Many years ago, I reviewed one of David Gelernter’s books for my college newspaper. It was, and remains, one of the worst books I have ever read, so poorly written and badly reasoned that it stayed in my mind more vividly than a lot of better books did. Bad books have a way of haunting us, which is probably why we hate them so. The worst movie you see in your life will be gone from your head by the next morning, but the worst book you were forced to read in school will be with you till you take your last breath.
The world and I moved on, but David Gelernter did not stop writing. Now he’s written an essay for The Wall Street Journal in which he claims to have solved the mystery of why “the left” hates Donald Trump so much. Since the article is now trapped behind a paywall, I’ll go ahead and spoil the surprise: The reason, you see, is that Trump is a “typical American,” and leftists hate typical Americans because they hate America.
For Gelernter, of course, “the left” means Chuck Schumer, Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama—mainstream Democrats. It means politicians who have spent their careers trying to win the votes of “typical Americans.” If they do hate such people, they are wise enough to keep it to themselves. Gelernter is not wise enough to keep any of his thoughts to himself. He just lets them fly, uncensored by doubt. This is an actual sentence from his essay:
The president deserves our respect because Americans deserve it—not such fancy-pants extras as network commentators, socialist high-school teachers and eminent professors, but the basic human stuff that has made America great, and is making us greater all the time.
Well, perhaps this is not an actual sentence.
Gelernter accepts the right-wing doctrine that contemporary Democrats are somehow different than the Democrats he grew up with. They are different, of course, but not in a way that he would care about. He just means that the Democrats of his youth talked about the greatness of America more than he thinks today’s Democrats do. He’s oblivious to the fact that Barack Obama spent hundreds of hours during his presidency talking about the greatness of America during Veterans Day speeches and the like, because Gelernter, like other right-wingers, experiences the words of liberals only as filtered through his favorite websites and cable news shows. As far as he’s concerned, the non-conservatives are all working for the same team, and the apparent differences of opinion between, say, a Nancy Pelosi and an Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez are just a ruse. He’s clearly never met the kind of leftist who spits out the word “liberal” as if they were expelling a wayward gnat from their mouth.
Why does “the left” hate us poor working stiffs so much? Gelernter explains:
The difference between citizens who hate Mr. Trump and those who can live with him…comes down to their views of the typical American: the farmer, factory hand, auto mechanic, machinist, teamster, shop owner, clerk, software engineer, infantryman, truck driver, housewife. The leftist intellectuals I know say they dislike such people insofar as they tend to be conservative Republicans.
“Insofar as” means “to the extent or degree that.” It does not mean “because.” I personally find it hard to believe that Gelernter’s social circle is swarming with “leftist intellectuals” eager to declare a blanket hatred of all software engineers. I am sure, however, that “teamster” deserves its capital letter, and that members of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters overwhelmingly support Democrats. For that matter, factory workers, auto mechanics, machinists, clerks, infantrymen, and stay-at-home mothers are all likely to make less than $50,000 a year, and individuals in that income bracket were overwhelmingly more likely to vote Democratic in the 2016 election. Gelernter doesn’t care about any of that. He doesn’t even nod in the direction of a statistic. He has all the swagger of the loudmouth at the neighborhood bar, and about as much wisdom.
But suppose we grant Gelernter his fantasies about the “typical American.” What does that have to do with Donald Trump? It turns out that Gelernter thinks Trump exemplifies the virtues that make non-liberal America great. These are some of his wholesome, all-American qualities:
Mr. Trump’s vulgarity, his unwillingness to walk away from a fight, his bluntness, his certainty that America is exceptional, his mistrust of intellectuals, his love of simple ideas that work, and his refusal to believe that men and women are interchangeable.
There’s not much here, and what is here isn’t worth much. “Unwillingness to walk away from a fight” is a virtue only if you believe that every fight is worth fighting, which is a belief held only by violent lunatics. As for exceptional America, it was Trump himself who chose to defend Vladimir Putin by sneering, “You think our country’s so innocent?”
Vulgarity, simple, bluntness, mistrust—the very words Gelernter uses to praise Trump say more than the actual sentences he puts them into.
Gelernter’s essay is not very interesting. But it does illustrate an interesting phenomenon: the plight of the right-wing intellectual in the Age of Trump. In 2018, to be a right-winger and an intellectual means that you either have to reject Trump or find some way to defend him. And rejecting Trump, for a right-winger, is not as simple as denouncing Trump as a person. Trump is no longer just Trump. He has made over the entire party in his image. State and local candidates’ careers are made and ruined by what they say about him.
If you are a thoughtful and honest person, as any intellectual should be, it’s bound to occur to you that everything vile about Trump—his ignorance, his racism, his contempt for the law, his endorsement of mob violence—was there in the Republican Party long before he showed up. To reject Trump is to reject those things, but to reject those things is to reject what the right-wing movement always was. When Max Boot broke with the Republicans over Trump, he didn’t just denounce the man, he denounced the movement that had given rise to him. But Boot is, so far, almost the only right-wing intellectual with the courage to do this.
The alternative is to defend Trump—and perhaps a man of “genius,” as Time magazine once described David Gelernter, is just the man to undertake this hazardous mission. Gelernter, alas, can only give us sentences like this, one after another:
Scholarship is fine, but the typical modern intellectual cheapens his learning with politics, and is proud to vary his teaching with broken-down left-wing junk.
Gelernter’s day job has something to do with computers, and his performance here puts one in mind of HAL in 2001. Perhaps the stress of this particular mission was too much for him.