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Achieving Our Country, Richard Rorty, 1998
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that
the old industrialized democracies are heading into a
Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements
are likely to overturn constitutional governments.
Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the
American future. The point of his book The Endangered Ameri
can Dream is that members of labor unions , and unorganized
unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their gov
ernment is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or
to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time,
they will realize that suburban white-collar workers-them-
selves desperately afraid of being downsized-are not going
to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for any
one else.
At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban
electorate will decide that the system has failed and start
looking around for a strongman to vote for-someone will
ing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureau
crats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen , and postmod
ernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.
A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis' novel It Can 't Happen Here
may then be played out. For once such a strongman takes of
fice, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932 , most of
the predictions made about what would happen if Hinden
burg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains
made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans ,
and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for
women will come back into fashion. The words "nigger"
and "kike" will once again be heard in the workplace . All the
sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unaccept
able to its students will come flooding back. All the resent
ment which badly educated Americans feel about having
their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find
an outlet.
But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of
selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge,
he will quickly make his peace with the international super
rich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists.
He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to pro
voke military adventures which will generate short-term
prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the
world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance
to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American
Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to
the workers about the consequences of globalization ? Why
could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly
dispossessed?