@article {1273099, title = {Something Has Cracked: Post-Truth Politics and Richard Rorty{\textquoteright}s Postmodernist Bourgeois Liberalism}, year = {2018}, abstract = {

Joshua Forstenzer, July 2018\ 

Just days after the election of Donald Trump to the presidency of the United States, specific passages from American philosopher Richard Rorty{\textquoteright}s 1998 book\ Achieving Our Country\ were shared thousands of times on social media. Both\ The New YorkTimes\ and\ The Guardian\ wrote about Rorty{\textquoteright}s prophecy and its apparent realization, as within the haze that followed this unexpected victory, Rorty seemed to offer a presciently trenchant analysis of what led to the rise of {\textquotedblleft}strong man{\textquotedblright} Trump. However, in this paper, Forstenzer points to Rorty{\textquoteright}s own potential intellectual responsibility in the unfolding crisis of liberal democracy.

This paper seeks to elucidate the relationship between Rorty{\textquoteright}s liberal ironism and contemporary post-truth politics. While the paper ultimately concludes that Rorty is not causally responsible and thus not complicit with the rise of post-truth politics, it contends that Rorty{\textquoteright}s philosophical project bears some intellectual responsibility for the onset\ of post-truth politics insofar as it took a complacent attitude towards the dangers associated with over-affirming the contingency of our epistemic practices in public debate. In the last instance, this paper argues that Rorty{\textquoteright}s complacency is a pragmatic failure and thus cuts to the heart of his pragmatism.

}, url = {https://ash.harvard.edu/files/ash/files/post-truth-politics-rorty.pdf}, author = {Joshua Forstenzer} }