Hugely pleased with this: my article about Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as proto-comparative constitutional law is now out in @law-and-humanities.bsky.social! It’s open access thanks to @tcdlibrary.bsky.social so it’s available to all. You can read it here:
www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....
![A short extract from Richard Rorty’s Achieving our Country about why Americans might turn to a strongman:
M]embers 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 nonsuburban electorate will decide that the system has failed and start looking around 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.
One thing that is very likely to happen is that the gains made in the past forty years by black and brown Americans, and by homosexuals, will be wiped out. Jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion… All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.](https://cdn.bsky.app/img/feed_thumbnail/plain/did:plc:h5pdgaafb2z3d4n2f4qgh34c/bafkreieihuw2pzxgrxs5frjzrqe74srnbqfa3hvwaew63czww2vns2by6y)
