Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America [Paperback]

To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments. In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought." This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right.

To remedy this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape. This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future.

This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration.

To Rorty, the modern Left has abandoned the dreams of Debs, Dewey, and DuBois in favor of scholastic "theorizing" and defeatist fatalism, as exemplified by the unlearned scholars who populate most of the nation's humanities departments. In exchange for any movement toward authentic social change, we are left instead with Foucault-reading pessimists, disillusioned by the aftermath of the Sixties and less interested in effecting actual progress than in "resisting" the system through barren exercises in jargon-laden "thought." This development over the last three decades, with its concomitant anti-Americanism, has made the Left largely impotent in the face of the well-organized, practical, and methodical assault from the Right.

To this, Rorty proposes an abandonment of pointless theory and instead an active, pragmatic, dedicated effort toward the realization of the true principles that have made America great: diversity, social justice, civil rights, and a movement toward actual equality rather than the social Darwinist "conservatism" which dominates our current political landscape. This is what the author means by "achieving our country." As someone who has spent considerable time in English departments, I wholeheartedly agree with Rorty that a transformation is necessary if the Left is not to decline into total oblivion in the near future.

This is an important and insightful assessment of our culture and politics, and a superb primer for Leftist regeneration.

Unfortunately, events in the 1960's created a schism in the Left from which neither side have succeeded in counteracting a unified Right that sunk its claws into the haunches of America. It is up to the Left to coalesce once again into a unifying force to continue the American story and achieve the country.

The loss of American pride is another key element. Rorty derives this from two modern thinkers, Walt Whitman and John Dewey, whose beliefs sharply contrasted with that of the finite, absolute, divine-centered beliefs of the Victorian pre-modernists. Whitman passionately exalted the more humanistic approach to truth and self-discovery caused by the floodgates opened by Darwin's theory of evolution. As a result, the divine standard to which men held to was replaced by secular humanism and humanistic standards.

Both Dewey and Whitman saw "America" and "democracy" as synonymous with being "human." Dewey too placed "America" and "democracy" on a visionary scale. But where Whitman described the American way as "the last and greatest vision of the American potential," Dewey saw "democracy" and thus America's story as "a great word, whose history... remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted".

As a result, Rorty asserts that Dewey and Whitman would advocate American pride despite blacker moments in America's history such as the Vietnam War. This was why the Left lost its effectiveness in carrying out its intellectual role--its spectatorial preoccupation with sin. According to Rorty, a Dewey-Whitman counter to this indulgence in self-disgust would be that "there are many things that should chasten and temper such pride, but that nothing a nation has done should make it impossible to regain self-respect."

Another group of thinkers Rorty drew upon was the "reformist Left," progressives who as champions of the downtrodden, strove to make political and social changes within a constitutional and democratic edifice. This reformist Left consists of two groups: the powerful, financially secure leftist elite launching top-down initiatives, (Upton Sinclair, Ida Tarbell, the Wagner Act) and the second group, consisting of the financially insecure and disempowered "little man" and grass roots organizations (Marcus Garvey, the Montgomery bus boycott, and the Stonewall riots.) Rorty contends that the reinforcement of the bottom by the top was the glue holding the two groups until 1964, when the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and the denial of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party at the Democratic Convention created a rift in the Left.

The solution, according to Rorty, is a unification of the Lefts, as the Cultural Left is "unable to engage in national politics... [or] deal with the consequences of globalization." That is something the pre-Sixties left is able to do, i.e. "piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy." Rorty also wants to wean the Cultural Left from addictions such as theorizing, philosophizing, abstract systems, and self-disgust. In its place, he proposes activism, concrete solutions, a focus on people and pressing issues, and national pride, the latter two which the grass roots conservatives used to push the Right in power. The job of this Brand New Left, a union of the reformist Left, Cultural Left, and in support of the little man, is to create a new ideology and hence a new utopia that will engage and mobilize a hitherto disillusioned populace into political participation waiting for specific solutions. The Brand New Left will be an intelligentsia practicing pragmatism.

Proud as Dewey and Whitman are in their assertion of America, bowing to no other authority, not even God, I am disturbed by one application of their assertion. This statement corresponds with American unilateralism, the concept of the United States being above the auspices of the United Nations, whose vision is more inclusive and unbiased towards any one nation.

I also agree, that yes, it is beneficial to be aware of the darker moments of American history, and to learn not to make the same mistake and move forward to what one would hope to be a better tomorrow. But what is the line between proper awareness and a prosaic, token, and trendy "awareness month" or "awareness week"?