TRUMP AS PROPHECY FULFILLED: RICHARD RORTY & MARK DANNER

 In the midst of an excellent analysis of the success of Donald Trump in the current New York Review of Books, Mark Danner recalls something prophetic written twenty years ago by Richard Rorty, which is worth quoting in full here:

"Watching him blather and mug as he casually leaned over the podium in Boca Raton, seeing him cultivate the applause as if directing a symphony and then raise his two hands in thumbs-up gestures as he surfed the waves of applause and the deafening shouts of “USA! USA! USA!,” I recalled a remark that the philosopher Richard Rorty made back in 1997 about “the old industrialized democracies…heading into a Weimar-like period.” Citing evidence from “many writers on socioeconomic policy,” Rorty suggested that

members of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots….

One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion…. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

As Trump put it in Nevada, “I love the poorly educated!”

Rorty’s words prophesy not only the strongman’s rise but his blithe refusal to let “political correctness” prevent him making sexist and bigoted remarks, and his fans’ euphoric enjoyment of their hero’s reveling in the pleasures of free speech."

Read the whole article here: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2016/05/26/the-magic-of-donald-trump/

Rorty's essay appears in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (1998)

MEMORIES...IN THE CORNERS OF MASS. AVE.

I was reading the New York Review of Books, and was struck by the opening of an article by Jerome Groopman on memory. Describing his waking before dawn on a Sunday to start work on the piece, he makes his way to the kitchen.

"The dark-roast coffee was retrieved from its place in the pantry, four scoops then placed in a filter. While the coffee was brewing, I picked up the New York Times at the door...I prepared an egg-white omelettte and toasted two slices of multigrain bread. After a few sips of coffee, fragments of the night's dream came to mind..."

It's not how I would write it. Note the adjectival specificity. Not 'coffee', but dark-roast coffee. Not 'the paper' or indeed 'the Globe' since Prof. Groopman teaches at Harvard, but The New York Times (it is Sunday, in mitigation). Not 'eggs' but an 'egg-white omelette' and finally not 'toast' but toasted two slices of multigrain bread. It's not brand-name specific, like a Stephen King story, but it has the feel of one of the personal ads in the back of the NYRB, all professorial good taste and healthy options.

The article itself is an interesting review of a number of books about how memory works, and stops working. But Prof. Groopman's dietary preferences come back into focus near the end, as he discusses Alzheimer's disease.

"To be sure, there is merit in seeking environmental factors that affect risk for a disorder like Alzheimer's disease...But in this search we need to be alert to wishful thinking. Identifying something simple in the environment, like junk food, as having a major impact on developing dementia is wonderful to imagine. If true, we could markedly reduce our risk by committing to a lifestyle free of soda, pizza, and French fries."

Wishful thinking indeed! Soda, pizza and French fries sounds like the sort of stuff the creative writing professor discovers in the ice-box of the trailer-park waitress with whom he's having an affair in one of those 'dirty realism' novels from the Reaganite Eighties. But would losing them really be 'wonderful to imagine'? I now feel guilty in admitting that I followed my trip to the Yale Art Gallery last week by sharing a white clam pizza and a pitcher of birch beer with a professor friend at the Modern Apizza. Obviously we undid whatever positive effect walking through Yale had on my brain cells.

It occurs to me it might be even more wonderful were we to discover that Cambridge's dark-roast coffee, egg-white omelettes, and multigrain bread turned out to increase the risk-factor of Alzheimers. And isn't it even more likely that we someday discover the brains of readers of the New York Times have chosen to shut themselves down rather than remember being subjected to the likes of Tom Friedman or David Brooks?

RONALD DWORKIN: THE LOST INDEPENDENT OBITUARY

NOTE: Due to circumstances beyond my control, the Independent double-booked the assignment to write the obit of Ronald Dworkin, the legal philosopher and one of my favourite writers in the New York Review of Books. Mine was the later assigned, and filed, so though I rushed to complete about 1,000 words in a couple of hours while watching two kids on half-term break, it went unused. I offer it here, as written and not edited by the paper. The one the paper used is good, and explains more fully than I try to the nature of Dworkin's philosphy, and the ones it argues against. It wasn't for me to insert myself into the obit, but it is my feeling that the legal profession in general prefers the HLA Hart approach to the law, as a sort of chess game taking place divorced from the 'real' world, and within the cheesboard of the courtroom. It avoids having to question one's own actions, and fall back on the zero-sum game theory of the adversarial approach, where winning is the goal, not justice. I can also recommend Godfrey Hodgson's excellent obit in the Guardian, a more personal reminiscence--and certainly the Gatsby-esque photo on the beach goes along with the best three-house arrangement I could think of.

RONALD DWORKIN: LEGAL MORALIST

Ronald Dworkin, who has died aged 81, was one of the world's foremost legal philosophers, and a forceful advocate for using morality to interpret issues of constitutional law. He was a leading scholar of constitutional law as a professor in both Britain and the United States, but he exerted equal influence in the wider world with his commentary on political issues and philosophy, most notably in the pages of the New York Review of Books, where his essays flowed like lectures, taking his audience along for an illuminating ride.

His legal philosophy was challenged most heavily from the political right, and he became a particular target when he opposed President Ronald Reagan's appointment to the Supreme Court of his former Yale colleague Robert Bork, with whom he had taught jointly a course in constitutional law. He based his opposition on Bork's strict constructionist approach, which he called a refusal to 'test interpretation of the Constitiution against the principles latent in (the Supreme Court)'s own past decisions.' Believing the framers of the Constitution had imbued it with room for moral interpretation, Dworkin often found such strict interpretations hypocritical, or in the case of the Supreme Court's 2000 decision to 'acclaim' George W Bush president, an exercise in 'professional self interest'. He wrote 'the fiat of the five conservative justices...stopped the deomocratic process in its tracks.'

Dworkin's work for the New York Review stretched from a trenchant analysis of affirmative action through the 2000 election and to the current Roberts court, which he described as a 'right-wing phalanx...guided by no judicial or political principle at all, but only by partisan, cultural, or perhaps religious allegiance'. In the New York Review he published a memorable destruction of the 2010 Citizens United decision, which applied the concept of freedom of speech to allow corporations unlimited spending on political campaign advertising, and a convincing argument in favour of 'Obamacare' and its requirement that people have health insurance. He was attacked, often derided, from the right. Bork called him a 'liberal moral relativist', and the New York Review would often run long criticisms of his articles by Harvard professor Gerald Fried, which Dworkin would then dissect in rebuttal. But Dworkin's principled stances earned the respect, if not agreement, of many on the right. Walter Olson, of the Cato Institute, wrote 'over decades of intra-left legal debate, he took the better side—arguing for the importance of individual rights, free speech, and the integrity of law as a discipline in itself'.

Ronald Myles Dworkin was born in Providence, Rhode Island 11 December 1931. His parents divorced when he was a baby, and his mother raised three children by teaching piano. He won a scholarship to Harvard, and after graduating went to Magdalen College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. His final examination paper was largely critical of the theory of legal positivism, as propagated by H.L.A. Hart, Oxford's Chair of Jurisprudence. Hart saw justice embodied in adherence to the law's system of rules, not requiring the perspective of morality. As it happened, Hart was called in to be one of the reader's of Dworkin's exam, which he passed with highest marks. In 1969, when Hart retired, he nominated Dworkin as his successor to the Chair, and cited passages from that exam in his welcoming speech. They also provided the basis of his collection, Taking Rights Seriously (1977), in which he took apart not only Hart's Concepts Of Law but John Rawls' A Theory Of Justice. Dworkin argued that the law needed to be interpreted to provide justice, rather than relying on a black and white answer, because, strictly speaking, both parties in a dispute might well be 'right' to a greater or lesser degree.

After taking his Oxford exams, Dworkin returned to Harvard to complete another law degree, and then clerked for Judge Learned Hand, of the US Court of Appeals, one of America's greatest jurists. In a move he came to regret, he then turned down an offer to clerk for the Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, instead joining the prestigious New York firm of Sulolivan and Cromwell. He had married Betsy Ross, whom he met while clerking for Hand, with whom they spent one of their first dates, and with the arrival of twins he found the travel demands of the job too pressing, and in 1962 took a professorship at Yale. He added the Oxford post, but in 1975 turned down Harvard and joined the faculty at New York University, helping to build its law school into one of the nation's best. Eventually, he moved to University College, London, and split time between London, where he kept a flat in Belgravia, and New York, with a colonial news house just off Washington Square. His summers were spent on Martha's Vineyard.

Dworkin's most influential book was Law's Empire (1986), which expounded his own theory of law, while in Sovereign Virture he offered a notion of society's parallel needs to allow people freedom to succeed while cushioning them against failure; that although all people were equal under the law, the law needed to realise that all people were not equal (2000). His books, like his essays, moved between the abstract principles of law, and analyses of contemporary legal issues. In Life's Dominion (1993) he examined legal arguments about both abortion and euthanasia, and A Badly Flawed Election (2002) took apart the Supreme Court's Bush v Gore decision. Justice For Hedgehogs (2011), with its title recalling Isiah Berlin, was his attempt to mix all his philosophy into one field theory, and a 16^th book, Religion Without God is forthcoming.

Betsy died in 2000, and Dworkin married Irene Brendel, the ex-wife of his friend, the pianist Alfred. He died of cancer, and is survived by his second wife, and his son and daughter from his first marriage.