How did we end up in trumpville? The late Richard Rorty has some insights

There's been a lot of talk since the beginning of trumpocalypse about how the left lost the election. Granted, if the Electoral College had served - for the first appropriate time in its history - its intended function, trump would not be President today, the left's strategy still has been a string of errors and prejudices.

Rorty, who died in 2007, pointed them out in his 1998 book, Achieving Our Country.

It's not a roadmap forward, but it is a very useful retrospective on how we got here, and a smart baseline on what mistakes the left and the center have to avoid in the future, if the country is going to survive.  Just don't take some of his "sainted left" posturing too seriously. We definitely have our own shortcomings, and the right isn't all devils.

Three of the most prescient quotes from the book are below: telling us exactly what we'd see 18 years later, in 2016.