Ross , as often transpires, has blogged something of interest:
[ . . . ] Obama’s "ironist’s temperament" doesn’t just make him a more interesting politician than your average baby-kisser: It has the potential to be crucial to his success as President. Mass democracy has a way of creating cults of personality around its most charismatic national politicians - we’ve seen this with the Kennedy brothers, with Reagan, and even with Sarah Palin - and it’s very easy to imagine an Obama Presidency that ends up being captive to the unprecedented hero-worship he generates, and the image that his fans have of him as a transformational President even before he’s taken over the Oval Office. I think something like this may have happened to George W. Bush in the aftermath of September 11th: The idea that his might be a world-historical presidency seemed to take over his actual presidency, to its great detriment. And where Obama is concerned, I think we should all hope that his more ironic instincts - his writerly detachment from the absurdities of politics and from his own celebrity - survive his ascension to the highest office in the land, as a useful guard against the hubris to which he’ll otherwise be tempted.
Now consider this:
[ . . . ] even if I am right in thinking that a liberal culture whose public rhetoric is nominalist and historicist is both possible and desirable, I cannot go on to claim that there could or ought to be a culture whose public rhetoric is ironist. I cannot imagine a culture which socialized its youth in such a way as to make them continually dubious about their own process of socialization.
That’s from Richard Rorty ( Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity 87). I have claimed before — most recently before the Peucinians at Bowdoin — that Rorty was too old to be hip to the trip on this score, and our own Dr. Lawler has reiterated on several occasions that Rorty isn’t postmodern so much as incredibly hypermodern. It’s pretty easy to get locked into aporetic wars over who’s REALLY postmodern, but I think Ross’s comment puts into a nice practical focus, when contrasted with Rorty’s, what it might mean to say Rorty is actually a hypermodernist. None of which is to say that "real" young pomocons are public ironists who therefore must love Obama, or that Obama’s ironist temperament is proof positive that we live fully within a culture that is totally, or even mostly, ironist in its public rhetoric. Indeed, a ‘realist’ postmodern conservative might size up Obama’s ironist temperament and caution that it could be a twist on Rortyanism after all — with real humility forced into the private sphere and irony made its only permissible public surrogate . Rorty keeps insisting that he wants private irony and public solidarity, but a Tocquevillean postmodern conservative might warn that what he winds up with is the private solidarity of the boutique affinity group and the public irony of the pelagian
