The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.
[…]
Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies, because the unemployed, the homeless, and residents of trailer parks are not the ‘other’ in the relative sense. To be other in this sense you must bear an ineradicable stigma, one which makes you a victim of socially accepted sadism rather than merely of economic selfishness.
| Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country, cited by Conor Friedersdorf in Where the Left Went Wrong—and How It Can Win Again
Rorty was anticipating, I think, the political shift from left-versus-right to up-versus-down.
(via stoweboyd)
This is an important read, but I am not hopeful anyone will heed its suggestions, so I’m pretty sure we’re stuck with trump for at least 7.5 more years.
tinfoilparachute 