Stacey Meeker offers a clue to unlocking some of the mysteries of cluelessness in her article "Utopia Limited: An Anthropological Response to Richard Rorty," Anthropoetics IV, no. 2 (Fall 1998/Winter 1999). Rorty is the author of Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in Twentieth-Century America (Cambridge and London: Harvard UP, 1998). Meeker's conclusion (footnote omitted; link added):

Rorty's utopian vision is so close to garden-variety left-liberalism that one is tempted to ask: "Why all this talk about utopia? The society you are calling for is pretty much the one we have already, one that includes political mechanisms for solving the problems you remain upset about. Why insist on unworkable utopias when your program is essentially that of the dominant wing of the Democratic party?" But Rorty is not speaking to an audience of politicians, or even of political scientists. His base in the academic world is in the Humanities, and professors of the Humanities remain largely on the far Left, hostile to capitalism and American democracy. Rorty's influence comes from his ability to speak the language of this group. In Achieving Our Country, he makes what despite its philosophical vagueness is ultimately a useful attempt to sell to his audience as utopia the dystopia that is American democracy-the "worst form of government imaginable, except for all the others that have been tried so far." At the end of the twentieth century, dystopia is the only structure of hope.

Just posting it here for future reference.

	11:20 PM

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