Achieving Our Country
Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America
A 1998 warning that a disillusioned electorate would eventually reach for a strongman.
Richard Rorty argues that the American left abandoned the reformist patriotism of Whitman and Dewey for a purely spectatorial cultural politics, and that the vacancy would be filled. The passage everyone now quotes predicts voters turning to a strongman who promises to end the influence of bureaucrats and lawyers, and the resurgence of prejudice that would follow. Published in 1998 from lectures given at Harvard, it is a short book that has aged unnervingly well.
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