Nearly 30 years ago, in writings published in 1997 and 1998, the philosopher Richard Rorty offered some spookily prescient speculations on the future of the United States. Looking at the widening gap between rich and poor, and Americans’ increasing pessimism that their children would have better lives than them, Rorty warned we were headed for a society “divided by class differences of a sort which would have been utterly inconceivable to Jefferson, or to Lincoln, or to Walt Whitman.” The Clinton-era Democratic Party had been “distancing itself from the unions and from any mention of redistribution, and moving into a sterile vacuum called ‘the center,’” meaning the party that should have been talking about inequality was silent as it continued to worsen. Rorty pointed out that only “scurrilous fascists like Pat Buchanan and, in France, Jean-Marie Le Pen, seem willing to talk about” economic insecurity.

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