Richard Rorty (1931-2007) was an influential philosopher and cultural critic whose work is essential to thinking about the liberal project.  If you haven’t read him, there’s no better place to start than PPP’s pamphlet Against Bosses, Against Oligarchies: A Conversation with Richard Rorty (2002), available for free here.  The pamphlet is an interview conducted by two (then) graduate students, Derek Nystrom and Kent Puckett, shortly after the publication of Rorty’s Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth Century America (1998).  Not only do they provide in their preface an essential introduction to Rorty’s thought, but their exchanges about the politics of the left and the future of liberalism continue to resonate, with renewed urgency, as the Democrat party seeks to respond to the destructive, authoritarian politics of Trump’s second administration.

Times have changed, but a core truth to his message endures: stop talking about culture, identity, and difference, and start talking about inequality, bosses, and oligarchies.

The pamphlet is something of a history lesson, taking us back to the 1990s when multiculturalism and identity politics dominated political debate. Rorty, instead, leans on the struggles of the Old Left – his left, the left of the New Deal, of union organizing, labor law, and the fight against monied interests.  The New Left, born of the 1960s, made considerable gains, stopping the war in Vietnam, advancing civil rights, and reducing the suffering of disenfranchised groups. But, according to Rorty, they turned against patriotism, indulged in grand theorizing, and denounced capitalism – all without proposing specific ways of resisting, at least beyond revolution. More, what Rorty calls the “cultural left,” a distinctive part of the New Left, academics and others, put their energies towards the “politics of difference,” the prioritization of group identities and cultures, fighting for recognition instead of the bread-and-butter economic questions of everyday life.

Rorty isn’t telling us to abandon the struggle for racial or gender equality, and he acknowledges the cultural left “has made America a far more civilized society than it was thirty years ago.” What he objects to is the complete substitution: the way totalizing theoretical frameworks of identity politics replace specific, winnable fights. And when economic injustice gets dissolved into theorizing about “late capitalism” or “ideology,” the left becomes, in his framing, practically powerless, comfortable and resigned with the idea that it has at least figured out the problem.

What’s great about the pamphlet is how hard Nystrom and Puckett push back, insisting that race and identity struggles remain central to the liberal project. Rorty responds by pointing out how, of course, race and economic precarity are intertwined, but he criticizes a discourse that makes identity primary – and hands the Right a gift. “If I were the Republican oligarchy,” he says, “I would want a left which spent all its time thinking about matters of group identity, rather than about wages and hours.” The oligarchy, he notes dryly, got exactly what it wanted.

A generation later, wealth has been concentrated at levels unimaginable in 1998, even greater than those of the Robber Baron era that gave birth to progressivism and the 20th century Old Left. Unions have collapsed. Neoliberalism has triumphed. The gig economy has produced many “jobs,” but they are all precarious: adjuncts, contractors, platform workers. Rorty was already worrying about the “adjunctification” in the university; today, he would have denounced not only the massive precarity, but also the political response of the Democrat party, including its failure to build coalitions around issues of basic economic injustice that would be necessary to win elections, pass laws, and fight “against bosses, against oligarchies.”

Near the end of the interview, Rorty describes what it would take to shift popular opinion: “Nothing is going to happen until you can get the masses to stop thinking of the bureaucrats as the enemy, and start thinking of the bosses as the enemy.” He said that in 1998, in the midst of the early debate over identity politics, but there’s still something worth pondering.  Following three decades of “culture wars” that shifted attention away from economic issues, Trump’s second administration launched a full-scale war on identity politics by privileging one set of identities – White, male – over all others.  His ‘anti-woke’ policies are dismantling not just DEI initiatives but basic civil rights, including voting, that we long assumed were untouchable.  But there’s even greater damage inflicted on the economy, and much of the administration’s policy is about enriching the already wealthy and strengthening the oligarchy. The 2025 “Big Beautiful Bill Act” extends the 2017 tax rates that favor the wealthy (cutting top marginal tax rates, estate taxes, and offering endless deductions for the rich) while cutting health care subsidies, SNAP benefits, and a slew of other social programs.

How should the opposition respond to this double attack? Rorty didn’t say how we shift attention from identity politics to the fight “against bosses, against oligarchy” --  or how we might combine them. He certainly didn’t have faith in grand schemes, including Marxism, as a response.  But he did value the democratic and electoral project and knew that the left had to win back power by addressing the basic issues of subsistence and affordability.

Today there’s the glimmer of an answer, as younger progressive Democrats begin to fuse their generation’s engagement with identity politics and the pressing issues of inequality and oligarchy. Taking the lead from Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the Social Democrat Zohran Mamdani came out of nowhere to win the mayoralty of New York City on a platform of issues dear to the hearts of “working families” everywhere, yet without abandoning an “identity politics” that recognizes different and distinctive communities and cultures. I think that Rorty would have approved: the fight “against bosses, against oligarchies” can happen while acknowledging the politics of difference. That’s the subject of another pamphlet, still to be written. But whether you find Rorty’s vision inspiring or insufficient, you can learn something from history by reading his interview, and make use of it now.