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9974776
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members of labor unions, and un-organized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers - themselves desparately afraid of being downsized - are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.
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politics
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Richard M. Rorty |
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283c069
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This cultural Left thinks more about stigma than about money, more about deep and hidden psychosexual motivations than about shallow and evident greed.
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Richard M. Rorty |
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f5b7a88
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The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting "power" as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized. Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed only when decisions are made by all those who may..
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Richard M. Rorty |
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279a1e0
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In my utopia, human solidarity would be seen not as a fact to be recognised 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 imagination, the imaginative ability to see strange people as fellow sufferers. Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created. It is created by increasing our sensitivity to the particular details of th..
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Richard M. Rorty |
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29666d4
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If we look to people who make no mistakes, who were always on the right side, who never apologized for tyrants or unjust wars, we shall have few heroes and heroines
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the-left
purity
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Richard M. Rorty |
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5af9bf6
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The sectarian divisions which plagued Marxism are manifestations of an urge for purity which the Left would be better off without.
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unity
sectarianism
marxism
purity
puritanism
patriotism
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Richard M. Rorty |
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162b674
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The pre-Sixties reformist Left, insofar as it concerned itself with oppressed minorities, did so by proclaiming that all of us -- black, white, and brown -- are Americans, and that we should respect one another as such.
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Richard M. Rorty |
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d2cb4b0
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Solidarity is not discovered by reflection but created.
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Richard M. Rorty |
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e78dbdd
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When the Right proclaims that socialism has failed, and that capitalism is the only alternative, the cultural Left has little to say in reply. For it prefers not to talk about money. Its principal enemy is a mind-set rather than a set of economic arrangements -- a way of thinking which is, supposedly, at the root of both selfishness and sadism.
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Richard M. Rorty |
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bdb27d8
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One reason the cultural Left will have a hard time transforming itself into a political Left is that, like the Sixties Left, it still dreams of being rescued by an angelic power called "the people". In this sense, "the people" is the name of a redemptive preternatural force, a force whose demonic counterpart is named "power" or "the system". The cultural Left inherited the slogan "Power to the people" from the Sixties Left, whose members ra..
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Richard M. Rorty |
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f7c6cec
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Vladimir Nabokov and George Orwell had quite different gifts, and their self-images were quite different. But, I shall argue, their accomplishment was pretty much the same. Both of them warn the liberal ironist intellectual against temptations to be cruel. Both of them dramatise the tension between private irony and liberal hope. In the following passage, Nabokov helped blur the distinctions which I want to draw: ...'Lolita' has no moral in..
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orwell
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Richard M. Rorty |
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651a8e5
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For James, disgust with American hypocrisy and self-deception was pointless unless accompanied by an effort to give America reason to be proud of itself in the future. The kind of proto-Heideggerian cultural pessimism which Adams cultivated seemed, to James, decadent and cowardly.
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proud
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Richard M. Rorty |