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I cannot honestly say I predicted Donald Trump’s election, though I had been remarking the billionaire’s anti-globalization campaign would appeal to Democrat voters who felt betrayed by the liberal left.

My forecasting, however, did not have the potency of American philosopher Richard Rorty. In 1998, Rorty predicted a strongman would emerge to take advantage of the vacuum the liberal-left created by opting for “cultural politics” over “real politics.”

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With average people struggling because of liberal emphasis on open immigration and identity politics, Rorty said the strongman would be an outlet for “the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates.”

“Members of labour unions, and unorganized skilled 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,” Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country: Leftist Thought in 20th-Century America.