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While Rorty's focus is on the United States, this issue of the viability
of the policies of the reformist Left has global implications and must
appeal to global conditions. There is negative evidence against Rorty's
thesis in the fact that even where there has been a collapse of develop–
ing capitalist economies (as in Russia, or Indonesia and other Asian
nations), the response has not been toward socialism and redistribution.
Rather, the policy prescriptions for economic reform have aimed at
improving the rule of law and at restructuring "crony capitalism" or
"criminal oligarchic capitalism" in order to achieve the conditions for
free markets. Where the parties of the traditional Left have come to
power in Western Europe, it would appear that reality has required
them to jettison the redistributive economic policies that Rorty supports
in favor of furthering free markets, even endorsing and promoting
Thatcherite "privatization."
The most striking example of Rorty's avoidance of any comparison
between the views of the Left and the Right emerges in his account of
the competing images of American society. Rorty is critical of the New
Left for adopting an image of America as a country of sequential victim
exploitation. This narrative of American history usually runs from the
exploitation of Native Americans to blacks to immigrants to women to
gays and lesbians. As noted above, Rorty accepts much of the bill of par–
ticulars of this narrative, but argues that the bleak past need not deter–
mine the hoped-for future. According to Rorty, the only image
presented by the Right in contrast with this narrative as a source for
national pride is one of chauvinistic militarism, as acted out in the per–
sonae of John Wayne.
Rorty believes that the negative views of America asserted by Martin
Heidegger during the period of his philosophical defense of Nazism
retained their moral authority. He writes: "When young intellectuals
watch John Wayne war movies after reading Heidegger.. .they often
become convinced that they live in a violent, inhuman, corrupt country.
The ubiquitous image of America developed in fictional form and in
media formula, of the United States as a country which provides equal–
ity before the law and multiple opportunities so that the poor may
achieve the good life, if not for themselves, then for the next generation,
is,
mirabile dictu,
simply omitted. This image is, of course, not only a
staple of the rhetoric of the Right. Its pervasiveness among all classes of
American society has generally been recognized as an obstacle to the
formation of class consciousness and to the political success of the par–
ties of the Left in American electoral democracy.
