Affluence and Activism

I’ve been reading a bunch of reviews, interviews, and other secondary materials about Richard Rorty in preparation for next week’s event at UC Irvine. Among the works that will get mention in my talk is the 1998 book Achieving Our Country. I thought I’d share a snippet from a Rorty interview in The Atlantic about the book:

How do you think today’s kids compare with earlier cohorts? I would guess, based on your book, that you think that today’s students are less politically engaged than they were in the sixties.

Yeah, but in the sixties the kids I taught never dreamed they could possibly fall out of the middle class. And these kids think they could do it very easily. So they’re just much more insecure.

And this makes them more politically engaged, or less?

I think it makes them less. It’s as if they don’t have time to think about politics. They’ve got to think about their careers.

So, was the activism of the sixties simply a matter of students having more time then?

I think it helped a lot. I think that the affluence of the country in the fifties and sixties made the civil-rights and antiwar movements possible.

That was twelve years ago. Certainly young people today feel even more likely to fall out of the middle class, and for good reason. It seems likely that the situation Rorty describes is thus even more acute now.

It’s likewise worth noting that Rorty was using the word “hope” to describe the American Left when Barack Obama was but a freshman Illinois state senator—”the party of hope” was his exact term. I wonder, though, if the idea of “hope” in politics has replaced any sort of action or outcome. I suspect that after two terms of George W. Bush, American progressives figured that the hope itself would be enough. After all, they now have mortgage foreclosures to worry about.