By Dan Williams
A Trump-like president has been a long time in the making.
While the left’s widespread protesting and civil unrest succeeded in getting this country out of an unjust, unpopular, and bloody war — Vietnam — the left splintered. The cultural left, institutionalized in universities, abandoned everything except for a symbolic allegiance to the working class. They set to work on a cultural program that focused on forms of social, instead of economic, oppression. They succeeded, for example, in reducing sexism and racism in the workplace, schools, and the culture at large.
However, this social progress came at a heavy cost. Globalization ravaged the working class and the dominant narrative of the cultural left was, when not simply ignorance, something ineffectual. Acknowledging the tragedies of a globalizing economy in words but not in action, the left abandoned the working class to examine such platitudes as “capitalism is evil.” The radical left became the establishment, training docile, abstract speculators of oppression rather than politically engaged members of civil society. It was only a matter of time before a populist uprising took place and a “strongman” took power.
This, at least, is the analysis that Richard Rorty gives in his book Achieving Our Country. Rorty writes, “At [some] point, something will crack. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for — someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”
Rorty wrote these words in 1997, a scenario he described as a mere “possible world.”
The problem is the view, fashionable for sometime now in liberal circles and promulgated in some classrooms, that America was conceived in the irredeemable sin of imperialism. In this view, the slaughter of the Native Americans (or any tragedy you wish) is an indelible stain from which America — especially white Americans — can never, ever expunge. Any attempt to do the real work of improving self and country is sneered at as naïve, conformist, and bourgeois. This cult of America’s Original Sin, which the cultural leftists never hesitate to invoke as a way of putting American pride in its place, must be checked, if not actively fought against.
It is likely President Trump is not going to deliver on the economic promises he made to the working class. Democrats — I mean the actual Democrats who are members of our community, not politicians in far-off places — need to recognize this as an opportunity to reforge its alliances with the working class. Teachers, writers, and activists need to do more than just spread a message of political reform (instead of adolescent rage and resentment); they need to teach how to become a member of civil society.