Richard Rorty And The Promise Of America

Richard Rorty, one of the most influential American philosophers of this generation, reminds me in a way of Noam Chomsky. Both men are widely regarded as geniuses in their field, and both (to my way of thinking) demonstrate that genius is not easily transferable from one field to another, as evidenced by their writings on politics.

Several years ago Rorty published a short book, ACHIEVING OUR COUNTRY (Harvard, 1998), ostensibly chastising his fellow leftists for not appreciating that America was flawed but not evil, that it should be reformed but not denounced or rejected. In the current issue of Dissent he has a review of Richard Posner’s LAW, PRAGMATISM, AND DEMOCRACY offering similar views, this time in opposition to what he says is Posner’s conservative cynicism.

Rorty laments the fact that

the poor in the United States can not be persuaded to vote their interests–or even to vote-except at moments of extreme crisis such as the Great Depression. When they do vote, it is often merely to display their ignorance.

Still, he writes, there is “something wonderful about being an American.” That something seems to involve America’s promise, what it stands for.

It is not for nothing that our democracy has been seen, by millions of people throughout the last two centuries, as more than just another arena of competition between interest groups. The United States has not been a beacon of hope for the world merely because American voters have been able to fire politicians who fouled up. Our country’s self-image is still shaped, and its history is still being molded, by a Lincolnesque narrative of moral progress-progress made by appeals to the better angels of our nature. Posner’s account of how the American political system works has no room for heroes and heroines of this narrative such as Susan B. Anthony, Eugene V. Debs, Woodrow Wilson, FDR, Thurgood Marshall, Betty Friedan, and Lincoln himself. These people were, to be sure, clever politicians who knew how to work the system. But they were also utopian dreamers-the sort of people for whom Posner has little use. They were able to change people’s ideas about where their interests lay, and thus to create and mobilize new interest groups. By doing so, they made their country different and better.

Now leave aside that Rorty thinks the most dramatic thing American heroes/heroines can do is to “mobilize new interest groups.” What I find interesting is his emphasis on a “narrative of moral progress.” In the same vein he calls the Brown desegregation decision “a moral breakthrough.” Americans, he says,

are also proud of having made their country morally better than it used to be. Americans have become, in the years since Brown, proud of Marshall and of Martin Luther King-of dreamers who helped their country to realize its promise, and to overcome its shameful past.

What, precisely, is the moral promise — specifically, the moral promise of Thurgood Marshall and Martin Luther King — to which Rorty refers here? I think it is clear that the promise he has in mind, the promise that allowed us to overcome our shameful past, is the promise in the Declaration that all men are created equal and that everyone (warning: here it comes again [see last post]) deserves to be treated without regard to race, creed, or national origin.

That promise is broken every time we justify treating people differently on the basis of race, but Rorty doesn’t seem to recognize that. At least I’m not aware of his criticizing racially preferential hiring, admissions, etc.

Now, maybe I’m mistaken about the promise. It is certainly possible to read our history less grandly, to see a more limited promise, albeit one that was also shamefully violated in the past. In this more limited view, America’s promise was simply that people here would be free of oppression. Slavery, segregation, and discrimination violated that promise. The failure to provide 40 acres and a mule violated that promise.

On this view, what was wrong with slavery and its aftermath was not that it violated some implicit American promise of equality but that it mistreated one discrete group of people, putting them at a disadvantage. Believing this requires one to disbelieve the 130 years or so of anti-slavery, anti-segregation, anti-discrimination arguments — the abolitionists and the NAACP did not, after all, argue that slavery and discrimination were wrong because they were bad for blacks but because they violated fundamental principles — but it is possible.

Insofar as Rorty supports a regime of racial preference, he is implicitly supporting a Posnerian view of American democracy as nothing more than an amoral contest of interest groups, a world where policies are not judged against principles but only against interests. In that world “what’s good for the blacks?” is no better nor no worse than the familiar “what’s good for the Jews?” But it’s hardly the stuff of a “narrative of moral progress.”