*UPDATED: Originally posted under the lede "America Gets Its Strongman"-Public Occurrences, 11/8/16*
Why the ellipses, Quasi's? That is where I got the excerpt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/books/richard-rortys-1998-book-suggested-election-2016-was-coming.html?_r=0
Jennifer Senior wrote the article. She introduces the alleged quotes of Rorty with,
Three days after the presidential election, an astute law professor tweeted a picture of three paragraphs, very slightly condensed, from Richard Rorty’s “Achieving Our Country."...It’s worth reading the paragraphs in full:
I just looked up the full excerpt. You be the judge if the astute law professor "very slightly condensed" the excerpt.
Ms. Senior writes that she reprinted "the paragraphs in full." Not true. She reprinted the astute law professor's misleading, sanitized condensation, not Rorty's paragraphs in full. Everything bolded and in brackets was omitted:
[Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that] members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. 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. [A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.]
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. [The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.] All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
-Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (1998)
Why the ellipses, Quasi's? That is where I got the excerpt.
http://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/books/richard-rortys-1998-book-suggested-election-2016-was-coming.html?_r=0
Jennifer Senior wrote the article. She introduces the alleged quotes of Rorty with,
Ms. Senior writes that she reprinted "the paragraphs in full." Not true. She reprinted the astute law professor's misleading, sanitized condensation, not Rorty's paragraphs in full. Everything bolded and in brackets was omitted:
[Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that] members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
At that point, something will crack. 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. [A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.]
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. [The words “nigger” and “kike” will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back.] All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.
-Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country (1998)
So, those words were not Richard Rorty's "point," that was Edward Luttwak's "point" in Luttwak's book.
Oh, that is bad from the astute law professor. And from Jennifer Senior for not checking the book(s).
Why would the astute law professor, Lisa Kerr, omit Luttwak's warning of populism overturning constitutional government? Of the analogy to the Weimar Republic? Of the suggestion that fascism is in America's future? Of Sinclair Lewis' "It Can't Happen Here"? Why omit the point, apparently Rorty's, that most predictions about Hitler in office were "wildly overoptimistic"? Do those not have relevance to Trump 2016?
Why omit Rorty's point that in this America 2.0 "nigger" and "kike" will once again be part of acceptable political discourse when, in fact, we have had Trump supporters yell "Fuck that nigger!," referring to President Obama, and "Jew.S.A!"?
That is BULL-SHIT writing.
I was so outraged upon discovering the actual excerpt and how it differed from Kerr's/Senior's that I attempted to find Senior's email address to fire off a protest and demand a correction. Could not find an email address for her.
