Trump Predicted

Related to the post immediately below, sometimes someone looks forward and sees the future with clarity. Perhaps they merely make a lucky guess about what portents foretell. Apropos of which, Steven Hayward of Power Line shares the following quote from the 1998 book Achieving Our Country by Richard Rorty.

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 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.

That does sound a lot like Donald John Trump’s 2016 platform, minus the “overpaid bond salesmen.” I don’t remember them being targeted.

Rorty even nailed the suburban (aka “college-educated”) hold-outs still voting D. He had amazing prescience, luck, or both.