U.S. President Donald Trump delivers remarks to the Detroit Economic Club at Detroit's MotorCity Casino Hotel on Tuesday.Evan Vucci/The Associated Press

Donald Trump’s authoritarian instincts and imperialist ambitions have spawned plenty of how-did-we-get-here hand-wringing among Americans. That, in turn, has produced much commentary about the signs missed, the predictions ignored.

Perhaps none of the forecasts were as prescient as the one from Richard Rorty, an American philosopher whose warning about the rise of authoritarianism in the U.S. was dusted off in 2016, when Mr. Trump first got elected. It has found even greater relevance and meaning in his second term.

“Members of labour unions and unorganized unskilled workers will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking and to prevent jobs from being exported,” the late Mr. Rorty wrote in Achieving Our Country, a book based on lectures he’d given at Harvard in 1997. “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........

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