by Richard Rorty

About the author: Richard Rorty is a professor of humanities at the University of Virginia. This viewpoint is from a speech Rorty delivered at Pomona College in Pomona, California, in February 1996.

If one accepts the premise that the basic responsibility of the American left is to protect the poor against the rapacity of the rich, it’s difficult to argue that the postwar years have been particularly successful ones. As Karl Marx pointed out, the history of the modern age is the history of class warfare, and in America today, it is a war in which the rich are winning, the poor are losing, and the left, for the most part, is standing by.

“Rights” Rhetoric

Early American leftists, from William James to Walt Whitman to Eleanor Roosevelt...