JOHN PATRICK DIGGINS
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around, it is claimed, John Dewey and Franklin
D.
Roosevelt, and believed
in the possibility of "agency" and "solidarity."
One sympathizes with Rorty's worry about our present state of frag–
mentation and disarray. But to recommend that we can overcome it by
returning to the thirties boggles the historical mind. The thirties was the
most acrimonious, disunited, and, after the Popular Front, cynical decade in
American history. To read the journals of the era involving the Trotskyists,
socialists, Stalinists, Lovestonites, Schachtmanites, and other -ists and -ites
is to know why "a herd of independent minds" would never allow itself to
be rounded up and branded with a single cause.
And what in the world does Rorty mean by "reformist Left"? When
Sidney Hook and others led the Left in the thirties, they distinguished their
own "revolutionary" organizations from liberalism and social democracy,
the Norman Thomases of the world and their seemingly innocent faith in
gradualism and amelioration. Becoming a reform socialist right now, said
John Dos Passos in 1933, would be as effective as drinking "near beer."
Rorty rarely stops to consider what it would mean to return to the
thirties in order to recapture Roosevelt for the Left. Would it not mean a
return to a Democratic Party that dared not break with the "solid South"
and racial segregation; to the welfare state and its dependencies; to an envi–
ronment of dustbowls, breadlines, and debilitating insecurity; and to a fiscal
policy too unsure of itself to fight successfully the Great Depression? And
to return to Dewey as a beacon for our troubled times is to return to an
untroubled thinker who warned America to stay out of the war with fas–
cism and who remained silent in the face of the Holocaust and Hiroshima.
When Rorty invokes Roosevelt and Dewey in the same breath the stu–
dent of history becomes breathless. Dewey had no use for Roosevelt or the
New Deal. Dewey desired to see the country move to the Left and turn
against capitalism and liberal pluralism, which he saw as subverting democ–
racy rather than sustaining it. And he invoked Thomas Jefferson, the
quintessential individualist, to combat individualism! As for FDR, the presi–
dent, the philosopher declared, had no coherent plan, only a grab bag of
innovations. Ironically, as Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. observed, America's leading
philosopher of experimentalism judged the New Deal too experimental.
But more is involved than simple misjudgment. To join Dewey to
Roosevelt as a means of the American Left's political revival would be to
join together what is essentially immiscible.
In
The Public and Its Problems,
Dewey criticized de Tocqueville, Lippmann, and others who saw mass
society as a threat to political authority. America, Dewey held, has more to
fear from the ruling classes and their leaders than from the democratic
masses and their common folk. The patrician Roosevelt saw things differ–
ently; small wonder he was accused by his rich friends of betraying his class
