeanson and Frantz Fanon aided the freedom fighters).
Married to a Czech, he leant his authority to the Cold War campaign for East European dissidents, whose British representative was Roger Scruton and is today claimed as a success by the CIA.
He was first elevated to the status of a public figure, charming an American audience by exposing the pretensions of European 'structuralist' theory at a conference at the John Hopkins University, sponsored by the Ford Foundation (Francois Cussett, French Theory, 2009, p. 29).
In 1968, when intellectuals like Guy Debord, Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Rudi Dutschke threw themselves into students' and workers' protests, Derrida retreated, expressing his fear of the mob (Powell, Jacques Derrida, p. 79).
Though Derrida and his fellow 'deconstructionists' were sold as the continuation of the spirit of 1968 to gullible American students, their real relationship to those events was that they summarised its defeat in a philosophy that mocked the pretensions of those who wanted to change the world.
And perversely, Derrida flirted with some thinkers who were politically associated with the far right, Frederick Nietzsche, the former Nazi collaborator Paul de Man and the card-carrying Nazi Martin Heidegger. His defence of these philosophers' intellectual contribution was a kind of dare to leftists, to see if they could be provoked ( in the event they were too jaded to care, perhaps even a bit turned on by the Nazi chic).
The essay skirting around de Man's wartime contributions to Nazi propaganda was surely the model for Bill Clinton's Grand Jury defence 'it depends what you mean by "is"'. (Jacques Derrida and Peggy Kamuf Like the Sound of the Sea Deep within a Shell: Paul de Man's War Critical Inquiry, Vol. 14, No. 3, The Sociology of Literature, Spring, 1988, pp. 590- 652)
At a deeper level Derrida's sympathy with Nietzsche and Heidegger was a wilful adoption of the obscurantist and anti-rational currents of reactionary thinking that corresponded to the anti-democratic element in right wing politics.
Early on, those who ran across Derrida understood that he was not radical, but something of a Cold War liberal. His interest in reactionary philosophers was noted by the left-wing Humanité, and later became a sticking point with the radicals at Tel Quel.
Even when he was giving papers in US colleges, more radical US academics winced at the quietistic implications of the End of Man. (Richard Popkin, 'Comments on Professor Derrida's Paper', Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 30, No. 1, (Sep., 1969), pp. 58-65) For the most part though academic America welcomed the mocking of rationalist pretensions.
In his rather good account of the impact of deconstruction in America, French Theory Francois Cusset shows how the ground for Derrida's success in America was already prepared by a Yankee disdain for unifying theories. Derrida blossomed in Yale University's literature department alongside de Man, Bevis Hillier and Harold Bloom, because, even though his public face was that of austere theory, his actual message was pluralistic and jokey-cute - ideal for an academic audience that was negotiating the diverse claims of special interest groups organised around gender and race. Derrida took the deconstruction of rationalism (which meant Marxism in the French context) and reapplied it to deconstruct the American Dream, just at the point that it was disintegrating under competing demands. As Cussett shows, Derrida's citations in journals began to rise in the US, just as they were falling off in his native France.