One of the weirder aspects of anti-Trump mania is its sniffy tone. And it’s especially weird coming from card-carrying liberal Democrats. For two generations our culture and its institutions have been living under a liberal ascendency. The country’s elites—the Bigs of the news media and Hollywood and the non-profit world and the arts and the academy—have signed on to a catechism of personal liberation, particularly sexual liberation, and a kind of radical individual autonomy that even lets you choose whether you’re a boy or a girl. We are taught to be “nonjudgmental” in matters of lifestyle and to accept a pristine relativism in metaphysics and morality.
In pursuit of perfect liberation we’ve had no-fault divorce, open access to abortion, the celebration of inverted sex, elimination of the blue laws, and wars against censorship that continue long after the censors have cried uncle. Say what you want about this regime, you’d never call it a triumph of puritanism.
Yet puritanical is precisely the tone of the Trump haters on the left. (We Trump haters on the right are another story.) But why? Consider Trump himself. Here’s a man who’s famous for his wide-ranging sex life, his disdain for conventional marriage, his eager embrace of divorce, his public use of profanity, his non-judgmental attitude toward unconventional sexual minorities—a man whose way of life seems unrestrained by religious impulses of any kind—a man who, in short, is a walking summation of our present-day cultural principles. Yet on each of these scores, from his many marriages to his cursing in public, he is vilified by journalists, politicos, TV starlets, right thinkers of every kind. After years of egging on potty-mouthed rappers and scolding religious believers, our cultural guardians suddenly sound like the General Conference of Methodist Bishops circa 1922.
A case in point is an article in the November number of Vanity Fair by the magazine’s editor, a man named Graydon Carter. He is best known for…well, not much. Carter helped found Spy magazine in the 1980s, and for the last twenty-some years he has filled his present magazine with more than enough throne-sniffing and celebrity-whoring to keep advertisers and a certain kind of reader happy. Also, to judge by a passing reference in his article, he owns a restaurant. Downtown, is my guess.
His article is titled “The Ugly American.” I don’t know why. The Ugly American is a 1950s novel about an American in Southeast Asia, about foreign relations generally, and Carter’s piece has nothing to do with foreign relations. The ugly American of his headline is (of course) Trump. An interesting article might be written about how the election of a professional buffoon like Trump would affect America’s image in the world, and then it would make sense to use the cliché about the ugly American as the title. For Carter it’s just a handy, off-the-shelf phrase he heard somewhere.
The point of the article is to express contempt, and he does convey his feelings effectively, though not through his writerly gifts, which seem to be not great. (Some sentences you have to read twice: “He is a mad jumble of a man, with a slapdash of a campaign.” It takes a couple readings before you realize he’s using the adjective “slapdash” as a noun. Nobody edits the editor.) Carter’s contempt is conveyed mostly by indirection. He isn’t a policy guy—his objection to Trump isn’t ideological, probably because Carter doesn’t have any more of an ideology than Trump does. His is the vague liberalism of the distracted Manhattanite, a mode of expression akin to etiquette. Like the title of the piece, it comes readymade, off the shelf—a set of attitudes issued along with your driver’s license when you move to Manhattan. (And to Brooklyn too, now. Sad.)
In place of political belief Carter substitutes an intense class consciousness; it’s where the contempt comes from. Trump is simply not in Carter’s league. As Carter tells the story of their relationship he lays out the evidence. There are several references to the Trump wives. “He invited me to two of his weddings — I went to the Marla Maples one.” It’s a clever insult, with many layers: note the implication that the invitations were unwanted and his attendance only grudging, and the distaste for a groom with multiple marriages, and the reminder that one of those marriages was to the hillbilly Marla. It is to laugh.
The evidence piles up: When Trump invited Carter to dinner years ago, the host served his guest surf and turf: “a dish I hadn’t eaten in 25 years.” (Mon Dieu!) Carter once invited Trump to the White House Correspondents Dinner as a joke, but Trump didn’t get that it was a joke! Trump gave Carter a couple of Trump ties as a gift. Generous, no? No: “They were a basic blue and a basic red, and they were stiff as a child’s sword.” They were probably really wide, too.
And then a bottle of Trump vodka arrived at his office—poor Carter couldn’t even bring himself to open it, much less have a snort. He passed it off to a sub-editor who evidently likes that sort of thing. And Trump’s tweets—they’re so “awkwardly worded.” Carter reproduces some of them, and they do seem like a slapdash. “It’s not the witty repartee you expect from someone running for the highest office in the land.” The reader stalls, struggling to think of a recent presidential candidate who can summon witty repartee—John Edwards? Bernie Sanders? Scott Walker? Maybe Carter is thinking of England, where the office seekers can be pretty witty. In any case, if the editor of Vanity Fair expects witty repartee from President Hillary Clinton, he’s got a long four years in front of him.
Carter does offer a genuinely hilarious and telling anecdote about a photo shoot for a big cover profile of Trump that Vanity Fair published in the early 1990s. (It’s about his hair.) Indeed, Trump has been a fixture of the magazine, an object of almost-obsessive coverage, for thirty years. You wonder why this clown, this déclassé jughead, has been so interesting to the editors and readers of Vanity Fair, who normally survive on a diet of Hollywood twinkies in complicated dresses and in-bred European royalty. Carter would like you to think Trump has always been a figure of fun, but in fact the magazine’s coverage has often been snigger-free. By the way, the Trump profile Carter refers to was written by Edward Klein. In the last decade Klein has become famous as the author of insane and scurrilous “biographies” of Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Now we know where he learned his chops.
Carter’s piece raises one further question, coming as it does from a credentialed member of the country’s cultural elite. He calls the Trump ascendency the “final stage of a dumbed down America.” Who could disagree? Trump’s rise, boosted by the forty percent of our fellow citizens who see him as a plausible president, is indeed evidence of a serious, system-wide failure. Dumbing down is a good name for it.
The question is, Who did the dumbing down? Our public schools? Our universities? Our entertainment media—television, movies, popular music? The press? Glossy magazines like Vanity Fair?
Surely all of them share in the blame. And all of them, from the schools to movie studios, rest snugly (I almost wrote “smugly”) in the control of liberal Democrats, and have done so for fifty years or more. If we’re getting dumber, we know whom to thank. How odd is their sniffy contempt for Donald Trump, the purest flowering of the culture they’ve created.
