Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

In 1998, Richard Rorty predicted that if the American left continued on its then-current trajectory — preoccupied with cultural politics, contemptuous of patriotism, and disengaged from the economic grievances of the working class — the result would eventually be a strongman politics of resentment, something resembling what happened in Weimar Germany. The prediction was widely noted after 2016 and is now the book’s most-cited feature. But the prophecy is less interesting than the diagnosis that generates it, and the diagnosis is where the book should actually be assessed.

The Core Claim

Rorty’s argument rests on a distinction between two lefts. The first is the reformist left of Whitman and Dewey — patriotic, future-oriented, committed to achieving through democratic politics what America’s founding rhetoric had promised but not delivered. The second is the cultural left that emerged from the 1960s and consolidated in the academy — Foucauldian, identity-focused, more concerned with unmasking power than with redistributing it, and constitutionally suspicious of the national pride that Rorty regards as a precondition for collective political agency.

The reformist left, Rorty argues, achieved things: labour law, the New Deal, civil rights legislation. The cultural left achieved tenure. By trading political engagement for theoretical sophistication, the post-1968 left abandoned the working class to economic forces it could no longer interpret or resist. The vacancy was filled, in time, by the right.

The philosophical underpinning is Rortyan pragmatism: there is no deep truth about America to which the left must answer, no metaphysical foundation on which politics can be built. What there is, is a set of inherited stories and aspirations that can be taken up, extended, and used. National pride, on this account, is not false consciousness — it is a motivational resource, one that a left serious about winning cannot afford to despise.

Where the Argument Is Strongest

The historical sections are the book’s most valuable. Rorty’s account of the reformist left — his readings of Whitman’s democratic vistas, Dewey’s instrumentalism, the progressive movement’s practical orientation — recovers a tradition that the cultural left had largely abandoned as insufficiently radical. Whether or not one accepts his normative conclusions, the historical argument that there was a coherent and effective American left before theory arrived is worth taking seriously.

The diagnosis of the cultural left’s political consequences is uncomfortable but largely accurate. The shift in left-intellectual culture from redistribution to recognition, from class to identity, from political organisation to academic critique, is a real phenomenon with real political costs. Rorty did not invent this critique — it had been made from various directions — but he stated it with unusual clarity and from within the left tradition rather than as an attack on it.

The prophecy, whatever one makes of its analytical basis, has proved descriptively accurate in outline. The strongman politics Rorty anticipated — economically nationalist, culturally revanchist, supported by a deindustrialised working class that the left had ceased to address — arrived more or less on schedule. That the prediction was made in 1998 gives it genuine evidential weight.

Where It Strains

The cultural left Rorty critiques is a composite and, in places, a caricature. He treats it as uniformly disengaged from practical politics, but much of what travels under the labels of identity politics and cultural critique has been organisationally effective — in labour organising, in civil rights litigation, in social movements that achieved concrete legislative and institutional results. The claim that theory and organisation are mutually exclusive is asserted more than demonstrated.

The relationship between the cultural left’s academic preoccupations and the working class’s political defection is also asserted more than it is argued. Rorty implies a causal link — the left’s condescension alienated white working-class voters, who turned to the right — but this causal story is complicated by decades of deliberate Republican strategy, the structural effects of deindustrialisation, and the question of whether working-class voters had other grievances the reformist left was equally failing to address. Correlation and causation are not carefully separated.

There is a deeper philosophical tension. Rorty’s case for patriotism rests on pragmatist anti-essentialism: America is not an essence but a project, and national pride is a useful fiction for sustaining collective agency. But if that is so, it is unclear why this particular fiction should be privileged over others — why the nation rather than the city, the union, the international working class. The pragmatist framework underwrites the move but does not fully justify the specific object. Rorty’s America also remains remarkably white and Anglophone in its cultural references, an irony that the cultural left he dismisses was at least attempting to address.

Verdict

Achieving Our Country is a short book with a diagnostic argument that has held up better than its critics initially allowed. The core claim — that the American left’s retreat into cultural politics had measurable political costs, and that those costs included the erosion of the democratic coalition required to resist authoritarian demagoguery — is serious and largely defensible. The mechanism linking cultural politics to working-class defection is underspecified, the cultural left is drawn with too broad a brush, and the pragmatist case for patriotism is more suggestive than conclusive. Read it as a provocation with real evidential support, not as a finished political theory.