Something Has Cracked: Post-Truth Politics and Richard Rorty's

Ash Center Occasional Papers

Tony Saich, Series Editor

Something Has Cracked: Post-Truth

Politics and Richard Rorty’s Postmodernist

Bourgeois Liberalism

Joshua Forstenzer

University of Shefﬁeld (UK)

July 2018

Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation

Harvard Kennedy School

Ash Center Occasional Papers Series

Series Editor Tony Saich

Deputy Editor Jessica Engelman

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Ash Center Occasional Papers

Tony Saich, Series Editor

Something Has Cracked: Post-Truth Politics and

Richard Rorty’s Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism

Joshua Forstenzer

University of Shefﬁeld (UK)

July 2018

Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation

Harvard Kennedy School

The Roy and Lila Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation

advances excellence and innovation in governance and public policy through

research, education, and public discussion. By training the very best leaders,

developing powerful new ideas, and disseminating innovative solutions and

institutional reforms, the Ash Center’s goal is to meet the profound chal-

lenges facing the world’s citizens. Our Occasional Papers series highlights

new research and commentary that we hope will engage our readers and

prompt an energetic exchange of ideas in the public policy community.

This paper is contributed by Joshua Forstenzer, the Vice-Chancellor’s Fellow

for the Public Benefit of Higher Education at the University of Sheffield and

a recent Democracy Visiting Fellow at the Ash Center. His research interests

are in political and social philosophy, American Pragmatism, and philosophy

of education. With this paper, Forstenzer answers the call of Harvard Ken-

nedy School’s academic dean and director of the Ash Center’s Democratic

Governance Programs, Archon Fung, who has stated, “. . . in this moment, it

is critical to work on the challenges to democracy.”

Just days after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United

States, specific passages from American philosopher Richard Rorty’s 1998

book Achieving Our Country were shared thousands of times on social

media. Both the New York Times and the Guardian wrote about Rorty’s

prophecy and its apparent realization, as within the haze that followed this

unexpected victory, Rorty seemed to offer a presciently trenchant analysis

of what led to the rise of “strong man” Trump. However, Forstenzer points

to Rorty’s own potential intellectual responsibility in the unfolding crisis of

liberal democracy.

Forstenzer’s paper seeks to elucidate the relationship between Rorty’s liberal

ironism and contemporary post-truth politics. While the paper ultimately

concludes that Rorty is not causally responsible and thus not complicit with

the rise of post-truth politics, it contends that Rorty’s philosophical project

bears some intellectual responsibility for the onset of post-truth politics

insofar as it took a complacent attitude towards the dangers associated with

over-affirming the contingency of our epistemic practices in public debate. In

the last instance, this paper argues that Rorty’s complacency is a pragmatic

failure and thus cuts to the heart of his pragmatism.

You may find all of the Ash Center’s Occasional Papers online at

ash.harvard.edu.

Tony Saich, Series Editor and Director

Ash Center for Democratic Governance and Innovation

Harvard Kennedy School

Letter from the Editor

The argument in this paper is the result of a great many discussions con-

ducted over the last year. In its first iteration, this paper was presented at a

masterclass in honour of Richard Bernstein at the Munich School of Philos-

ophy. All participants at that event have my thanks and Richard Bernstein,

Mara-Daria Cojocaru, and Martin Müller have my very special thanks

for their detailed comments. Versions of this paper were then presented at

the “Corrupting Education” conference and at the Centre for the Study of

Higher Education research seminar at the University of Sheffield. On these

occasions, the paper received very helpful comments from Ian James Kidd,

Heather Battaly, Marion Oveson, Charlie Crerar, Gareth Parry, and Heather

Ellis. Many more discussions relating to this paper have taken place within

the Ash Center’s Democracy Fellows seminar and over coffee immediately

after our meetings in the fall term of 2017. Ultimately, this paper was pre-

sented during the Democracy Fellows seminar and received very helpful

comments from all in attendance. In particular, I am very grateful to Alice

Xu who made an excellent discussant and raised many important points

that helped significantly improve the paper. In addition, special thanks are

owed to Archon Fung, Clarissa Rile Hayward, Muriel Rouyer, Cornel West,

Markus Holdo, Robert Stern, Alexis Artaud de la Ferrière, María Marta

Maroto, Charles Petersen, Carrie Roush, Sean Gray, Quinton Mayne, and

Jonathan Collins for helpful comments, suggestions, and thoughtful crit-

icisms. Furthermore, I would like to extend my special thanks to Jessica

Engelman for her most excellent editorial guidance and to Daniel Harsha,

Teresa Acuña, and Tim Glynn-Burke for sustained and thoughtful institu-

tional support. Special thanks are also owed to Gaylen Moore from Moore

Better Writing for her kind and thoughtful editorial assistance. Finally, this

paper would not have come into being without the more general support of

the University of Sheffield, the Harvard Kennedy School, Sir Keith Burnett,

Ruth Arnold, Lord David Blunkett, Peter Levine, and Matthew Flinders.

They too have my heartfelt thanks. Of course, the usual disclaimer applies—

all remaining weaknesses, mistakes, and oversights are entirely my own.

Joshua Forstenzer

University of Sheffield (UK)

Acknowledgments

Contents

Introduction ............................................................1

I. What Is Post-Truth Politics? ..............................................5

II. Rorty’s Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism ..................................9

Truth, Justification, and Ethnocentrism .................................10

Rortyan Ironism: Liberalism without Foundations .........................13

III. Rorty’s Responsibility for Post-Truth Politics: Complicity, Causation,

and Complacency ....................................................16

Complicity ......................................................16

Causation .......................................................19

Complacency ....................................................21

Conclusion ............................................................27

Notes ................................................................29

Something Has Cracked

[M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled work-

ers, 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 elec-

torate 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.

[…]

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made

in the past 40 years by black and brown Americans, and by

homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women

will come back into fashion. […] 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)

Introduction

Selecting intellectual heroes is a dangerous business. They are inevitably

riddled with vices (small or large, private or public, ethical or epistemic), no

matter how great their virtues. Their ideas go in and out of fashion and are

subject to human frailty as well as the vagaries of time, since they can be,

and often are, misunderstood or made to serve other masters at the hands of

their most ardent devotees as well as their staunchest critics. Worse still, the

tensions at the heart of their work, on occasion, can detract from the very

causes they aimed to serve. Determining how responsible our intellectual

heroes are for the unsavory uses and misuses of their thought is a messy,

human affair that inevitably demands that we take them off the pedestal we

had once erected in our innermost sanctum just for them.

Something Has Cracked

This is the thought that struck me when, just days after the election of Donald

Trump to the presidency of the United States of America, the passages cited

above from Richard Rorty’s Achieving Our Country were shared thousands of

times on social media, even leading The New York Times and The Guardian to

write about Rorty’s prophecy and its apparent realization.

According to such

articles, Trump’s election was proof that, to use Rorty’s phrase, “something had

cracked”: the rural white working class voted to run back the clock on racial

and gender equality because its economic standing had been so eroded by

globalization as to lose faith in piecemeal improvements, liberalism, and social

harmony, turning instead to a strongman who would sanction unleashing their

pent-up frustration in the form of various shades of bigotry. The Left had thus

failed to bind the concerns of the white working classes left behind by global-

ization and rampant economic inequality with those of the rainbow coalition

(comprising primarily women, the young, and people of color) that had carried

Barack Obama to back-to-back presidential terms.

This account seems to offer a compelling narrative to explain the rise of

“Trumpism.”

It is also, however, a simplistic narrative that ignores the more

fundamental question of whether Trump voters were, on the whole, more

motivated by economic distress and political disaffection,

belief in outright

falsehoods,

hostility towards Hillary Clinton,

undue political influence—

foreign (e.g., Russian interference)

or domestic (e.g., James Comey’s Octo-

ber 28, 2016, letter to Congress)

—or a more or less explicit desire to lash out

at the very popularity of liberal pluralism, exemplified—if nowhere else—in

Obama’s two-term presidency and the prospect of electing the first woman in

the history of the country to its highest office.

Nevertheless, in Achieving Our Country, Rorty tells a story that potentially

explains something that remains baffling to many—namely, how some-

one like Donald Trump could become the president of the United States of

America in the twenty-first century. This explanation is, of course, limited

by its prophetic and therefore anachronistic nature as well as by the fact

that it was couched in an attempt to elucidate a different problem: how the

American Left had lost its luster in the second half of the twentieth century.

Indeed, according to Rorty, from 1964 onwards, the Left was torn asunder

by the emergence of a “cultural Left” steeped in academic sensitivity and

focused on advocating for recognition of the historic oppression of people of

color, women, and people whom we might now identify as LGBTQ+. This

cultural Left “thinks more about stigma than money, more about deep and

hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed,”

Something Has Cracked

thus breaking away from what Rorty called a “reformist Left” that was “in

the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market econ-

omy.”

In his account, while the cultural Left helped to assert the voices of

underrepresented communities, it did so by relinquishing what Walt Whit-

man called “common dreams” along with the American national project

of becoming “the world’s first classless society.”

Rorty further suggested

that this schism caused the Left as a whole to move away from effectively

addressing inequality through national politics because the academic cul-

tural Left focused its attention instead on articulating visions of participatory

democracy and theorizing hegemonic oppression.

Ultimately, for Rorty,

the cultural Left was guilty of engaging in the politics of spectatorship while

the solution lies in rekindling the politics of collective action, building an

alliance between the intellectual Left, the labor movement, and the working

classes. He therefore proposed returning to an egalitarian reformist agenda

articulated within the national myth of American (as opposed to universalis-

tic) solidarity, focusing on a People’s Charter that would call for campaign

finance reform, universal health care, renewed funding for K–12 education,

and increased taxation of the very rich.

With the current debate (if we can call it that) between the moderate and

radical wings of the Democratic Party thundering on, it is no surprise that

some today find this strategic analysis and recommendation prescient and

even potentially useful.

However, in spite (or perhaps because) of Rorty

being one of my former intellectual heroes, applauding his foresight

regarding the undoing of the democratic settlement in America strikes me

as a problematic understanding of his own role in the unfolding crisis of

progressive liberalism. Why? Crucially, because the rise of “Trumpism”

was enabled by framing much of its political project within the rhetoric of

post-truth politics. Moreover, its repeated rejection of a strong standard of

truth seemingly echoes Rorty’s own recurrent assaults—from the Philos-

ophy and the Mirror of Nature onwards—on the very idea that “knowl-

edge,” “facts of the matter,” or “rational justification” can be anything

more than the product of local justificatory practices.

In other words,

elite rhetoric relating to post-truth politics echoes significant aspects of

Rorty’s wider philosophical project, a project he once called “postmod-

ernist bourgeois liberalism.”

In fact, this connection between Trump

and his acolytes’ style of doing politics and postmodernism is already the

object of media discussion.

Perhaps the most notable commentaries on

this issue come from Daniel Dennett and Andrew Perrin. In a February

2017 interview, Dennett said:

Something Has Cracked

Maybe people will now begin to realise that philosophers

aren’t quite so innocuous after all. Sometimes, views can

have terrifying consequences that might actually come true.

I think what the postmodernists did was truly evil. They are

responsible for the intellectual fad that made it respectable to

be cynical about truth and facts.

In contrast, Perrin maintains that “[t]he indictments of postmodernism are

based on a shallow caricature of the theory and an exaggerated estimation of

its effects.”

We may thus ask: Has the intellectual movement that is post-

modernism played a role in the rise of post-truth politics?

It is to go some way towards answering this question that I will seek to

articulate a scholarly account of the relationship between Rorty’s post-

modernism and post-truth politics in this paper.

This seems an appealing

project for me because I find force in both Dennett’s claim that cynicism

about our epistemic standards is democratically dangerous and Perrin’s

claim that it is unhelpful to discuss postmodernism as though it were a

clearly defined school of thought.

To be clear, I think focusing on Rorty

in this discussion is legitimate because: (a) recent attention given to his

‘prophecy’ invites further intellectual scrutiny;

(b) he was one of the few

great analytically-trained philosophers who associated himself with post-

modernism (even though he came to regret using the label); and (c) I think

he would have genuinely been appalled at the thought that his philosophical

approach had actually left us with a depleted rhetorical toolbox to con-

front the threat posed by a virulent strain of xenophobic, chauvinistic, and

authoritarian politics.

This paper therefore offers a kind of immanent critique of Rorty’s thought,

subjecting his views to the test of his pragmatism. While I ultimately con-

clude that it is not causally responsible for the advent of, and thus not com-

plicit with, post-truth politics, I will argue that Rorty’s philosophical project

bears some intellectual responsibility for the onset of post-truth politics,

insofar as it took a complacent attitude towards the dangers associated with

over-affirming the contingency of our epistemic claims. In the last instance,

I contend that, since post-truth politics demonstrates that embracing the

contingency of one’s epistemic commitments has been effectively cou-

pled to a regressive and illiberal political agenda, Rorty’s complacency is a

failure to properly embrace the pragmatist maxim. To show this, I will (I)

offer an account of post-truth politics, (II) present a broad outline of Rorty’s

Something Has Cracked

postmodernist bourgeois liberalism, and (III) consider its responsibility for

the rise of post-truth politics.

I. What Is Post-Truth Politics?

Truth is not in fashion these days—at least, not in the realm of politics.

Perhaps it never was; lies and deception have probably always played a sig-

nificant role in that part of life.

But our collective relationship to the value

of truth seems to have taken a turn for the worse in recent years.

Indeed,

Oxford Dictionaries proclaimed “post-truth” its 2016 word of the year, noting

a 2,000-percent increase in its usage over the previous year and defining it

as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less

influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal

belief.”

Evidence for the claim that we are living in an age of post-truth

politics is often found in two events: the Leave campaign’s victory in the

Brexit referendum and Donald Trump’s successful run for the US presidency.

Indeed, falsehoods and outright lies are perceived to have played a dispropor-

tionate role in these campaigns, with these electoral events culminating in the

triumph of the campaigns that told the most egregious untruths.

Thus, the

“post-truth” character of our politics refers to the relative irrelevance of the

value of truth in contemporary public affairs. Yet, the term “post-truth” has a

longer history.

Steve Tesich first coined the term in his 1992 article in The Nation entitled

“Government of Lies.”

There, he used the word “post-truth” to describe

his sense that America had become a society where truth is politically

unimportant. Starting with Watergate, but contending that Ronald Reagan’s

Iran-Contra scandal and George H. W. Bush’s fabricated justification for

America’s involvement in the Gulf War cut deeper still, Tesich explained that

tepid popular reaction to lies in politics had shown that the American people

would prefer to believe in comfortable falsehoods than confront harsh truths.

This realization alarmed him deeply:

We are rapidly becoming prototypes of a people that totali-

tarian monsters could only drool about in their dreams. All

the dictators up to now have had to work hard at suppressing

the truth. We, by our actions, are saying that this is no longer

necessary, that we have acquired a spiritual mechanism that

can denude truth of any significance. In a very fundamental

Something Has Cracked

way we, as a free people, have freely decided that we want to

live in some post-truth world.

In this post-truth world, according to Tesich, we are left to live in a gray and

fuzzy moral universe with few absolutes and a “cozy universal appeal,” since

it justifies and sanctions moral mediocrity. Here, we are bound to wander

aimlessly between confusion and quiescence.

From our current vantage point, it is hard not feel the poignancy of this descrip-

tion: the campaigns during the Brexit referendum and the 2016 US presidential

elections were not only marked by loudly expressed and oft-repeated false-

hoods, but they (each in their own way) also presented limited, unimaginative,

and uninspiring moral worlds where the politically viable options merely

offered a choice between one type of moral failing (passive acceptance of

extreme wealth inequality and of the socially regressive aspects of globaliza-

tion) and another, far worse still (xenophobic sentiment coupled with an agenda

of nationalist retrenchment and a clear disregard for the injustices visited upon

members of minority groups within the supposedly hallowed nation).

Rather

than rallying behind bold, vibrant, and ambitious moral agendas, voters were

left to adjudicate between the morally abject and the unspeakably worse. In

Tesich’s view, this moral quandary is made possible by a lack of social and

political currency placed in the value of truth.

While post-truth politics refers to the general diminishment of the signifi-

cance of traditional epistemic standards in public discourse, I think we must

go one step further and recognize that political rhetoric that encourages

(more or less explicitly) the deepening of this phenomenon constitutes a

highly strategic intervention in the public forum.

It is the rate of use of this

strategic intervention that distinguishes present day “post-truth” politics from

Tesich’s early “post-truth world.” What is the nature of this strategic inter-

vention? I think post-truth rhetoric operates as what Koopmans and Statham

called a “discursive opportunity structure.”

McCammon et al. explain that

discursive opportunity structures are “ideas in the larger political culture that

are believed to be ‘sensible,’ ‘realistic,’ and ‘legitimate’ and […] facilitate the

reception of” certain political proposals.

In other words, discursive oppor-

tunity structures act as framing agents for more specific political proposals,

facilitating persuasion by tapping into broader ideas with social currency.

Discursive opportunity structures can be more or less stable and more or less

in tune with wider discursive fields, and political actors may capitalize on

them to a greater or lesser degree.

Something Has Cracked

In the case of post-truth rhetoric, it is the blatant breach or diminishment

of traditional epistemic norms that serve distinct political agendas (most

recently, Brexit in the UK and Trumpism in the US). By “post-truth rhet-

oric,” I mean the discursive mobilization of ideas relating to the absence

of epistemic norms regarding political claims to motivate popular support

for one’s preferred agenda. One type of engagement in post-truth rhetoric

is when a speaker makes false assertions and refuses to defend them with

reasons when asked to by members of the public or the media. Another type

might be when a speaker makes contradictory statements within a relatively

short period of time and refuses to clarify which claim they believe to be

true. However, perhaps the most powerful type of engagement in post-truth

rhetoric is when a political actor makes a direct rejection of traditional

epistemic norms and/or of the epistemic authority of those who seek to

abide by traditional epistemic norms (such as technical experts, academics,

and reliable media outlets).

During the Brexit campaign, when Michael Gove, then British Secretary

of State for Justice and one of the leaders of the Leave campaign, said that

Britons had “had enough of experts,” his words were taken to give license to

the idea that no one knows anything better than anyone else.

Although Gove

later objected to that narrow interpretation of his words, their political effect

was to lend credence to the idea that expertise and official sources of knowl-

edge were not to be taken seriously when they said that the consequences of

Brexit were likely to be grave.

Across the Atlantic, during the 2016 tran-

sition, George Stephanopoulos questioned then Vice-President-Elect Mike

Pence about a tweet where then President-Elect Trump purported that he not

only won the electoral college but the popular vote as well, provided that

“you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally.”

Stephanopoulos

pointed out that there was no evidence of illegal voting on the scale sug-

gested by Trump’s tweet and asked whether it was a president-elect’s right to

make false statements. In response, Pence said:

Well, it’s his right to express his opinion as president-elect of

the United States. I think one of the things that’s refreshing

about our president-elect and one of the reasons why I think

he made such an incredible connection with people all across

this country is because he tells you what’s on his mind.

Here, Pence is conflating matters of opinion with matters of fact to occlude

the fact that Trump’s claim was not grounded in evidence.

Something Has Cracked

During his actual presidency, Trump’s political team has been even more

explicit about its epistemic commitments (or lack thereof). When Kelly-

anne Conway, senior presidential adviser, was asked by Chuck Todd on

NBC’s “Meet the Press” about the claim made by Trump and repeated by

Sean Spicer, the White House Press Secretary at the time, that Trump’s

inauguration was the most attended in the history of the United States,

she explained that they were merely offering “alternative facts.”

After

many media outlets insisted that such “alternative facts” were nothing

short of falsehoods, Trump started calling the mainstream media “fake

news” with alarming regularity.

The term “fake news” won the distinc-

tion of being the Collins Dictionary’s 2017 word of the year and refers

to “false, often sensational, information disseminated under the guise of

news reporting.”

In other words, after a campaign during which candi-

date Trump made 560 false statements according to the Toronto Star,

Trump was—without a hint of irony—now claiming that the mainstream

media were fabricating facts for the express purpose of politically damag-

ing his administration.

One explanation for this is that Trump and his associates simply do not

believe in the existence of an actual fact of the matter. Therefore, in their

view, all factual claims are merely expressive of partisan bias. As Trump’s

associate and former adviser, Roger Stone, explains it:

Facts are, obviously, in the eye of the beholder. You have an

obligation to make a compelling case. Caveat emptor. Let the

consumer decide what he or she believes or doesn’t believe

based on how compelling a case you put forward for your

point of view.

Reading these words, it is hard not to find resonance with some of Rorty’s

most provocative slogans. These include, for example: truth is “what one’s

peers, ceteris paribus, let one get away with saying”;

“the question of

whether justification to the community with which we identify entails truth

is simply irrelevant”;

“[n]o organism, human or non-human, is ever more

or less in touch with reality than any other organism”;

and, perhaps most

damningly, “anything can be made to look good or bad by being rede-

scribed.”

Although Stone and Rorty were expressing their views in widely

different contexts, it is precisely this appearance of chiming that warrants

further investigation. That is why I will now discuss Rorty’s wider intellec-

tual project.

Something Has Cracked

II. Rorty’s Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism

While Rorty began his academic career as a successful mainstream ana-

lytic philosopher, he famously became impatient with this approach.

From

Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature onwards, he began to draw (rather

selectively) on Heidegger, Wittgenstein, and Dewey to develop an altogether

different kind of philosophical project. He called this project many names,

including “postmodernist bourgeois liberalism,” “liberal ironism,” and

“pragmatism.” It was in this phase of his career that he became “perhaps the

most extensively referred to of contemporary philosophers, both inside and to

an unusual extent outside academia,”

as well as an object of extraordinary

academic scorn:

Conservatives demonize him as a threat to civilization as

we know it; Marxists and other political radicals deplore

what they see as his complacent and uncritical defence of

American capitalism; postmodernists disdain his shallowness

compared with the arcane profundities of their European

gurus; analytical philosophers shake their heads sadly at a

good man gone to the bad; and the leading liberal political

theorists for the most part studiedly ignore him.

It is not to add unnecessary opprobrium that I intend to revisit Rorty’s central

philosophical contribution here, but rather to put his ideas to his own test in

the mode of immanent critique. While his style of writing and his detach-

ment from overt logical argumentation makes reading him as a consistent (or

even, at times, a coherent) proponent of a central argument difficult, even

the most uncharitable reading underlines his central concern with affirming

the primacy of practice over theory. Indeed, according to him, the value of

a theoretical idea is to be understood by contemplating its practical effects.

Rorty’s philosophical project is itself a theoretical idea and the worry ani-

mating this paper is that it may have played a role in contributing to the

advent of post-truth politics. To ascertain whether that is indeed the case, I

will endeavor to give a brief, but hopefully fair, account of his philosophical

project. At its heart, we find a double stance: on one hand, Rorty urges us to

confront the historical and cultural contingency of the justificatory standing

of our most cherished beliefs, and, on the other hand, he hopes to convince us

to remain as committed as ever to a wide and compassionate moral and polit-

ical liberalism. To explain how he thinks these commitments hang together,

let us consider each in turn.

Something Has Cracked

Truth, Justification, and Ethnocentrism

Rorty has a fraught relationship with the term “postmodernism.” On one

hand, he is one of the few major analytic philosophers to apply the term to

himself; on the other, he relatively rapidly distances himself from the “post-

modernist” label because he thinks the “term has been so over-used that it is

causing more trouble than it is worth.”

Rather, he proposes that we think

of Heidegger, Derrida and—presumably—himself as “post-Nietzschean”

philosophers. Yet, we still find an epistemological continuity in the position

referred to by these changing labels—namely, the rejection of the Enlighten-

ment “myth of the neutral justificatory framework.”

It is this rejection that I

will endeavor to explain in this section.

Although Rorty stresses that he does not offer a positive theory of truth, he

sometimes summarizes his view of truth by quoting William James’s famous

words: “The true […] is only the expedient in the way of our thinking.”

explains this tension as follows:

Philosophers who, like myself, find this Jamesian suggestion

persuasive swing back and forth between trying to reduce

truth to justification and propounding some form of mini-

malism about truth. In reductionist moods we have offered

such definitions of truth as “warranted assertability,” “ideal

assertability,” and “assertability at the end of inquiry.”

He therefore begins many of his books with a rejection of the correspondence

theory of truth. This is the view according to which p is true if and only if

p is the case. This view is problematic for Rorty because he maintains that

there is no “God’s eye view,” no “Archimedean” point, no way to ascertain

whether p is the case outside of local, contextually-rooted vocabularies and

practices. However, resisting the urge to make truth a relative concept, he

insists that there are only limited uses of the term “true”:

• Commendation: this happens when I assert that p is true to express that I

agree with p and I think you should too;

• Caution: this happens when I ask “p is justified but is it true?”—by doing

so I am expressing the thought that p might not be justifiable to other

existing or future audiences; or

• Disquotation: this happens when I express how the concept of “truth” is

used in a given language-set.

Something Has Cracked

Crucially, for Rorty, truth is not the goal of inquiry. He holds that we can only

aim for something if we can know if we have achieved it, because it makes

no sense to say that we are aiming for something, the attainment of which

would remain obscure to us all the same. He takes it as given that we can

never know if we have arrived at truth. In fact, according to him, the caution-

ary use of truth (or what Rorty takes to be fallibilism) does not point towards

a realm of facts waiting to be discovered; rather, it reminds us of the variety

of standards of justification and the future possibility of a better theory. Thus,

for Rorty, inquiry merely aims for warranted assertability or justification.

Warranted assertability and justification, in his view, are never more than the

product of human conversation since, “[t]he world does not speak. Only we

do.

”

In other words, he rejects the correspondence theory of truth because,

while propositions and sentences are a part of the human world, they are not

to be found in the nonhuman natural world under the form of “facts.” Instead,

he proposes his ethnocentric account of justification, according to which jus-

tification is always bound by the standards currently in use in one’s commu-

nity.

Thus, the kind of human interaction that would make a belief justified

is discursive through and through, since a belief must be taken to be justified

by one’s community in order to be justified. As a result, for him, justification

is intensely locally (in terms of where the community begins and ends) and

historically (in the sense that a belief might fall in and out of favor) situated.

Furthermore, Rorty maintains that communities are contingent formations

loosely tied together by the existence of a shared vocabulary.

His use of the term “vocabulary” in this context is somewhat idiosyncratic,

since he considers vocabularies to be broad clusters of words and metaphors

thanks to which human beings communicate meaning, as opposed to sets

of concepts thanks to which we represent distinct parts of the world. He

believes this because he holds a pragmatic view of language.

Indeed, he illus-

trates this view by telling a Darwinian story about the evolution of language.

According to him, vocabularies come into existence for the same purpose as

practical tools—namely, “to help us cope with the world.”

Further evolu-

tionary processes have helped refine these vocabularies, so that only those

best suited for helping human beings prosper in their respective environments

remained. But these vocabularies are no more representationally accurate

than the chameleon’s ability to take on the colors of its neighboring environ-

ment. Instead, vocabularies can only be said to be more or less useful. The

usefulness of language goes beyond issues of survival, however, in allowing

us to pursue our distinctive conceptions of “human flourishing.”

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Crucially, for Rorty, different conceptions of human flourishing make different

vocabularies more or less useful for us. It follows from this that our judgments

about which vocabularies—and thus which standards of justification—are bet-

ter than others will ultimately depend upon our conception of human flourish-

ing. If a new vocabulary is judged to be closer to our ideal of human life, then

adopting it will be judged to be rational; if not, then adopting it will be deemed

irrational. Therefore, judgments about the rationality of selecting vocabularies

and standards of justification depend on our conception of human flourishing.

Indeed, according to him, we can determine the relative expediency of a vocab-

ulary in promoting a given set of interests and values, but we cannot neutrally

determine which interests and values it is more rational to pursue.

When we

make determinations of interests or assert the desirability of certain values, we

are only ever doing so from within our vocabulary.

But how are we to adjudicate between the determinations of value, standards,

and justification made by different communities? For Rorty, there is no neu-

tral standard by which we can answer such a question, because vocabularies

are incommensurable with one another—or, as Donald Davidson puts it,

“there is no chance that someone can take up a vantage point for comparing

conceptual schemes by temporarily shedding his own.”

The best we can

do, according to Rorty, is to judge the various vocabularies from within our

own vocabulary, which is by “our lights.” Furthermore, he maintains that

our admitting that such judgments are limited by our conceptual schemes

involves no greater loss than our misplaced belief in the myth of neutral jus-

tification. Instead, what we should hope for epistemically is greater solidar-

ity—that is to say, the widening of our community to incorporate more and

more people into the justificatory conversation (Rorty sometimes refers to

this process as growth in inter-subjective agreement).

And yet, Rorty goes further still. He actively seeks to discourage us from

aiming for a final vocabulary which would hold a neutral justificatory

mechanism, taking it as expressive of the ambition to impose an unwar-

ranted limitation on human creativity. Moreover, he adds that “the very idea

of a ‘fact of the matter’ is one we would be better off without,”

because

he believes that talk of “facts of the matter” suggests that “there are proce-

dures of justification which are natural and not merely local.”

Speaking in

a way that suggests that standards of fact, objectivity, or rational justification

are somehow outside ourselves, somehow beyond the control of our given

community, suggests an implicit commitment to the correspondence theory

of truth and a kind of subservience to the world, which constrains human

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autonomy by threatening to entrench a contingently held vocabulary as the

“Truth” and thus closing down avenues for conversation and playful rede-

scription.

Unbridled conversation and playful redescription, Rorty contends,

are necessary if we are to fully embrace his liberal ideal.

Rortyan Ironism: Liberalism without Foundations

In “Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism,” Rorty asserts that his political

project consists of an “attempt to defend the institutions and practices of

the rich North American democracies without”

grounding such a defense

in a transcultural and ahistorical account of rationality, morality, or human

dignity. The term “bourgeois,” he explains, denotes the historically and geo-

graphically situated type of liberalism Rorty intends to defend. He therefore

rejects the need to ground his liberalism in what he calls “philosophical

liberalism” which he understands to be “a collection of Kantian principles

thought to justify us in” our commitment to North American liberal hopes.

Rorty goes on to explain that the term “postmodernist” denotes “[a] ‘distrust

of metanarratives,’ narratives which […] are stories which purport to justify

loyalty to, or breaks with, certain contemporary communities, but which are

neither historical narratives about what these or other communities have done

in the past nor scenarios about what they might do in the future.”

Rorty

thus rejects, for example, Kant’s noumenal self, Hegel’s Absolute Spirit, and

Marx’s Proletariat, considering these totalizing entities too divorced from

the lives and concerns of actual communities to be of any real use. He also

suspects that aspiration to “Truth,” in the sense of aiming to reach a more

than merely ethnocentric justification for one’s view, constitutes another such

metanarrative he thinks we would be better served by abandoning.

Instead, Rorty takes John Rawls’s attempt at justification in Political Lib-

eralism to be exemplary of another, altogether preferable, approach. Rather

than seeking to ground liberal principles and democratic institutions in a

philosophical account of human nature, ethics, truth, or the self, Rawls limits

himself to seeking a reflective equilibrium amongst free and equal citizens

who are already committed to living in a liberal order rooted in American

public political culture. According to Rorty,

[Rawls] disengages the question of whether we ought to

be tolerant and Socratic from the question of whether this

strategy will lead to truth. He is content that it should lead

to whatever intersubjective reflective equilibrium may be

obtainable, given the contingent make-up of the subjects in

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question. Truth, viewed in the Platonic way, as the grasp of

what Rawls calls “an order antecedent to and given to us,” is

simply not relevant to democratic politics.

Rorty admits that this position presupposes that the self is fundamentally

plastic and malleable, capable of being reshaped to suit “oneself, to [be]

tailored to one’s politics, one’s religion, or one’s private sense of the meaning

of one’s life. This, in turn, presupposes that there is no ‘objective truth’ about

what the human self is really like.”

Rather, he invites us to envision the self

as a “centerless web” involved in a rich process of self-creation. This sense

of radical contingency (of the self, of one’s vocabulary, of the justification of

one’s cherished beliefs) is what he calls “irony.” Rorty’s liberal ironists are

thus acutely aware of the contingency of their world view, but nevertheless

choose to be firmly committed to liberalism. The key liberal commitment, in

this view, is an unwavering attachment to the fundamental rule formulated by

Jean Bethke Elshtain: “Don’t be cruel.”

But that alone does not suffice. If all liberalism demands is to avoid actu-

ally being cruel, then liberals might be tempted to sit idly and silently on

the side, more or less blissfully unaware of the depths of suffering visited

upon those who are not at present members of their community. Thus, Rorty

supplements the goal of avoiding cruelty with that of expanding one’s sense

of community by expanding solidarity, since solidarity is the means by which

groups grow into one another, becoming larger, more inclusive, and kinder

communities. This is to be achieved by being invested in the project of

involving more people in conversation by developing new and varied vocab-

ularies. These new vocabularies would, by Rorty’s account, permit manifold

groups to come to know one another—this is the meaning of his social hope.

Crucially, however, for him, vocabularies among smaller communities often

require protection from more influential vocabularies. Or, at the very least,

they require protection from the dominant vocabulary of universal rational

justification, which threatens to stifle conceptual creativity and innovation

and thus shut down conversation. The liberal ironist is therefore engaged in

the process of developing the virtues of tolerance, open-mindedness, creativ-

ity, inclusivity, and empathy.

How does the liberal ironist square their commitment to liberalism with

their awareness of radical contingency? In short, they do so through parti-

tion. Their awareness of radical contingency is a private matter, while their

commitment to expanding liberal solidarity is a public matter. Yet, it is also

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the case that Rorty insists on the fact that the expansion of solidarity is less a

matter of epistemic competence and more a matter of emotional education:

In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact

to be recognized by clearing away “prejudice” or burrowing

down to previously hidden depths but, rather, as a goal to be

achieved. It is to be achieved not by inquiry but by imagina-

tion, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow

sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but cre-

ated. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the partic-

ular details of the pain and humiliation of other, unfamiliar

sorts of people. Such increased sensitivity makes it more

difficult to marginalize people different from ourselves by

thinking, “They do not feel it as we would,” or “There must

always be suffering, so why not let them suffer?”

Liberals can attempt to bring those who do not share their views about

the importance of sympathy and solidarity around to their point of view

through playful conversation (“joshing”

), but those who prove recalcitrant

to the charms of liberalism must eventually just be considered “mad,”

“brutes,”

or “fanatics.”

These illiberal types (Nazis and religious fun-

damentalists, for example), in this view, are people to whom there is no

need to justify one’s self. They are outside the moral community and no

exhortation to become more rational, to attend to “the facts of the matter,”

to human nature, or to the truth are liable to sway them. Our best hope, as

far as Rorty is concerned, is edification via exposure to detailed narratives

about other people or narratives that offer redescribed versions of our-

selves that encourage people to see others as “one of us” rather than “one

of them.”

He thus advocates a turn away from the search for theory, facts,

and criteria, and towards narrative learning for moral and political progress.

Our transitional goal, for him, is to avoid “conversation stoppers,”

such as

appealing to the authority of God, Truth, or History, to defend our currently

cherished beliefs. Instead, a thorough awareness of the contingency of our

own views serves as the means to ensure that the conversation remains

forever open. Thus, the ironists realize

that anything can be made to look good or bad by being

redescribed, and their renunciation of the attempt to formu-

late criteria of choice between final vocabularies, puts them

in a position which Sartre called “meta-stable”: never quite

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able to take themselves seriously because always aware that

the terms in which they describe themselves are subject to

change, always aware of the contingency and fragility of

their final vocabularies, and thus of their selves.

Since Rorty considers himself to be offering his own liberal ironist narra-

tive as a means to encourage broader and richer conversation,

we may thus

legitimately ask: How effective is Rorty’s own ironist narrative at further-

ing this goal? If nothing else, the advent of post-truth politics has brought a

renewed practical saliency to this question that I think is worth addressing.

As it stands, post-truth politics has not served the end of broadening the

liberal conversation, but of closing it down by bolstering a renascent nativ-

ism and growing mistrust between significant portions of the population in

the US and the UK. That is why I will now seek to ascertain how responsible

Rorty’s philosophical project can be legitimately considered to be for the rise

of post-truth politics.

III. Rorty’s Responsibility for Post-Truth Politics: Complicity, Causation, and

Complacency

Establishing Rorty’s intellectual responsibility for the advent of an empirical

phenomenon (i.e., post-truth politics) is, as I mentioned in the introduction,

inevitably a messy, human affair. Nevertheless, to bring as much light and

clarity to the topic at hand, it is necessary to introduce three different dimen-

sions of responsibility, namely: complicity, causation, and complacency.

will address these in turn.

Complicity

Complicity involves enabling (i.e., providing a necessary condition for) or

facilitating (i.e., making it more likely that another actor will perform) a

wrongdoing while not being the principal perpetrator of said wrongdoing.

According to Gregory Mellema, the paradigm case of moral complicity is

one where “the agent (or agents) is the principal actor by virtue of moral

wrongdoing and one or more agents contribute to the outcome in a manner

that makes them complicit to the wrongdoing of the principal agent(s).”

Crucially, the charge of complicity assumes that the accomplice intends to

aid a perpetrator in carrying out a certain course of action and plays a causal

role in enabling it.

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Now, to be clear, my concern is not that Rorty is somehow complicit with

all of the political agendas associated with politicians who make use of

post-truth rhetoric—his compassionate liberalism precludes him from

intending to bolster cruel, xenophobic, or authoritarian political agendas.

Rather, I am merely worried that Rorty might be complicit with a limited

part of these agendas—namely, the part that involves seeking to diminish the

significance of traditional epistemic standards in public discourse. We may

call this the “post-truth agenda.” I contend that the success of the post-truth

agenda constitutes a harm in its own right, because it aims to deny politically

salient information to citizens. In How Democracies Die, Steven Levitsky

and Daniel Ziblatt explain that “[c]itizens have a basic right to information in

a democracy. Without credible information about what elected leaders do, we

cannot effectively exercise our right to vote.”

In other words, denying citi-

zens credible information results in the diminishment of political autonomy

(i.e., citizens’ capacity to partake in meaningful democratic deliberation),

because it results in a widespread state of confusion in which objects of

public deliberation become less discernible and standards of public justifica-

tion become increasingly arbitrary. Furthermore, Rorty willfully facilitated

the occurrence of this particular harm by arguing for the adoption of the

post-truth agenda and popularizing certain aspects of post-truth rhetoric.

Returning to our previous definition of “post-truth” as “related to or denoting

circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping pub-

lic opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief,” it should be clear

that any contribution made by Rorty’s words to encourage others to forego

discussions of fact in favor of emotionally compelling narratives in public

discourse would make him complicit with other, more rhetorically powerful

actors who share this common goal.

But here one might resist the charge of complicity on the grounds that it

assumes an erroneous account of Rorty’s intentions. While the early Rorty

may have been overly romantic in his calls to give up talk of matters of fact

in the public domain, the mature Rorty recognized that this romanticism

should only apply in private: in our private activities (such as poetry and

philosophy), where aesthetic sensibility and emotional development take pri-

ority, freedom of self-creation reigns; in our public activities (such as science

and politics), communal norms of justification and liberal consensus-seeking

are to remain unchanged (i.e., pursing greater solidarity leads to contingent

justification among an ever-widening group while preserving how we ordi-

narily speak about justification and truth); or so the argument goes. Certainly,

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in some moods, the mature Rorty seems to want his readers to reject the

pursuit of certainty, objectivity, truth, or a final vocabulary in philosophy

and other private musings, but allow citizens to seek inter-subjective agree-

ment within their own terms (including local claims to truth and fact), as

well as permitting scientists and social scientists to function as they normally

would by seeking knowledge in a manner which they would recognize as

being objective (although still only in the sense of being the object of an

inter-subjective agreement).

Or as Richard Shusterman puts it:

[The public/private split] performs [Rorty’s] postmodern

remapping of modernity’s tripartite schema of science, art and

the ethico-political into a dualism of public discourse based

on normalcy and consensus versus a private discursive sphere

aimed at radical innovation and individual fulfilment.

However, even in his mature writings, Rorty is not always so discriminat-

ing.

For example, in Achieving Our Country (a part of his later works), he

begins with a discussion of the proper place of national pride in democratic

politics and rejects objectivity as a relevant goal in this matter. He thus

argues for selecting a narrative of national identity to cultivate an appropriate

amount of national pride to empower co-nationals to imagine how the nation

could be improved, without allowing such pride to escalate into unchecked

arrogance, bigotry, and imperialism. For Rorty, the selection of a narrative is

a matter of future-oriented choice, never a matter of objective knowledge of

one’s nation’s past. He writes:

[T]hough objectivity is a useful goal when one is trying to cal-

culate means to ends by predicting the consequences of action,

it is of little relevance when one is trying to decide what sort

of person or nation to be. Nobody knows what it would be like

to try to be objective when attempting to decide what one’s

country really is, what its history really means, any more than

when answering the question of who one really is oneself,

what one’s individual past really adds up to.

In his view, we only ask such questions because they allow us to try out var-

ious self-conceptions that permit the contemplation of various futures; facts

about our past do not matter in the slightest. To illustrate his point, Rorty

contrasts the attitudes taken by James Baldwin and Elijah Muhammad to the

enslavement of black people by white Americans. While Elijah Muhammad’s

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Nation of Islam holds “that white people started out as homunculi created

by a diabolical scientist,” James Baldwin maintained that “we, the black and

white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation—if we

are really, that is, to achieve our identity, our maturity, as men and women.”

For Rorty, the significant difference between these two visions is that the

former is wedded to a politics of spectatorship while the latter is wedded to

a politics of engagement, not that the former is false and that latter is at least

more likely to be true. While this focus on participation is laudable, Rorty

contends that there is no point in arguing about which view is more accurate,

because both “are intelligible. Either can be made plausible. But there are no

neutral, objective criteria which dictate one rather than the other.”

For him,

the same lack of grounds for epistemic adjudication holds between concep-

tions of America proposed by the political Left and those proposed by the

political Right.

This indicates that even the mature Rorty occasionally intends for his injunc-

tion to replace talk of objectivity or “facts of the matter” with talk of better

or worse narratives that can be made to look better or worse depending on

how we describe them to apply in the realm of politics.

Therefore, his intent

was (at least on some occasions) to convince others to dispense with strong

epistemic norms in the political arena.

However, intention alone is insufficient—the charge of complicity crucially

hinges on whether Rorty’s words actually played a role in causing or facili-

tating the rise of post-truth politics. That is why we must consider its causal

role more carefully.

Causation

Recently, Richard Evans, the historian and long-standing critic of postmod-

ernism, charged postmodernists with causal responsibility for the advent of

post-truth politics. Indeed, he wrote on Twitter:

Apostles of the “post-fact” era graduated from US universi-

ties in the era of postmodernism: Kellyanne Conway 1989,

Sean Spicer 1993 . . . If I am wrong, and postmodernist

disbelief in truth didn’t lead to our post-truth age, then how

do we explain the current disdain for facts?

In an interview with historian Deborah Lipstadt about the role he played

in the libel case opposing Holocaust denier David Irving (depicted in the

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film Denial), Evans further explained that he thinks that postmodernism’s

rejection of the importance and robustness of truth “affected a generation

of university graduates in the States.”

In other words, for him, the causal

responsibility of postmodernism for the post-truth age is a pedagogic fail-

ing caused by a discursive shift that led to an unhealthy suspicion of epis-

temic practices. The problem, however, with ascertaining causation is that it

invites the following question: Was the advent of postmodernism a necessary

condition for the rise of post-truth politics? The answer to that question is a

resounding “no.” More likely necessary conditions for the widespread ero-

sion of US and UK citizens’ concern for truth in politics include:

• The social and cultural fragmentation caused by rampant income

inequality;

• The normalization of what Wolfgang Streeck has called “the expert lie,”

which is the politically-motivated mobilization of expertise to assert

politically expedient falsehoods. According to Streeck, notable expert lies

include the Laffer Curve to justify reducing taxes on the very rich, the

European Commission’s “Cecchini Report” promising economic boons

in return for the “completion of the internal market,” and pre-2008 assur-

ances of US financial experts—including Ben Bernanke, Alan Greenspan

and Larry Summers—that “government agencies had no need to take

action to prevent the growth of bubbles” in financial markets;

• Public revelations of state mendacity (in addition to the instances Steve

Tesich noted in “Government of Lies,” Colin Powell’s infamous claims

about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq come to mind);

• The algorithms and norms that regulate our use and experience of social

media, which have given rise to ever-new ways of deceiving one another

(as captured by the idiom “catfishing”

100

);

• The rolling “crisis of traditional journalism” marked by audience frag-

mentation, commercial pressure (resulting in a loss of stable revenue for

print journalism), increased political polarization, and loss of trust in the

media’s general commitment to the public good;

101

• Systems of primary and secondary education designed to foster testing

results rather than student understanding and critical thinking;

102

and,

• A recalcitrant anti-intellectualism coupled with an ardent devotion to a

superficial, market-driven, all too often short-term, pseudo-practical mind-

set (or what Richard Hofstadter called “the mystique of practicality”

103

However, adopting a probabilistic account of causation invites considering an

alternative question: Did an event (i.e., the rise of postmodernism in certain

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academic fields) increase the antecedent likelihood of a particular phenome-

non (i.e., post-truth politics) coming to pass? More to the point, has Rorty’s

work increased the antecedent likelihood of the rise of post-truth politics to

prominence? If we take the successes of the Trump and Leave campaigns to

be the causes of current disregard for epistemic standards in public debate

in the US and UK, respectively, then Rorty likely played no significant role

in facilitating these events—as far as we know, key actors in the Trump and

Leave campaigns were not avid Rorty readers seeking to implement his phil-

osophical visions.

104

However, if we see the success of these campaigns as the

consequences of a wider sociological reality where epistemic norms play a

diminished role, then it is not unreasonable to think that Rorty may have con-

tributed (however marginally) to the likelihood that citizens would be more

open to dismissing the significance of public representatives brazenly failing

to adhere to traditional epistemic norms. And yet, he may well have caused

others still to defend their attachment to traditional epistemic norms yet more

firmly. Thus, ascribing more than an extremely limited role to Rorty in facili-

tating (i.e., making more likely) the rise of post-truth politics faces a difficult

climb. Therefore, in the absence of strong empirical evidence pointing to

such a causal link, prudence requires that we abstain from a hasty conclusion.

The causal charge must therefore be rejected at this stage and, along with it,

the charge of complicity. But what are we to make of complacency?

Complacency

Complacency is defined as “self-satisfaction especially when accompanied

with unawareness of actual dangers or deficiencies.”

105

According to Jason

Kawall, “[c]omplacency is a vice that does not cause evil or mediocrity; it is

a vice that allows these to exist.”

106

To be concerned about complacency is to

agree with John Kenneth Galbraith that “[i]n all life one should comfort the

afflicted, but verily, also, one should afflict the comfortable, and especially

when they are comfortably, contentedly, even happily wrong.”

107

In this con-

text, to charge Rorty’s philosophical project with complacency is to accuse

it of failing to demonstrate an awareness of, and thus of failing to effectively

challenge, important threats to the realization of its moral vision. As we have

seen, Rorty’s ethnocentric liberalism aims to liberate creative energies so as

to bring more and more people into a broader community of solidarity, united

by nothing more than a common conversation, endlessly renewed thanks to a

shared awareness of the contingency of any one final vocabulary.

At a theoretical level, Rorty’s hope that this free-floating conversation

would naturally bolster liberal values has been thoroughly challenged by

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many critics. For example, Norman Geras contends that Rorty’s ironism

is problematic for justice because “whatever the conception, to operate

principles of justice, you need to know what has happened or is the case,

under some passable interpretation of it within the multiplicity of these

that there must, of course, always be.”

108

Richard Bernstein points out that

even if we accept that our standards of justification are constrained by the

social practices of our existing communities, Rorty’s “obsession” with

endlessly underlining the contingency of our moral and epistemic commit-

ments gets in the way of taking part in the very practical task of arguing

with our peers about how “to discriminate the better from the worse”

109

within our current social practices.

110

Jeffrey Isaac criticizes Rorty’s liberal

ironism on the grounds that it is impractical to “allow ourselves to remain

captives of the current state of affairs” when such a state of affairs demands

thorough-going critique.

111

These criticisms point to the potential danger of irrationalism and quiescence

within Rorty’s work in the face of serious political challenge. When con-

fronting post-truth politics, this danger becomes actual. We must therefore

ask: Can Rorty’s liberal ironism provide any grounds to challenge post-truth

politics? Let us take a practical example. Consider the following claims made

by Trump in 2017 and their rebuttals by the New York Times (in parentheses

after each statement):

January 23: “Between 3 million and 5 million illegal votes caused me to

lose the popular vote.” (There’s no evidence of illegal voting.)

January 25: “Now, the audience was the biggest ever. But this crowd

was massive. Look how far back it goes. This crowd was massive.”

(Official aerial photos show Obama’s 2009 inauguration was much more

heavily attended.)

January 26: “We’ve taken in tens of thousands of people. We know

nothing about them. They can say they vet them. They didn’t vet them.

They have no papers. How can you vet somebody when you don’t know

anything about them and you have no papers? How do you vet them? You

can’t.” (Vetting lasts up to two years.)

February 7: “And yet the murder rate in our country is the highest it’s

been in 47 years, right? Did you know that? Forty-seven years.” (It was

higher in the 1980s and ’90s.)

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One may be tempted to dismiss Trump’s claims on the grounds that they

are purposefully mendacious.

112

But let us assume that they are expressed

in earnest. We must thus ask ourselves: Ought we to believe Trump’s

claims or the Times’ rebuttals? Again, one may be tempted to merely

dismiss Trump’s claims because there is no evidence that they are true.

Yet, many people do indeed choose to believe them. Still putting to one

side the charge of lying or deceit, I and many others want to say that

belief in these claims is misplaced as it is—at the very best—the product

of wishful-thinking, confusion, or mistake. But it is not clear that Rorty’s

philosophical commitments warrant such a conclusion. Why not? In short,

because those who believe Trump’s statements often claim to be doing

so because his claims match their sense of what is true, regardless of the

absence of traditional standards of evidence. Worse still, some claim that

traditional epistemic norms do not apply because these merely express the

interests of another community—the so-called “elite.”

113

On this account, we might conjecture that we are confronting two distinct

epistemic communities: E1, for whom there is a fact of the matter which

makes certain claims true or false and for whom presenting evidence, making

logical arguments, and drawing on expertise are legitimate means of seeking

to ascertain which is which; and E2, for whom there is either no fact of the

matter about a whole series of important claims and/or for whom evidence,

logics, and experts cannot be trusted to determine specific facts. We must

therefore ask ourselves: What are the legitimate grounds for adjudicating

between these communities? By what criteria can we establish that certain

claims are indeed true while others are false? Which group has the epistemic

authority to correct the other?

In response, Rorty’s work presents us with three potential answers:

A. Members of E1 and E2 are equally legitimate in their epistemic stances

(since there is no non-neutral way of adjudicating between vocabularies).

B. Members of E2 are more legitimate in their epistemic stance because they

are better ironists, in the sense that they are more acutely aware of the

contingency of claims to knowledge than E1—i.e., members of E2 believe

Trump but in a mode that makes no claim to “facts of the matter.”

C. The epistemic standards of E1 and E2 are not the relevant sources of

authority for determining which community is to be believed; rather, we

ought to accept the epistemic standards of the group that politically aims

to minimize suffering.

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Neither A nor B give us grounds to reject E2, but I suspect that a Rortyan

might opt for C because, while the liberal ironist may well have little to say

about the wrongs of post-truth politics simpliciter, they would vehemently

object to the political project of Trumpism which mobilizes post-truth pol-

itics in order to visit unnecessary suffering and humiliation on many disad-

vantaged groups (such as people of color, women, undocumented migrant

residents, etc.).

However, I contend that this argument only moves the problem further

down the field. Why? The political project associated with Trumpism

claims to be standing up for a community that it considers to be under-

served, suffering, and oppressed—namely, white communities, and espe-

cially white men. Speaking at Texas A&M University, Richard Spencer,

arguably the leading ideologue of Trump’s far-Right white supremacist sup-

port base, said that the Left had taken control of the culture and intended to

destroy “white racial identity” with “an undifferentiated global population,

[a] raceless, genderless, identity-less, meaningless population consuming

sugar, consuming drugs, while watching porn.”

114

While supporters of this

view often consider Islam to be the immediate enemy of white western

civilization, they claim the wider enemy, the main source of their purported

oppression, is “globalism.” According to Trump campaign press secretary,

Hope Hicks, globalism is:

An economic and political ideology which puts allegiance

to international institutions ahead of the nation-state; seeks

the unrestricted movement of goods, labor and people across

borders; and rejects the principle that the citizens of a coun-

try are entitled to preference for jobs and other economic

considerations as a virtue of their citizenship.

115

By the campaign’s account, globalism caused the Great Recession, the rise in

opioid addiction in white working-class communities, the closure of factories

in white post-industrial parts of the Rust Belt, and the general weakening

of the grip on power of white working men in America. More conspiratori-

ally, some Trump supporters insist that this process is consciously enacted

by powerful but shady interest groups including global banks, prominent

Jewish people (such as George Soros), as well as powerful figures (such as

Presidents Barack Obama and George W. Bush, and the United Nations).

116

According to Lauren Southern, a host on the Right-wing Canadian media site

Rebel Media:

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Globalists almost always sneer down their nose at tradition,

disdain national culture, laugh at religion and generally

despise the West while holding a creepy affection for the

third world […] They want open borders, cheap labor, and

antinationalism to benefit their business and political visions,

and are all too willing to shaft the little people to achieve it.

117

In other words, many members of E2 consider themselves to be the vic-

tims of cruelty visited upon them by “globalists.” Moreover, they mobilize

ungrounded and conspiratorial narratives to explain why they are experi-

encing various forms of disadvantage. This, in turn, motivates and justifies

their appetite for what they consider to be a kind of redress against minorities

(most notably Muslims, Native Americans, African Americans, Latinx peo-

ple, women, and members of the LGBTQ+ community).

The crux of the matter for Rorty’s liberal ironist, presumably, has to involve

determining which community stands to suffer most: white people under

the yoke of globalism or members of the minority groups and communities

whose lives, dignity, and livelihoods are at risk as a result of Trump’s polit-

ical agenda? And yet, the specter of incommensurability haunts the Rortyan

here, because it is not clear that they can ascertain which group stands to

suffer most. Since they resist establishing criteria, moral or epistemic, that

would permit us to establish which is greater than the other, we are left

merely with a cacophony of claims and no means to establish which are more

serious than the others. In other words, looking across various epistemic

communities, the liberal ironist cannot distinguish actual suffering from the

mere complaint of suffering. For them, each claim is as good as the next.

However, in response, I think the Rortyan might change tack and say that it

is not the reduction of suffering which would guide their rejection of E2’s

standards but their commitment to tolerance. In “Rationality and Cultural

Difference,” Rorty defines rationality in three ways: Rationality

consists

in instrumental rationality; Rationality

“establishes an evaluative hierarchy

rather than simply adjusting means to taken-for-granted ends”; Rationality

“is roughly synonymous with tolerance—with the ability not to be overly

disconcerted by differences from oneself, not to respond aggressively to such

differences. This ability goes along with a willingness to alter one’s own

habits—not only to get more of what one previously wanted but to reshape

oneself into a different sort of person, one who wants different things than

before.” Rorty explains that Rationality

“goes along with a reliance on

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persuasion rather than force, an inclination to talk things over rather than

to fight, burn, or banish.”

118

The liberal ironist will likely avoid criticizing

Trumpists for lacking in Rationality

(because they clearly do not) and

Rationality

(because the ironist does not believe that such hierarchies can

be established), but they can criticize the Trumpists for lacking in Rational-

ity

. In other words, Trumpism fails to be rational in the sense that it is more

willing to exclude and fight than to include and talk.

At first glance, this seems to go some way towards providing grounds to

criticize the most politically destructive aspects of the Trumpist political

project (for example, attempting to ban millions of Muslim people from

entering the US on the basis of a possible relationship to Syria, Libya, Iran,

Yemen, Chad, and Somalia;

119

threatening to deport “Dreamers” by ending the

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program;

120

demonstrating sympathy

towards white supremacist groups;

121

sanctioning violence against dissent-

ers;

122

and threatening the media

123

). However, Trump and many of his sup-

porters regularly present themselves as the defenders of peace and civility,

arguing that “the other side” is instigating violence or constraining their right

to free speech.

124

While I believe that such claims are entirely spurious (as

well as purposefully misleading and mobilized for highly strategic political

effect),

125

Rorty cannot establish the falsehood of such claims without first

determining which community’s epistemic standards to adopt in order to

evaluate them. Yet, since we need to know which claims are true and which

are false regarding each community’s commitment to tolerance, conversation,

and persuasion to establish which community best respects Rationality

the

mere invocation of tolerance, conversation, and peacefulness is insufficient

to effectively reject the claims of an epistemic community that believes itself

to be attached to them, but in fact, is not.

126

Rorty is therefore trapped in a

justificatory circle, once again left with conflicting claims made by different

epistemic communities and no stable ground from which to determine which

are more justified. This is practically problematic because it leaves the door

open to the practical possibility of wedding even the most thorough-going

ironism with authoritarian goals. Ultimately, it is this failure to seriously

consider (in the face of repeated warnings) the possibility that a community

committed to an illiberal and oppressive political agenda could draw on the

ironist’s skepticism to explain and defend itself that makes Rorty’s philo-

sophical project complacent about the dangers of post-truth politics.

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Conclusion

We have seen that Rorty’s romanticism led him to hope that widespread

ironism would generate a kinder, more compassionate liberal culture. I have

argued that our present moment of post-truth politics (in the US and in the

UK) has shown us that an overly-contingent epistemic stance (such as that of

the ironist) is compatible with illiberal political projects. Even though Rorty

wished for the advent of a public discussion where questions of fact, objec-

tivity, and truth, would be less significant, since his philosophical oeuvre is

not likely to have played a causal role in enabling or facilitating the advent of

post-truth politics, he is not complicit with the rise of post-truth politics. Ulti-

mately, however, it is Rorty’s failure to articulate criteria by which we can

determine which community’s epistemic standards are preferable to those of

other communities that demonstrates that his project was complacent towards

the dangers of post-truth politics.

In response, I suspect Rorty would have accused me of asking too much of

him. Indeed, he wrote:

It is unfortunate, I think, that many people hope for a tighter

link between philosophy and politics than there is or can be.

In particular, people on the left keep hoping for a philosoph-

ical view which cannot be used by the political right, one

which will lend itself only to good causes. But there never

will be such a view; any philosophical view is a tool which

can be used by many different hands.

127

Yet, it is precisely his failure to seriously attend to the possibility that a

part of his philosophical project (i.e., ironist ethnocentrism) could be mobi-

lized with great effect against another part of his philosophical project (i.e.,

liberalism), which constitutes Rorty’s pragmatic failing. Charles Sanders

Peirce’s formulation of the pragmatic maxim states: “Consider what effects,

which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of

our conception to have. Then, our conception of those effects is the whole of

our conception of the object.”

128

As a pragmatist, it behooved Rorty to con-

sider the ‘conceivable’ practical bearings of his philosophical project. Had

he attended more carefully to the possibility that asserting the contingency

of our epistemic standards could be used to denigrate and, at times, stop

conversation, perhaps Rorty would have worried about the rise of the kind of

post-truth politics we see today.

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Is the upshot of my argument that we have no other choice but to return to

an unreformed faith in naïve appeals to pure facts, perfect objectivity, and

ultimate truth? No, it is not. But my argument does suggest that critique of

traditional epistemic norms must be well-motivated, thorough in its consid-

eration of viable alternatives, and careful to bolster (not diminish) the signifi-

cance of democratic conversation.

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Notes

1. Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century

America (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1998), 89–90 (hereafter

cited as AOC).

2. Edward Helmore, “‘Something Will Crack’: The Supposed Prophecy of Donald

Trump Goes Viral,” Guardian, November 19, 2016, accessed October 28, 2017,

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/19/donald-trump-us-election

-prediction-richard-rorty; Jennifer Senior, “Richard Rorty’s 1998 Book Sug-

gested Election 2016 Was Coming,” New York Times, November 20, 2016,

accessed November 17, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/21/books

/richard-rortys-1998-book-suggested-election-2016-was-coming.html.

3. Some people refer to the political movement around Trump as “Bannonism”

rather than “Trumpism” to underscore the influence of Steve Bannon on

Trump’s political project (and, perhaps, for those who doubt Trump’s capacity

for actual decision-making, to cast doubt about his rational agency in shaping

this agenda). I prefer to call it “Trumpism” because core elements of the agenda

chronologically preceded Bannon’s involvement in the Trump campaign, but

also because Bannon agrees with this assessment—in a recent interview with

the New York Times Bannon said that Trump is “the leader of this movement

[…] because if you look back over the last 25 or 30 years, he has preached this

day in and day out. So he embodies it. He is also a charismatic leader. Some-

body who galvanizes people. […] I believe] he is a truly global revolutionary

figure.” From time mark 6:55 to 7:24 in the “Daily” podcast (November 10,

2017), accessed November 15, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/11/10/us

/politics/steve-bannon.html.

4. Frances Moore Lappé and Adam Eichen, Daring Democracy: Igniting Power,

Meaning and Connection for the America We Want (Boston: Beacon Press,

2017), 1–76.

5. Hillary Clinton, What Happened (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017), 8–9.

6. Megan Carpentier, “Why Do People Dislike Hillary Clinton? The Story

Goes Far Back,” Guardian, October 18, 2016, accessed November 14, 2017,

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/18/hillary-clinton-why-hate

-unlikeable-us-election.

7. National Intelligence Council (US), Assessing Russian Activities and Intentions

in Recent US Elections (Washington, DC, 2017), accessed November 15, 2017,

https://www.dni.gov/files/documents/ICA_2017_01.pdf; Donna Brazile, Hacks

(New York: Simon & Schuster, 2017).

8. Nate Silver, “The Comey Letter Probably Cost Clinton the Election: So Why

Won’t the Media Admit as Much?” FiveThirtyEight, May 3, 2017, accessed

November 15, 2017, https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/the-comey-letter

-probably-cost-clinton-the-election/.

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9. On the racial dimension, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, We Were Eight Years in Power

(New York: One World, 2017), and “Trump Is the First White President,”

Atlantic, October 2017, accessed November 15, 2017, https://www.theatlantic.

com/magazine/archive/2017/10/the-first-white-president-ta-nehisi-coates/537909.

On the sexist dimension, see Mel Robbins, “Hillary Clinton Lost Because of

Sexism,” CNN (opinion) (May 3, 2017), accessed November 15, 2017, http://

www.cnn.com/2017/05/03/opinions/hillary-clinton-interview-sexism-robbins/

index.html.

10. Richard Rorty, AOC, 77.

11. Richard Rorty, AOC, 105.

12. Richard Rorty, AOC, 8.

13. Richard Rorty, AOC, 82 and 104.

14. Richard Rorty, AOC, 99; also, see his “First Projects, Then Principles,” Nation,

December 22, 1997.

15. Conor Friedersdorf, “The Book That Predicted Trump’s Rise Offers the Left a

Roadmap to Defeating Him,” Atlantic, July 6, 2017, accessed November 17,

2017, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/07/advice-for-the-left

-on-achieving-a-more-perfect-union/531054.

16. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton (NJ): Princeton

University Press, 1979) (hereafter cited as PMN).

17. Richard Rorty, Objectivity, Relativism, and Truth: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 1

(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 197–202 (hereafter cited as

ORT).

18. See, for example, Paul Waldman, “How Donald Trump Is Turning the GOP into

a Postmodernist Party,” American Prospect, December 5, 2016, accessed

November 11, 2017, http://prospect.org/article/how-donald-trump-turning

-gop-postmodernist-party; Peter McKnight, “Trump as Postmodernist: Truth No

Longer Bound by Facts,” Globe and Mail, January 28, 2017, accessed March

19, 2018, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/trump-as-postmodernist

-truth-no-longer-bound-by-facts/article33796581; Michael Gerson, “Conserva-

tives Defend Our Post-Truth President,” Register-Guard, October 25, 2017,

accessed March 19, 2018, http://registerguard.com/rg/opinion/36084624-78/

conservatives-defend-our-post-truth-president.html.csp; Andrew Calcutt, “The

Truth about Post-Truth Politics,” Newsweek, November 21, 2016, accessed

November 1, 2017, http://www.newsweek.com/truth-post-truth-politics-donald

-trump-liberals-tony-blair-523198.

19. Carole Cadwalladr, “Daniel Dennett: ‘I Begrudge Every Hour I Have to Spend

Worrying about Politics,’” Observer, February 12, 2017, accessed November

7, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/science/2017/feb/12/daniel-dennett

-politics-bacteria-bach-back-dawkins-trump-interview.

20. Andrew Perrin, “Stop Blaming Postmodernism for Post-Truth Politics,”

Chronicle of Higher Education, August 4, 2017, accessed October 10, 2017,

https://www.chronicle.com/article/Stop-Blaming-Postmodernism-for/240845.

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21. The most significant contribution to date on this is Eduardo Mendietta’s

“Rorty and Post-Post-Truth” in the Los Angeles Review of Books, July 22,

2017, accessed November 17, 2017, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/rorty

-and-post-post-truth/. Here, Mendietta argues elegantly that Rorty holds two

conceptions of truth: one that is private and unimportant and one that is public

and of civic significance. To his credit, Mendietta points out that Rorty’s second

version of truth all too often remains inchoate. I discuss this issue in sections

II and III, but I should let it be clear here that I think Rorty’s insistence on dis-

missing epistemic standards (such as objectivity or truth) even when he writes

about politics renders this distinction ultimately unhelpful.

22. Michel Foucault, for one, doubted that it was, saying in an interview, “What are

we calling postmodernity? I’m not up to date . . . I do not understand what kind

of problem is common to the people we call postmodern or poststructuralist,” in

Lawrence D. Kritzman, ed., Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other

Writings, 1977–1984, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1988), 33–34.

23. Richard Rorty, Essays on Heidegger and Others: Philosophical Papers Volume

2 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 1 (hereafter cited as EHO).

24. Machiavelli, for one, suggested that lies and deception ought to play such

a significant role in politics: “A wise lord cannot, nor ought he to, keep his

promises when such observance would place him at a disadvantage, and when

the reasons for which he gave his word no longer exist.” In The Prince, trans.

Maurizio Viroli (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 60.

25. For an excellent discussion on the nature of this phenomenon, see Christopher

Robichaud, “Facts Aren’t Enough to Save Liberal Democracy,” Niskanen Cen-

ter (blog), January 17, 2017, accessed January 9, 2018, https://niskanencenter

.org/blog/facts-arent-enough-save-liberal-democracy/.

26. The website for Oxford Dictionaries, “Word of the Year 2016 Is…” page,

accessed November 8, 2017, https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the

-year/word-of-the-year-2016.

27. See, for example: Matthew D’Ancona, Post-Truth: The New War on Truth and

How to Fight Back (London: Ebury, 2017), e-book; Jonathan Rose, “Brexit,

Trump, and Post-Truth Politics,” Public Integrity, Vol. 19, No. 6, 555–558;

Michael Peters, “Education in a Post-Truth World,” Educational Philosophy

and Theory, Vol. 49, No. 6, 563–566.

28. Steve Tesich, “Government of Lies,” Nation, January 13, 1992.

29. Ibid., 13.

30. Ibid., 14. Moreover, Tesich cites President George H.W. Bush: “[The] moral

dimension of American policy requires us to […] chart a moral course through

a world of lesser evils. That’s the real world, not black and white. Very few

moral absolutes,” 13.

31. To be clear, this is a contingent, not a logical, claim. In this article, I am

not concerned with arguments pertaining to whether or not metaphysical

or metaethical anti-realism necessarily undermine the practical purchase of

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moral claims. Rather, my argument is contingent all the way down: given

the fact that the diminishment of widespread popular concern with epis-

temic norms and practices in politics happens to have gone together with

a diminishment of the ambition of politically live moral options in the UK

and the US, this poses a pragmatic challenge to Rorty’s romantic hope that

ironism might bolster a more thoroughly kind, liberal, and compassionate

political order.

32. By “traditional epistemic norms,” I mean little more than what Robert Talisse

calls “the norms of truth and responsiveness.” These consist of the following:

“being a believer commits one to aspiring to truth”; “aspiring to truth” demands

that we respond “appropriately to reasons.” “[Therefore] responsible believing

calls us to the social enterprise of examining, exchanging, testing, and challeng-

ing reasons.” “Saving Pragmatist Democratic Theory (from Itself),” Ethics &

Politics 12, No. 1 (2010), 20.

33. Ruud Koopmans and Paul Statham, “Ethnic and Civic Conceptions of Nation-

hood and the Differential Success of the Extreme Right in Germany and Italy,”

in How Social Movements Matter, ed. M. Giugni, D. McCadam, and C. Tilly

(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 228. Special thanks to

Markus Holdo for pointing me in the direction of this important concept.

34. Holly McCammon, Harmony Newman, Courtney Sanders Muse, and Teresa

Terrell, “Movement Framing and Discursive Opportunity Structures: The Polit-

ical Successes of the U.S. Women’s Jury Movements,” American Sociological

Review 72, No. 5 (2007), 731.

35. On framing more generally, see George Lakoff’s The All New Don’t Think of An

Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate (White River Junction, VT:

Chelsea Green Publishing, 2014).

36. Gove insists that he was in fact trying to be specific rather than general in his

objection. His statement reads: “I think that the people of this country have had

enough of experts with organisations from acronyms saying […] that they know

what is best and getting it consistently wrong, because these people […] are the

same ones who got it consistently wrong.” See Ian Katz, “Have We Fallen Out

of Love with Experts?” BBC News, February 27, 2017, accessed September 9,

2017, http://www.bbc.com/news/uk-39102840.

37. Gove did add, however, “I’m not asking the public to trust me. I’m asking

them to trust themselves.” This falls rather close to an outright rejection of

the value of expertise in democratic decision making. See Henry Mance,

“Britain Has Had Enough of Experts, says Gove,” Financial Times, June 3,

2016, accessed November 15, 2017, https://www.ft.com/content/3be49734

-29cb-11e6-83e4-abc22d5d108c.

38. Jennifer Rubin, “Interviewers Cannot Let Trump’s Lies Fly By,” Washington Post,

December 5, 2016, accessed September 8, 2017, https://www.washingtonpost

.com/blogs/right-turn/wp/2016/12/05/interviewers-cannot-let-the-lies-fly-by/.

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39. Ibid.

40. Alexandra Jaffe, “Kellyanne Conway: WH Spokesman Gave ‘Alternative Facts’

on Inauguration Crowd,” NBC News, January 22, 2017, accessed December

11, 2017, https://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/meet-the-press-70-years/wh

-spokesman-gave-alternative-facts-inauguration-crowd-n710466.

41. Christopher Rosen, “All the Times Donald Trump Has Called the Media ‘Fake

News’ on Twitter,” Entertainment Weekly, June 27, 2017, accessed November

10, 2017, http://ew.com/tv/2017/06/27/donald-trump-fake-news-twitter/.

42. Julia Hunt, “‘Fake News’ Named Collins Dictionary Word of the Year for

2017,” Independent, November 2, 2017, accessed November 15, 2017, http://

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/fake-news-word-of-the-year

-2017-collins-dictionary-donald-trump-kellyanne-conway-antifa-corbynmania

-a8032751.html.

43. Daniel Dale and Tanya Talaga, “Donald Trump: The Unauthorized Database

of False Things,” Toronto Star, November 4, 2016, accessed November 15,

2017, https://www.thestar.com/news/world/uselection/2016/11/04/donald-trump

-the-unauthorized-database-of-false-things.html.

44. Mattathias Schwartz, “‘Facts Are in the Eyes of the Beholder,’ Says Roger Stone,

Trump Confidant,” Intercept, March 6, 2017, accessed November 15, 2017,

https://theintercept.com/2017/03/06/facts-are-in-the-eye-of-the-beholder-says

-roger-stone-trump-confidante-in-exclusive-interview/.

45. Richard Rorty, PMN, 176.

46. Richard Rorty, ORT, 177.

47. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and Social Hope (London: Penguin Books, 1999),

xxiii (hereafter cited as PSH).

48. Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge Uni-

versity Press, 1989), 73 (hereafter cited as CIS).

49. Neil Gross recounts this slow but dramatic conversion in detail and underlines

the influence of Thomas Kuhn’s philosophy of science as well as the reality of

academic politics in Richard Rorty: The Making of an American Philosopher

(Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2008), 198–233.

50. Matthew Festenstein, “Richard Rorty: Pragmatism, Irony and Liberalism,” in

Richard Rorty: Critical Dialogues, ed. M. Festenstein and S. Thompson (Cam-

bridge: Polity, 2001), 1 (book hereafter cited as Critical Dialogues).

51. John Horton, “Richard Rorty: Pragmatism, Irony and Liberalism,” in Critical

Dialogues, 15.

52. Richard Rorty, EHO, 1.

53. Matthew Festenstein, in Critical Dialogues, 8. Moreover, Richard Shuster-

man explains that “since Habermas identifies the postmodern with Nietzsche,

Rorty’s terminological substitution does not affect the sense of their debate

[about the desirability of overcoming the Enlightenment’s pursuit of episte-

mological foundations],” “Reason and Aesthetics: Habermas and Rorty,” in

Critical Dialogues, 149.

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54. William James, Pragmatism and the Meaning of Truth (Cambridge, MA: Har-

vard University Press, 1975), 106.

55. Richard Rorty, Truth and Progress: Philosophical Papers, Vol. 3 (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1998), 2 (hereafter cited as TP).

56. Richard Rorty, TP, 21–22.

57. Richard Rorty, CIS, 6.

58. This claim arguably constitutes Rorty’s neo-pragmatism’s most substantial

point of departure from classical pragmatism. While Charles Sanders Peirce’s

idealized definition of truth as the belief that awaits us at the end of inquiry

(provided that we inquire long enough and well enough) stands in starkest

contrast to Rorty, neither James nor Dewey held that the justification or indeed

the truth of a proposition was entirely contingent on the existing epistemic stan-

dards of an actual community.

59. Richard Rorty, “Putnam and the Relativist Menace,” Journal of Philosophy 90,

No. 9 (1993), 448–449 (hereafter cited as PRM).

60. Ibid., 449.

61. Richard Rorty, CIS, 54–55.

62. Richard Rorty, PRM, 443.

63. Donald Davidson, Inquiries into Truth and Interpretation (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1984), 185, as cited by Rorty in ORT, 6.

64. Richard Rorty, ORT, 21–34.

65. Ibid., 193.

66. Ibid., 22.

67. Ibid., 193–194: “I should argue that in recent history of liberal societies, the

willingness to view matters aesthetically—to be content to indulge in what

Schiller called ‘play’ and to discard what Nietzsche called ‘the spirit of serious-

ness’—has been an important vehicle of moral progress.”

68. Ibid., 198.

69. Ibid., 199.

70. Richard Rorty, CIS, 40: “The final victory of poetry in its ancient quarrel with

philosophy—the final victory of metaphors of self-creation over metaphors of

discovery—would consist in our becoming reconciled to the thought that this

is the only sort of power over the world which we can hope to have. For that

would be the final abjuration of the notion that truth, and not just power and

pain, is to be found out there.”

71. Richard Rorty, ORT, 191–2.

72. Ibid., 192–193.

73. Jean Bethke Elshtain, “Don’t Be Cruel: Reflections on Rortyan Liberalism,” in

The Politics of Irony, eds. D.W. Conway and J.E. Seery (New York: St Martins,

1992), 199–217; Rorty approvingly quotes Judith Shklar’s claim that, for liber-

als, “cruelty is the worst thing,” in CIS, 74.

74. See Richard Rorty, PSH, 77–83, but especially 81: “From this point of view,

moral progress is not a matter of an increase of rationality—a gradual

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diminution of the influence of prejudice and superstition, permitting us to see

our moral duty more clearly. Nor is it what Dewey called an increase of

intelligence, that is, increasing one’s skill at inventing courses of action which

simultaneously satisfy many conflicting demands. People can be very intelli-

gent, in this sense, without having wide sympathies. It is neither irrational nor

unintelligent to draw the limits of one’s moral community at a national, or

racial, or gender border. But it is undesirable—morally undesirable. So it is best

to think of moral progress as a matter of increasing sensitivity increasing

responsiveness to the needs of a larger and larger variety of people and things.

Just as the pragmatists see scientific progress not as the gradual attenuation of a

veil of appearance which hides the intrinsic nature of reality from us, but as the

increasing ability to respond to the concerns of ever larger groups of people—in

particular, the people who carry out ever more acute observations and perform

ever more refined experiments—so they see moral progress as a matter of being

able to respond to the needs of ever more inclusive groups of people.”

75. Richard Rorty, CIS, xvi.

76. Richard Rorty, ORT, 193.

77. Ibid., 187.

78. Richard Rorty, TP, 205.

79. Richard Rorty, ORT, 193.

80. Ibid., 200–1.

81. Richard Rorty, PSH, 168–74.

82. Richard Rorty, CIS, 73–4.

83. See, for example, Matthew Festenstein, “Ethnocentrism and Irony,” in Richard

Rorty: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers, Vol. IV, ed. J. Tartaglia

(New York: Routledge, 2009), 100–6 (hereafter cited as Critical Assessments).

84. These were helpfully distinguished by Philip Conway, “Post-Truth, Complicity

and International Politics,” E-International Relations, March 29, 2017, accessed

November 15, 2017, http://www.e-ir.info/2017/03/29/post-truth-complicity-and

-international-politics/.

85. Ibid., 2.

86. Gregory Mellema, Complicity and Moral Accountability (Notre Dame: Univer-

sity of Notre Dame Press, 2016), 56.

87. Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt, How Democracies Die: What History

Reveals About Our Future (London: Viking, 2018), 199.

88. For more on “political autonomy,” see Joshua Cohen, “For a Democratic Soci-

ety,” in The Cambridge Companion to Rawls, ed. Samuel Freeman (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2003), 86–138.

89. For example, when asked point blank: “How would you define truth in terms

of its function in public life?” Rorty answers, “There are two questions here. I

think that what people really worry about is truthfulness. They think they are

being lied to all the time, and usually they are right. They are being lied to. And

they wish that people would tell them the truth. But what they mean here is not

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a question of the nature of truth. They just want people to say what they believe,

governments to say the same things to the public that they say to other govern-

ments, and so on. Truth as a philosophical problem is a question of whether true

statements are representations of reality, or whether the notion of representation

applies to statements, and so on. This is really technical.” In “There Is a Crisis

Coming—Interview with Zbigniew Stanczyk,” in Take Care of Freedom and

Truth Will Take Care of Itself, ed. E. Mendietta (Stanford: Stanford University

Press, 2006), 57.

90. Richard Shusterman, “Reason and Aesthetics between Modernity and Postmo-

dernity: Habermas and Rorty,” in Critical Dialogues, 146.

91. For an important discussion of the evolution in Rorty’s public/private romanti-

cism see Martin Mueller, “From Irony to Robust Serenity—Pragmatic Politics

of Religion and Rorty,” Contemporary Pragmatism 14, No. 3, 334–349.

92. Richard Rorty, AOC, 11.

93. Ibid., 13.

94. I strongly suspect that Baldwin would take issue with this, since, in some places,

he affirms—pace Rorty—that facing unpleasant truths is necessary if we are

to begin to tell a story of how we might change the realities expressed by such

truths. Consider, for example, “As Much Truth as One Can Bear,” New York

Times Book Review, 1962, reprinted in The Cross of Redemption: Uncollected

Writings, ed. and introduction by Randall Kenan (New York: Pantheon, 2010), 42:

“Not everything that is faced can be changed. But nothing can be changed until it

is faced. […] Most of us are about as eager to change as we were to be born, and

go through our changes in a similar state of shock.” Also see “If Black English

Isn’t a Language, Then Tell Me, What Is?” New York Times, July 29, 1979,

accessed November 1, 2017, http://www.nytimes.com/books/98/03/29/specials

/baldwin-english.html: “The brutal truth is that the bulk of white people in Amer-

ica never had any interest in educating black people, except as this could serve

white purposes. It is not the black child’s language that is in question, it is not his

language that is despised: It is his experience. A child cannot be taught by anyone

who despises him, and a child cannot afford to be fooled. A child cannot be taught

by anyone whose demand, essentially, is that the child repudiate his experience,

and all that gives him sustenance, and enter a limbo in which he will no longer be

black, and in which he knows that he can never become white. Black people have

lost too many black children that way.”

95. Remaining for a moment within the African-American intellectual legacy, one

notes that even the notion that truth-talk should be reserved to some impersonal

“public sphere” is seriously challenged by Lorraine Hansberry’s opening of

To Be Young, Gifted and Black (New York: Signet, 1969), 45: “For some time

now—I think since I was a child—I have been possessed of the desire to put

down the stuff of my life. That is a commonplace impulse, apparently, among

persons of massive self-interest; sooner or later we all do it. And, I am quite

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certain, there is only one internal quarrel: how much of the truth to tell? How

much, how much, how much!” Special thanks to Cornel West for introducing

me to some of Baldwin’s and Hansberry’s writings with so much sensitivity,

joy, and interpretive zest.

96. As cited by Philip Conway, op. cit. note 84.

97. Harriet Swain, “Richard Evans Interview: The Film Denial ‘Shows There Is

Such a Thing as Truth,’” Guardian, February 14, 2017, accessed November

17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/education/2017/feb/14/richard-evans

-interview-holocaust-denial-film.

98. See, for example: Danny Dorling, Inequality and the 1% (London: Verso,

2014); Joseph Stiglitz, The Great Divide: Unequal Societies and What We

Can Do About Them (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2016); Robert

B. Reich, Saving Capitalism: For the Many Not the Few (New York: Vintage,

2016); Thomas Piketty, The Economics of Inequality, trans. Arthur Goldham-

mer (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2015).

99. Wolfgang Streeck, “The Return of the Repressed,” in The Great Regression, ed.

Heinrich Geiselberger, (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2017), 159–60.

100. Thanks to my “Life Worth Living” students for introducing me to this term.

101. See, for example, Paolo Mancini, “Media Fragmentation, Party Systems and

Democracy,” International Journal of Press/Politics 18, No. 1 (2013), 43–60;

Markus Prior, Post-Broadcast Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University

Press, 2007); Paul Starr, “An Unexpected Crisis: The News Media in Postindus-

trial Democracies,” International Journal of Press/Politics 17, 234–242.

102. See Gert J. Biesta, Good Education in an Age of Measurement: Ethics, Politics,

Democracy (New York: Routledge, 2010); Gert Biesta, “Why ‘What Works’

Still Won’t Work: From Evidence-Based Education to Value-Based Education,”

Studies in Philosophy and Education 29, No. 5 (2010), 491–503; Michael Field-

ing, “The Human Cost and Intellectual Poverty of High Performance School-

ing: Radical Philosophy, John Macmurray and the Remaking of Person-Centred

Education,” Journal of Education Policy 22, No. 4 (2007), 383–409. Special

thanks to Tim Herrick for introducing me to this important literature.

103. Richard Hofstadter, Anti-Intellectualism in American Life (Toronto: Vintage,

1966). Many thanks to Carrie Roush for pointing me in the direction of this

important book.

104. However, a widespread misconception regarding Trump supporters is that they

are primarily working class and under-educated (and therefore unlikely to have

ever been introduced to postmodernist intellectual themes). According to Nich-

olas Carnes and Noam Lupu, Trump’s supporters in the Republican primary

were mostly affluent people with a similar rate of college degrees as registered

Republicans more generally (approximately 30 percent). Moreover, Carnes and

Lupu add that the American National Election Study “showed that in Novem-

ber 2016, the Trump coalition looked a lot like it did during the primaries.”

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See their “It’s Time to Bust the Myth: Most Trump Voters Were Not Working

Class,” Washington Post, June 5, 2017, accessed February 2, 2018, https://

www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/06/05/its-time-to-bust

-the-myth-most-trump-voters-were-not-working-class/.

105. Merriam-Webster, s.v. “Complacency (n.),” accessed September 19, 2017,

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/complacency.

106. Jason Kawall, “On Complacency,” American Philosophical Quarterly 43, No. 4

(2006), 343.

107. John Kenneth Galbraith, “In Pursuit of the Simple Truth,” Guardian, July 28,

1989, as cited in Jason Kawall, ibid.

108. Norman Geras, “Language, Truth and Justice,” in Critical Assessments, 346. To

explain further, holding that the “fact of the matter” is the description that helps

us cope best, or the one that our peers let us get away with asserting, or one that

is merely coherent with regard to the rules of a specific language game, simply

eludes what is at stake when a citizen claims to be the victim of a miscarriage

of justice or when unrecognized victims level allegations against purported per-

petrators who in turn assert their own side of the story. In those circumstances,

justice hinges on one claim being closer to the facts than the other. Thus, Geras

contends that Rorty either abandons any robust concern for justice or unduly

helps himself to an idea of getting the world right.

109. Richard J. Bernstein, “Philosophy in the Conversation of Mankind,” in Critical

Assessments, 50.

110. In “One Step Forward, Two Steps Backward: Richard Rorty on Liberal Democ-

racy and Philosophy,” Political Theory 15, No. 4 (1987), 560, Bernstein warns

that Rorty’s unease with talk of “standards” or “criteria” to evaluate political

projects endangers the very project of defending an inclusive, egalitarian

liberal democratic ideal: “It is time that Rorty himself should appropriate the

lesson of Peirce, ‘Do not block the road to inquiry,’ and realize that rarified

meta-philosophical or meta-theoretical discussion can never be a substitute

for struggling to articulate, defend, and justify one’s vision of a just and good

society. Rorty, who has eloquently called for open conversation, fails to realize

how his rhetorical strategies tend to close off serious/playful conversation about

liberalism and democracy […] The pragmatic legacy (which Rorty constantly

invokes) will only be recovered and revitalized when we try to do for our time

what Dewey did in his historical context—to articulate, texture, and justify

[Bernstein’s italics] a vision of a pragmatically viable ideal of communal

democracy.”

111. Jeffrey Isaac, “Is the Revival of Pragmatism Practical, or What are the Con-

sequences of Pragmatism?” in A Pragmatist’s Progress? Richard Rorty and

American Intellectual History, ed. John Pettegrew (New York: Rowman &

Littlefield, 2000), 167.

112. Although Rorty seems to think, at times, that we can dismiss those who lie,

this is problematic because accusing someone of lying typically requires

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establishing both that the claim is false and that the speaker has the intention to

mislead their addressee. Part of the challenge with Trump is that his intentions

are rather hard to ascertain in any given context [for one line of explanation,

see The Dangerous Case of Donald Trump: 27 Psychiatrists and Mental Health

Experts Assess a President, ed. Bandy Lee (New York: St Martin’s, 2017)].

Moreover, above establishing intention, what is at stake here is determining by

what criteria Trump’s statements can be said to be false.

113. At least, that is one way of understanding the claims of various Right-wing

commentators. See for example, Ann Coulter’s In Trump We Trust: E Pluribus

Awesome (New York: Penguin, 2016), especially 1–37; Milo Yiannopoulos,

Dangerous (Boca Raton: Dangerous Books, 2017); and Danuta Kean, “Milo

Yiannopoulos Labels Low Sales Figures of Dangerous Memoir ‘Fake News,’”

Guardian, July 13, 2017, accessed November 17, 2017, https://www.theguardian

.com/books/2017/jul/13/milo-yiannopoulos-labels-low-sales-figures-of-dangerous

-memoir-fake-news. In fairness, a more reasonable way of interpreting much of

this is that many on the Right are involved in propaganda themselves (see, for

example, Carole Cadwalladr, “Robert Mercer: The Big Data Millionaire Waging

War on Mainstream Media,” Guardian, February 26, 2017, accessed November

17, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/politics/2017/feb/26/robert-mercer

-breitbart-war-on-media-steve-bannon-donald-trump-nigel-farage. However, for

Rorty, the problem remains the following: How, on his view, are we to determine

who is telling the truth and who is propagandizing?

114. Michael Phillips, “The Elite Roots of Richard Spencer’s Racism,” Jacobin,

December 20, 2016, accessed November 17, 2017, https://www.jacobinmag

.com/2016/12/richard-spencer-alt-right-dallas-texas/.

115. Liam Stack, “Globalism: A Far-Right Conspiracy Theory Buoyed by Trump,”

New York Times, November 14, 2016, accessed November 17, 2017, https://

www.nytimes.com/2016/11/15/us/politics/globalism-right-trump.html.

116. Ibid.

117. Ibid.

118. Richard Rorty, “A Pragmatist View of Rationality and Cultural Difference,”

Philosophy East and West 42, No. 4, 581.

119. BBC News US/Canada, “Trump’s Executive Order: Who Does Travel Ban

Affect?” February 10, 2017, accessed November 17, 2017, http://www.bbc

.com/news/world-us-canada-38781302.

120. The outlook on this is not promising, but there is still some measure of hope

that a legislative solution might be found before Dreamers are threatened with

arrest and deportation. See Brian Bennett, “DACA Negotiations Slow as Trump

Demands More than Democrats Will Give,” Los Angeles Times, November 17,

2017, accessed November 17, 2017, http://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol

-trump-daca-20171117-story.html.

121. Michael Shear and Maggie Haberman, “Trump Defends Initial Remarks on

Charlottesville; Again Blames “Both Sides,’” New York Times, August 15,

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2017, accessed November 17, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15/us

/politics/trump-press-conference-charlottesville.html.

122. Kate Somers-Dawes, “All the Times Trump Has Called for Violence at His

Rallies,” March 12, 2016, accessed November 17, 2017, http://mashable.com

/2016/03/12/trump-rally-incite-violence/#1PoBEvGYIiqg.

123. Chris Cillizza, “Donald Trump just issued a direct threat to the free and inde-

pendent media,” CNN, October 12, 2017, accessed November 17, 2017, http://

www.cnn.com/2017/10/11/politics/donald-trump-media-tweet/index.html.

124. White supremacist activists (who often describe themselves as “alt-Right”) and

Right-wing Republicans (such as Ann Coulter) have been arguing that they are

the victims of censorship and that they are the true advocates of free and open

discussion. See, for example, Alheli Picazo, “How the Alt-Right Weaponized

Free Speech,” Macleans, May 1, 2017, accessed January 17, 2018, http://www

.macleans.ca/opinion/how-the-alt-right-weaponized-free-speech/. Moreover,

after a deadly vehicular attack on anti-racist protesters in Charlottesville, Vir-

ginia, on August 12, 2017, Trump maintained that the “alt-left” had been “very,

very violent” and that there was blame “on both sides.” See Shear and Haber-

man, 2017, accessed January 21, 2018, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/15

/us/politics/trump-press-conference-charlottesville.html.

125.

I agree with Jennifer Saul that Trump’s use of racial “figleaves” not only permit

him to appeal to racist voters, it also shifts the norms of public speech. See Jen-

nifer Saul, “Racial Figleaves, the Shifting Boundaries of the Permissible, and the

Rise of Donald Trump,” Philosophical Topics, Vol. 45, No. 2, 97–116 (2017).

126. While I suspect that few informed readers are likely to believe that Trump, his

political associates, and most of his supporters earnestly believe themselves

to be defenders of tolerance and civility, anecdotal evidence suggests that a

sizable number of Trump supporters do. See, for example: Tom McCarthy, “No

Regrets: One Year after They Voted for Trump,” Guardian, October 26, 2017,

accessed January 31, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017

/oct/26/no-regrets-one-year-after-they-voted-for-trump-has-he-delivered. In the

case of Brexit, many Leave voters were explicitly motivated by an attachment

to the parliamentarian value of sovereign self-determination, and others still

were motivated by a Left-wing analysis of the European Union’s attachment to

neoliberalism. In both groups, many citizens likely believed themselves to be—

rightly or wrongly—the defenders of civility, tolerance, and reasoned argument.

See, for example, Anonymous academic, “I Voted Brexit—Why Do Academic

Colleagues Treat Me Like a Pariah?” Guardian, September 15, 2017, accessed

January 2, 2018, https://www.theguardian.com/higher-education-network/2017

/sep/15/i-voted-for-brexit-why-do-academic-colleagues-treat-me-like-a-pariah.

127. Richard Rorty, PSH, 63.

128. Charles Sanders Peirce, The Essential Peirce (Bloomington, Indiana University

Press, 1992–99), 132.

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