He saw it coming

Richard Rorty (1931-2007) is described by Wikipedia as an American philosopher, historian of ideas and a public intellectual. The last title probably wouldn’t go down very well in The White House (well none of the titles would). Such things are outwith the mental capacity of the self-declared Great Genius in the Oval Office.  But Rorty saw things coming (this is where philosophers triumph). Canada’s Globe and Mail ran a piece on Rorty’s prescient thoughts on the U.S. Here’s some of them:
 
“Members of labour unions and unorganized unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking and to prevent jobs from being exported,” the late Mr. Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country, a book based on lectures he’d given at Harvard in 1997. “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 non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for – someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”

Mr. Rorty imagined the gains made by Black and brown Americans would be wiped out. “Jocular contempt” for women would come back in fashion. “All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet. He [this strongman] will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there is so little resistance to his inevitable rise.”

Mr. Rorty argued that this phenomenon would be the fault of many on the Left, who would become increasingly less interested in the real-world concerns of the white middle class in favour of identity politics, diversity and inclusion and culture wars. “Outside the academy [leftist intellectuals],” Mr. Rorty wrote, “Americans still want to feel patriotic. They still want to feel part of a nation which can take control of its destiny and make itself a better place.”
 
I confess to not having read anything by Rorty, so I don’t know whether he also considered how techbro oligarchs would begin to replace elected government. It could be that he may have predicted how in a more fascistic state the oligarchs might find themselves thrown into prison or otherwise contained. Think Putin, or indeed Hitler, both of whom cowed big business into submission. Before then I imagine the public intellectuals will have had first dibs on the cells.