The American academy has done as much to overcome sadism during the last thirty years as it did to overcome selfishness in the previous seventy. Encouraging students to be what mocking neoconservatives call "politically correct" has made our country a far better place. American leftist academics have a lot to be proud of. Their conservative critics, who have no remedies to propose either for American sadism or for American selfishness, have a great deal to be ashamed of. [...] Nevertheless, there is a dark side to the success story I have been telling about the post-Sixties cultural Left. During the same period in which socially accepted sadism has steadily diminished, economic inequality and economic insecurity have steadily increased . It is as if the American Left could not handle more than one initiative at a time-as if it either had to ignore stigma in order to concentrate on money, or vice versa. One symptom of this inability to do two things at once is that it has been left to scurrilous demagogues like Patrick Buchanan to take political advantage of the widening gap between rich and poor. While the Left's back was turned, the bourgeoisification of the white proletariat which began in World War II and continued up through the Vietnam War has been halted, and the process has gone into reverse. America is now proletarianizing its bourgeoisie, and this process is likely to culminate in a bottom-up populist revolt, of the sort Buchanan hopes to foment. [...] Seventy-two percent of Americans now think that "layoffs and loss of jobs in this country will continue indefinitely." They have good reason to think this. Unless something very unexpected happens, economic insecurity will continue to grow in America. Indeed, it is easy to imagine things getting much worse much faster. This is because a good deal of the insecurity is due to the globalization of the labor market-a trend which can reasonably be expected to accelerate indefinitely. What industrialization was to America at the end of the nineteenth century, globalization is at the end of the twentieth. The problem which Dewey and Croly faced how to prevent wage-slavery from destroying the hope of equality-was partly solved by the leftist initiatives of 1910-1965. But a problem Dewey and Croly never envisaged has taken its place, and measures which might cope with this new problem have hardly even been sketched. The problem is that the wage levels, and the social benefits, enjoyed by workers in Europe, Japan, and North America no longer bear any relation to the newly fluid global labor market. Globalization is producing a world economy in which an attemp t by any one country to prevent the immiseration of its workers may result only in depriving them of employment. This world economy will soon be owned by a cosmopolitan upper class which has no more sense of community with any workers anywhere than the great American capitalists of the year 1900 had with the immigrants who manned their enterpri ses. The increasing dependence of American universities on gifts from abroad, of American political parties on bribes from abroad, and of the American economy on foreign sales of Treasury bonds are examples of the tendencies which are at work. [...] If the formation of hereditary castes continues unimpeded, and if the pressures of globalization create such castes not only in the United States but in all the old democracies, we shall end up in an Orwellian world. In such a world, there may be no supemational analogue of Big Brother, or any official creed analogous to Ingsoc. But there will be an analogue of the Inner Party-namely, the international, cosmopolitan super-rich. They will make all the important decisions. The analogue of Orwell 's Outer Party will be educated, comfortably off, cosmopolitan professionals-Li nd's "overclass", the people like you and me. The job of people like us will be to make sure that the decisions made by the Inner Party are carried out smoothly and efficiently. It will be in the interest of the international superrich to keep our class relatively prosperous and happy. For they need people who can pretend to be the political dass of each of the individual nation-states. For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere--to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world's population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.
Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, 1997 (1st edition: Harvard University Press, 1998); pages 82, 83, 84-85 and 87-88.
