Let’s go back to the mid 1980s when Richard Rorty was writing “Contingency, Irony and Solidarity.” At that point in history, Ronald Reagan was in his second term as President. With the exception of Jimmy Carter’s one term in the late 1970s, Republicans had held the White House since 1968. In 1986, the Democrats retook the Senate after six years of Republican control. But the House was firmly controlled by the Democrats. In fact, between 1932 and 1994, the Democrats controlled the U.S. House of Representatives for all but two years, a staggering 60 of 62 year run.
Judging by today’s standards, you would think that this would be an era of hopeless political deadlock. But this was not the case at all. The filibuster was very rarely used in this era. The Democratic Speaker of the House and the Republican President would annually compromise on a budget. There were huge political disagreements throughout the era—the Nixon term was one of the most tumultuous in our history—but the business of government went on. Nixon, in fact, created the Environmental Protection Agency and indexed Social Security benefits to inflation, highly progressive reforms in any era.
The media landscape was dominated by major players with huge audiences—people across all ideologies would watch the CBS Evening News or ABC’s Nightline, and there was an accepted baseline of knowledge about the our world. I say “our” because that was unquestionably a narrow, American-centric world, far less diverse than what we have access to today. But it did, at least, provide the basis for lively debate between the parties and grounds for compromise when necessary.
Richard Rorty looked at where the culture and language was going in the 1980s and knew that this could not last. The American consensus was built on our attachment to universal values and rights “endowed by our Creator.” Huge parts of the American culture were left out of this narrative from the start, but the narrative itself became a vision for a country where all people were created equal and had equal rights under law.
In short, there was simply too much money to be made appealing to groups left out by the consensus. It started on talk radio in the 1990s, where a market was discovered and cultivated for Right Wing, populist audiences. Over time, audiences on the left that were just as annoyed by the centrist press sought out their own voices. News room were always under pressure to cut costs from entertainment-centric media departments, and news coverage suffered, destroying the case for maintaining centrist, anti-partisan newsrooms.
Now we live in an age where it’s impossible to hold debates because no one can agree to terms where genuine policy disagreements can be heard and understood. This summer’s Biden-Trump debate will go down in history as the moment where President Biden’s age caught up with him, but it was also a perfect example of a candidate in Donald Trump who instead of clashing on ideas, just created his own fictional world and barely made a truthful statement all night.
I do not have a problem with the Rorty conception of creating new poetic language to describe the vision of America. Perhaps there is a way to update the Founding Fathers’ language to our times and make it more compelling. But let’s not kid ourselves—this exercise in shifting the communications approach away from arguing better to describing everything has obliterated our culture’s sense of truth.
Donald Trump still has an opportunity to win this election for a startling reason—a majority of Americans, regardless what they think of him personally, now believe he was an effective president. This is objectively ludicrous. But in an age where redescription has become everything, why not throw all of your energy into convincing Americans that they had it great during the Trump era and he was confidently on top of it all?
I’m not going to go paragraph by paragraph through this Rorty chapter and explain his views on Foucault and Habermas … it’s not necessary. We’ve seen Rorty’s story play out for nearly 40 years. And he was sadly right. The rhetorical basis of America has fractured. But Rorty was wrong that this would lead to a revitalized, modern America more capable of taking on the challenges of our age.
I saw a British commentator on social media remark yesterday that America has never been objectively better than it is right now (judging by economic growth, innovation, the basic freedoms provided to everyone in our culture) but it’s also never been subjectively worse, because we all sense that it’s completely ungovernable.
It’s ungovernable because we’re incapable of talking to one another and seeing real problems with a pragmatic mindset. So it’s not irrational for that subjective mindset to dominate. Maybe we’ll continue to successfully muddle on anyway—but I’m sure it won’t feel good as we do so.
Leave a Reply