Nearly 20-year-old prediction by an obscure left-wing philosopher, now widely shared after the election, foresaw the rise of a Trump-like ‘strongman’
Americans trying to unpick he phenomenon of Donald Trump have turned to an obscure academic, who predicted that old industrialized democracies were heading into a Weimar-like period in which populist movements could overturn constitutional governments.
In 1998, the late Stanford philosopher Richard Rorty published a small volume, Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America, that described a fracturing of the left wing coalition that rendered the movement dispirited and cynical that it invited its own collapse.
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