Reddit reviews Achieving Our Country : Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America

> M]embers of labor unions, and unorganized unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else.

>At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no longer be calling the shots. A scenario like that of Sinclair Lewis’ novel It Can’t Happen Here may then be played out. For once a strongman takes office, nobody can predict what will happen. In 1932, most of the predictions made about what would happen if Hindenburg named Hitler chancellor were wildly overoptimistic.

>One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. The words [slur for an African-American that begins with “n”] and [slur for a Jewish person that begins with “k”] will once again be heard in the workplace. All the sadism which the academic Left has tried to make unacceptable to its students will come flooding back. All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.

Credit to Richard Rorty, Achieving Our Country

excellent !

Se lie parfaitement avec ce livre un peu vieux mais n'a jamais été autant d'actualité.

I don't have the heart to go point by point. The reason I brought up John Dewey was because he is an example of someone who held postmodern like views, but was obviously not a "postmodernist" in the Peterson sense. Richard Rorty, one of the people you quoted as a postmodernist, holds almost the same views as John Dewey; he even wrote a whole book about wanting to go back to a Dewey like left wing party. Rorty even considers himself a Neo-pragmatist, not a postmodernist. I brought up other traditions having "postmodern" thoughts to show that there is nothing actually malicious inherently in postmodern thought.

>The chain of signifier -> signifier -> signifier -> ... doesn't end. We never reach the signified. We never reach meaning. Truth doesn't exist, or if it does, we are permanently cut off from it. Why would you try to be rigorous in finding out what's true, if there's no such truth to find? Why would you be rigorous with anything, when rigor is just a meaningless set of meaningless standards that don't go anywhere?

The critique doesn't stop there. The point of the critique is not to say "oh, I guess we can never get past words." It is to point out that there is a fundamental problem with the signified-signifier relationship. One solution of the postmodernists: Think of words as part of the fabric of reality itself; Derrida said, the grammatical is the ontological. The problem of reaching reality, after deconstruction, is a kind of false problem: saying, "I have pain" doesn't describe pain behavior, it replaces it, so there is no intractable signifier-signified problem.

>You can analyze one language from within another language. This 'ultimate context', outside of any language, either doesn't exist or is something people can't access. How is any of this a problem?

So, you agree with postmodernists. Postmodernists aren't epistemic nihilists. Everything you think is nihilism is typically a first step in a critique that leaves the world uncertain, but not unmeaningful.

>"It is meaningless to speak in the name of -- or against -- Reason, Truth, or Knowledge." -Michel Foucault

"Reason," "Truth," and "Knowledge" have special meanings in this instance. He is referring to the transcendental versions of these. It is pointless to affirm of deny these because they are eternally reaffirming. Ex: I can always say "Being is" and say something entirely true 100% of the time, no matter what is in front of me. Foucault probably followed this line by showing how what we mean by these transcendental terms is in fact contingent upon power structures, and useful to authorities in affirming the status quo, and that they often actually has nothing to do with rigorous thinking.

What boggles my mind is that Postmodernism, a tradition that critiques those that are blinded by Idealism, is so often portrayed as being anti-reason.

>Why would you be rigorous with anything, when rigor is just a meaningless set of meaningless standards that don't go anywhere?

Rorty, after his critique in Philosophy and The Mirror of Nature, was more concerned than anyone about our values, since he understood that there is nothing immutable in them, that they were ultimately contingent. Contingent does not equal meaningless. You are the one conflating meaningful and contingent, not Rorty, not the postmodernists.

I am going to finish with a Nietzsche quote because Nietzsche is surprisingly postmodern. This dialectical move is at the heart of a good deconstruction:
>6. The true world — we have abolished. What world has remained? The apparent one perhaps? But no! With the true world we have also abolished the apparent one.

By proving things like there is no "true world" postmodernists are not advocating that all things arbitrary. What they are saying is that we must reevaluate what we mean by "true world" since certain conceptions of the "true world" have intractable problems. They are trying to show how we actually use language, what we could possibly mean.