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Jonathan Storment

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Forgotten Country: The Other “Other”

Forgotten Country: The Other “Other”

Last updated on: January 24, 2017 at 5:01 am by Jonathan Storment

Forgotten Country: The Other “Other” 2017-01-23T14:51:16-05:00 Jonathan Storment

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Forgotten Country Other Maybe you saw last year, a few days after the results of the Presidential election shocked much of the nation, there were several paragraphs from a 1998 philosophy book that was starting to make the rounds.

The book “Achieving Our Country” was written by Richard Rorty at a time when the economy seemed to be doing quite well. President Clinton was creating better social infrastructures for the country. Diversity was becoming more and more popular in the media (Anybody else remember the rise of those stock photos on company and church websites?) and the country seemed to be progressing toward a more inclusive and equal union.

But Rorty didn’t see it that way.

What he saw was trouble coming.

Here’s the predictions he wrote back in 1998:

[M]embers 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 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.

I’ve read those paragraphs to dozens of people. People who voted for Trump and those, who like me, didn’t.

To be clear, Rorty wasn’t endorsing this future, he was just describing what he believed would be the natural outcome of where the breakdown he saw happening would lead.

And what was the breakdown specifically?

It wasn’t so much along the lines of race or gender or geography, it was education.

The Diploma Divide

Rorty’s theory was that it was an unfortunate coincidence that at the same time that racism was becoming less and less accepted in American society, the intellectual community was becoming less and less focused on what he saw as wholistic economic justice for the common good.

Jennifer Seniornov wrote a great review about Rorty’s predictions of Trump where she explained it like this:

The alliance between the unions and intellectuals, so vital to passing legislation in the Progressive Era, broke down. In universities, cultural and identity politics replaced the politics of change and economic justice….[When he wrote this material] few of his academic colleagues, he insisted, were talking about reducing poverty at all.”

I live in a small city with three Universities. Which means I am friends with, and know a lot of people in the Academy, and my best friends in this city happen to have PhD’s. So I know this kind of generalization isn’t always accurate, but I think this read is largely right.

The breakdown that seems the most acute to me in this election isn’t racial, it is educational.

It is badly educated Americans feeling resentment for having their manners dictated to them by college graduates.

I get the pushback here: if by manners you mean refusing to tolerate the “n word” or mocking people with disabilities, yeah, I’m going to try and dictate manners.

But it’s more than just helping challenge the bullies or change what people believe is socially acceptable.

There is, generally speaking, often a hubris that comes along with having an education. It was, after all, a lot of hard work to earn something that fundamentally changed the way you view the world, and so feeling proud of your achievement is only natural. I’m speaking here as someone who has a masters, and is proud of my education, and fully appreciates the value of the academy and what people who have dedicated their life to it do.

But the problem is that along with this can come another form of anti-intellectualism.

There is a kind of anti-intellectualism that can read a 800 page philosophy book or an essay on sociology, but finds it harder to learn from and appreciate the wisdom of a 65 year old janitor who didn’t make it past Jr. High.

Making Sense of Madness

This is why the narrative of racism being a primary motivator for Trump’s election rings false to me (despite the reality that some Trump voters are, and have no doubt been emboldened by his election). It just doesn’t seem to make sense of facts like the relatively high percentage of Latino voters (29%) or that so many of Trump voters had voted for Obama both times in previous elections.

The day after the election, Charles Camosy, a professor at Dartmouth University wrote an op-ed piece in the Washington Post where he pointed this out:

The most important divide in this election was not between whites and non-whites. It was between those who are often referred to as “educated” voters and those who are described as “working class” voters….College-educated people didn’t just fail to see this coming — they have struggled to display even a rudimentary understanding of the worldviews of those who voted for Trump. This is an indictment of the monolithic, insulated political culture in the vast majority our colleges and universities.

I count myself in that category.

This election has made me spend some time going back to my roots and talking to people who I thought I knew about what kind of hopes and dreams they have.

I’m still convinced that voting for Donald Trump was against my friends and families best interests, but I’m no longer convinced I still know what those interests are.

I still care about the things I cared about on November 7th. I want to be a good neighbor and advocate for my brother and sisters of color, I want to work for things like equal pay for women, and being hospitable to our Muslim friends.

But what this election has done, was make me reconsider how to use words like justice and inclusion in a broader sense.

In the words of Rorty back in 1998 “Nobody is setting up a program in unemployed studies, homeless studies, or trailer-park studies…because the unemployed, the homeless, and the residents of trailer parks are not ‘other’ in the relevant sense.”

So to all my friends and family, and the people I grew up with, to all my friends who went off to start a career while I had the privilege of going to college, I heard you.

I will work harder to listen to you in the future too.

You were the other, “other.”

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