【美国哲学家、芝加哥大学和耶鲁大学毕业生理查德·罗蒂（Richard Rorty）早在20多年前，已经对2016年的美国总统大选有先见之明。以下来自他于1998年撰写的《成就我们的国家》(Achieving Our Country )一书。根据这位普林斯顿教授的预测，危机发生时间将从2014年开始，这个与2016年仅仅只有2年的误差......】
Richard Rorty
成就我们的国家，1998, pp. 87-91（英文原文见文章后部分）
为了让“无产者”们保持安静，超级富人们必须刻意维护一种假象：政治在某个时刻会（对他们的生活）发生影响。因为经济议题的决定权在富人手里，他们会鼓励左派和右派的政客，去专注于文化（和“价值观”）的议题。
他们的目的，是针对美国底层75%的穷人，以及世界底层95%的穷人，让这些人的思维都忙碌于诸如种族和宗教的互相敌意，或去争论性行为的道德观。如果媒体刻意制造的伪事件（甚至包括短暂而血腥的战争），所能够让穷人（或者无产者）无暇他顾，那么超富阶层就没有什么可以担心害怕的了。
对我们这个世界的思忖，会引发来自左派阵营的两个回应。第一个是，他们会坚称国家之间的不平等应该得到解决，特别是北半球（发达国家）应该和南半球的不发达国家分享财富。第二个是，每个民主国家政府的主要责任，是帮助自己国家的那些生活得最不如意的公民。
这是自相矛盾的。特别是，第一个观点变成老牌民主国家应该开放边境，而第二个观点是他们应该关闭。
第一个观点，对生活在象牙塔，拥有国际观的左翼人士来说，是自然而然的。而工会的人士则喜欢第二种观点，特别是那些很难找到工作的人，而这些人恰恰最容易被右翼民粹组织运动所接纳。美国的工会人士，目睹了本国的工厂一个接一个关门，然后在斯洛文尼亚、泰国，或墨西哥重新开张（编者按：居然没提中国？）。
毫不奇怪，国际自由贸易对这些人来说，不单单意味着公司高管和持股人的发财，不发达国家工人生活指数的提高，更带来了美国工人生活水平的恶化；毫不奇怪，他们认为美国的左派知识分子，是站在公司高管和持股人一边的，他们享有共同的阶级利益。
我们知识分子，大部分是来自学术界，和普罗大众是相当隔绝的，至少在短期内不受全球化的影响。更严重的是，我们好像更关注发展中国家的人民，而不是我们自己公民的命运。
很多社会经济政策方面的评论家已经在警告，我们这个老牌的工业民主国家，正在走向魏玛共和国时期，这是（希特勒上台前的德国民主政体），正是在这个时期民粹主义运动推翻了宪政体制的政府。
比如，爱德华·鲁特维格曾指出，法西斯主义可能就是美国的未来。在他的著作《受到威胁的美国梦》中，他指出，工会组织，和无组织无技能的工人阶级，迟早会意识到他们自己的政府根本就不想去防止他们的薪水触底，不想去阻止工作外流。同时，他们会意识到，生活在城郊富人区的白领阶层，其实也害怕丢工作，所以他们根本就不愿意多交税来给其他人提供低保福利。
在那个时刻，崩裂就要发生。那些在城郊富人区以外的选民们，将断定这个体系已经垮了，他们开始寻找一个强人，把票投给他。这个人会向他们打保票，一旦当选，这些腐败的官僚，狡诈的律师，挣大钱的卖证券者，和后现代主义的教授们，就不能再发号施令了，正如辛克莱尔的小说《在这里，这是不会发生的！》所描绘的那样。而一旦这个强人掌握了政权，谁又能预测以后会怎样？反正在1932年，很多人预测“如果兴登堡提名希特勒为首相”会如何。历史告诉我们，这些预测都太乐观了。
一个很大的可能，过去40年来，黑人，黄人（西裔，亚裔），同性恋者们取得的进步，将被夺走而荡然无存；对女性的轻视调笑，会再度风行。侮辱性的词汇，如“黑鬼”，侮辱犹太人的“KIKE”，将再度回响于职场。所有那些侮辱性的，教授们尽一切努力教育学生不能接受的词语用法，将如洪水般倒灌回流。缺乏教育的人民对受过高等教育的人的憎恨，将很容易找到发泄。
不过，这些对“政治正确”的绝地大反击，却无法改变自私的本性。比如，笔者所想象的这个强人一旦掌了权，他会迅速和国际超富阶层达成妥协，比如希特勒和当年的德国工业家们之间的苟且。他将激发人民对诸如海湾战争之类胜利的光荣回忆，甚至用军事冒险来产生短期繁荣。这个人对美国和世界来说，都会是一个灾难。
人民会疑惑，这个人在美国并非不可避免的崛起，怎会遇到如此之少的抵御？人们会问，左派都跑到哪里去了？为什么是右派的布坎南在向工人解说全球化的后果？为什么左派不能成为新近破产工人山呼海啸般怒火的出口？
注：理查德·罗蒂也在他的文章《从2096年向后看》(Looking Backwards From the Year 2096)中预言，经历2014年至2044年的黑暗时代之后，他（在1998年）虚构的这些美国危机，将摆脱权利的纠葛，从兄弟会一般的关爱和无私中，恢复过来。
英文原文
【For the sake of keeping the proles quiet, the super-rich will have to keep up the pretense that national politics might someday make a difference. Since economic decisions are their prerogative, they will encourage politicians, of both the Left and the Right, to specialize in cultural issues. The aim will be to keep the minds of the proles elsewhere-to keep the bottom 75 percent of Americans and the bottom 95 percent of the world’s population busy with ethnic and religious hostilities, and with debates about sexual mores. If the proles can be distracted from their own despair by media-created pseudo-events, including the occasional brief and bloody war, the super-rich will have little to fear.
Contemplation of this possible world invites two responses from the Left. The first is to insist that the inequalities between nations need to be mitigated-and, in particular, that the Northern Hemisphere must share its wealth with the Southern. The second is to insist that the primary responsibility of each democratic nation-state is to its own least advantaged citizens. These two responses obviously conflict with each other. In particular, the first response suggests that the old democracies should open their borders, whereas the second suggests that they should close them.
The first response comes naturally to academic leftists, who have always been internationally minded. The second response comes naturally to members of trade unions, and to the marginally employed people who can most easily be recruited into right-wing populist movements. Union members in the United States have watched factory after factory close, only to reopen in Slovenia, Thailand, or Mexico. It is no wonder that they see the result of international free trade as prosperity for managers and stockholders, a better standard of living for workers in developing countries, and a very much worse standard of living for American workers. It would be no wonder if they saw the American leftist intelligentsia as on the side of the managers and stockholders-as sharing the same class interests. For we intellectuals, who are mostly academics, are ourselves quite well insulated, at least in the short run, from the effects of globalization. To make things worse, we often seem more interested in the workers of the developing world than in the fate of our fellow citizens.
Many writers on socioeconomic policy have warned that the old industrialized democracies are heading into a Weimar-like period, one in which populist movements are likely to overturn constitutional governments. Edward Luttwak, for example, has suggested that fascism may be the American future. The point of his book The Endangered American Dream is that members 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 non-suburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for-someone wiling 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 such 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 “nigger’ and “kike” 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.
But such a renewal of sadism will not alter the effects of selfishness. For after my imagined strongman takes charge, he will quickly make his peace with the international super-rich, just as Hitler made his with the German industrialists. He will invoke the glorious memory of the Gulf War to provoke military adventures which will generate short-term prosperity. He will be a disaster for the country and the world. People will wonder why there was so little resistance to his evitable rise. Where, they will ask, was the American Left? Why was it only rightists like Buchanan who spoke to the workers about the consequences of globalization? Why could not the Left channel the mounting rage of the newly dispossessed?
In his essay, Rorty wrote about a Dark Age spanning from 2014 to 2044, from which his fictional America recovers by foregrounding principles of fraternity and unselfishness rather than rights.】
参考：
https://www.davewigstone.com/2016/11/11/at-that-point-something-will-crack-richard-rorty-achieving-country-1998/
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