No, I don't think so Terry - democracy as unachieved hope is better
(the following is straight of wikipedia but has the right tone I think)
The essential theme to those novels is that America is not yet achieved, that "the tone of the Gettysburg Address was absolutely right, but that our country would have to transform itself in order to fulfill Lincoln's hopes."[5].
Rorty quotes approvingly Walt Whitman's Democratic Vistas[1]: "'democracy' is a great word, whose history...remains unwritten, because that history has yet to be enacted." This theme is consistent to the Left and is where Rorty derives the title: "The Left, by definition, is the party of hope. It insists our nation remains unachieved."[6] Whitman and John Dewey are essential to his discussion because he identifies them as crucial to developing the mythology of an unachieved America which was "ubiquitous on the American Left prior to the Vietnam War."[7]
Their contribution is a pragmatic twist on Hegel and Hegelianism, in which America is eventually a glorious synthesis of all the opposed civilizations and ideas mingling in a democracy. This philosophy undergirds the old Left's view. The context understood, Rorty promises to contrast "the Deweyan, pragmatic, participatory Left as it existed prior to the Vietnam War and the spectatorial Left which has taken its place."
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