DAVID SIDORSKY
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This refusal to consider the existence of the Right as a possible alter–
native direction toward achieving our country has bearing for Rorty's
own proposal for the restoration of the reformist Left. Rorty ascribes
what he terms "the eclipse of the Left" between
1964
and the present to
internecine quarrels among leftist factions. Accordingly, his formula for
the Left's return to power is the reconciliation among these factions. He
fails to consider the need for changing the agenda of the parties of the
Left as a prerequisite for any electoral victory.
Ironically, Rorty's discounting of the viability or the success of the
non-Left in recent decades is relevant to an evaluation of his criticism of
the academic Left. Rorty's charge is that the academic Left, ensconced
in the insulated sanctuary of the university, has become a passive spec–
tator, refusing to engage in its needed activist functions in American
political coalitions. Yet this criticism may not appreciate the political
shrewdness of the academic Left in shaping its significant role in Amer–
ican politics. For the academic Left appears to have adapted the strat–
egy of the Italian Marxist Gramsci, who urged the Left to pursue
cultural hegemony from the protected base of the university rather than
to engage in a losing confrontation in the political arena. Thus, the aca–
demic Left has not joined with the trade unions, as Rorty advises, in a
program
to
counter free-market economics. Instead it has achieved, to a
significant degree, a victory in the cultural wars virtually to the point of
cultural hegemony, not only in the University but also within elite
groups in the media, theater, and publishing, preserving the perspectives
of the Left during a period when the programs and policies of socialist
and communist movements and states were forced
to
declare themselves
bankrupt. A confirmation of the significance of the academic Left is
available through the thought-experiment of imagining the situation in
American society during the presidencies of Reagan, Bush, and Clinton
were the academic Left not so dominant in the culture wars.
By refusing
to
join issue with the Right, Rorty sidesteps any need
to
evaluate the degree
to
which the United States has already been achieved
successfully, through the ways in which it has preserved inherited social
and political institutions including limited government, a conservative
judicial framework, and free enterprise. His support for change in a rad–
ical direction does not derive its legitimacy from any specific bill of par–
ticulars against American institutions. Rather, Rorty's appeal is
to
the
ever-present possibility of reforming the status quo by means of the polit–
ical party of perennial hope. For Rorty, Walt Whitman has been the poet
whose theme is that America is a country open to utopian possibilities
and John Dewey has been the philosopher who envisioned American
