The American Left has always been weak and lackluster in terms of organization and party structure, yet in the realm of political philosophy it has consistently possessed remarkable richness and depth. A clear manifestation of this intellectual richness can be found in Richard Rorty’s masterpiece—known in Iran under the title Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America.
Rorty wrote and published this work in the late 1990s, but the book remained largely unnoticed for seventeen years until Donald Trump’s disastrous victory in the 2016 election jolted it back to life. Suddenly, a long-forgotten book turned into a publishing phenomenon, because America realized that Rorty had predicted, with astonishing accuracy, the rise of Trump many years before.
The explosive success of the book was due to one crucial paragraph and one pivotal question. Rorty asked what fate awaited society if labor unions and unskilled workers—those who do not live in affluent suburbs—came to the conclusion that no one in the U.S. government or among America’s elites cared about them or even tried to shield them from the economic and social consequences of modern industrial trends. Rorty wrote:
“At that point, something will crack in the social fabric. The non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone who will assure them that, once elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots.”
Rorty warned that once such a figure came to power, nothing would remain predictable. He accurately foresaw that the gains made by racial and sexual minorities over the preceding four decades would be wiped out, that the degradation of women would once again become normal—even fashionable—and that slurs such as “nigger” and “kike” would reappear in the workplace.
In Rorty’s view, all the sadism and cruelty that the academic Left had tried to purge from students’ minds would return to society’s surface. All the pent-up resentment of America’s less-educated classes—toward the educated elites who dictated how they should live—would eventually erupt.
Rorty’s main objective in Achieving Our Country was to revive the American Left, which he believed had taken a wrong turn and hit a dead end during the 1960s and 70s. He valued certain achievements of that era, such as identity politics and the culture of “political correctness,” particularly because university professors taught students to avoid personal cruelty.
Trump’s re-election did not simply reaffirm the uncanny accuracy of Rorty’s predictions; it fulfilled, word for word, his prophetic warnings. Rorty not only predicted the rise of a “strongman” like Trump, he also traced its roots to the rage of the working class and their alienation from the academic Left. Trump’s second victory showed that this anger had not subsided at all; it had become a durable political force—and Rorty was not merely a commentator but a prophet of the era we now inhabit.
The wealthy and powerful benefit from the fact that America’s working class and poor are less politically engaged and vote less frequently. The result is clear: politicians are deaf to the demands of ordinary people yet remarkably obedient and responsive to the interests of the rich.
Let us run a thought experiment on what genuine democracy in America might look like: how different would the country be if more members of the working and middle classes entered the halls of power? Imagine policymakers who have personally felt the pressure of rent payments, overdue bills, or a second job—would America look anything like it does today?
In October of last year, Zohran Mamdani entered New York City’s mayoral race as a newcomer—a fresh socialist and a virtually unknown figure. Yet he managed to win more than half the votes in an election with the highest turnout in half a century. This victory came despite billionaires pouring resources into the campaign of his main opponent, former New York governor Andrew Cuomo. With his triumph, Mamdani not only became the youngest mayor of America’s largest city in more than a hundred years, but also the city’s first Muslim mayor.
If Rorty’s prediction of a Trump-like “strongman” diagnosed America’s political illness, Mamdani’s victory represents the cure—a cure Rorty himself prescribed. Rorty argued that when the Left forgets how to speak the language of working people, a void appears that right-wing demagogues fill with resentment.
Mamdani was the antidote to that situation. He demonstrated that the working class is not inherently right-leaning; it simply seeks someone who understands its pain and offers real solutions. By defeating a candidate backed by billionaire donors, he proved that the message of social justice carries far more power than capital. His victory owed much to a Rorty-esque insight: that to defeat the far right, the Left must return to its true home—the people Mamdani thanked in his victory speech, “the working people of New York.”
Mamdani’s win shows that the Left can confront and overcome the destructive forces of Trumpism. And this is the central task of our time—provided that this new Left accomplishes what Rorty envisioned: it must absorb the positive elements of the “academic Left” of recent decades while discarding its “harmful and foolish” aspects. Most importantly, this renewed Left must rebuild its long-lost connection to the lived experience of the working class so that it can withstand the Trump-style demagoguery Rorty foresaw long before it arrived.