Many intellectuals misunderstand Donald Trump. Intellectuals often forget that Americans vote for a man, not a white paper, and that Trump passed the very first test for Republican candidates in 2016 while the rest of the field flunked. He was angry and seemed capable of acting on his anger. Trump voters’ anger has nothing to do with vague white-male resentments. It is anger against Obama and the free pass he gets even from many Republicans who are scared to rip into this smug, arrogant incompetent lest they be called racist.
It’s not just that Obama has smothered the economic recovery and left it gasping in a ditch, and brought America lower in power and prestige than at any point since Jimmy Carter and Cyrus Vance paced the D.C. streets preaching penitence in sackcloth and ashes. It’s Obama’s arrogance, not his mere ineptitude, that drives people crazy. It’s his venomous contempt for his opposition and the very idea of opposition—and the growing sense that he dislikes America. Americans treat their president with great respect and expect to be treated respectfully in turn. That is the first law of democracy. A president who breaks it is dangerous.
Many primary voters clearly believed that if Obama doesn’t make you angry, you are too far removed from normal human emotion to make a decent president. Cruz finished second not because he was second in the antiestablishment sweepstakes (he was not), but because he came second closest to displaying actual human outrage at the worst president in modern history.
I’ll admit that Trump-the-man lost me when he lost so many others, when he attacked Senator John McCain’s war record and refused to apologize. In many ways Trump is a perfect picture of the vanity culture (aka the kindergarten culture, the Internet culture) that has replaced the old Cold War society—in which, at least, adulthood was a virtue. It’s as hard to respect Trump as it was to respect Bill Clinton. But there was more to Clintonism than the sex-predator, and there is far more to Trumponianism than a vain, loud-mouthed vulgarian who talks like a 6-year-old. Trump is a vessel in which some part of a nation’s outrage has collected—and it’s the outrage, not the vessel, that deserves respect. Respect the wine, not the glass.
Furthermore, Trump is right and the intellectuals wrong about the Republican party, and American politics in general. It is indeed the Republican and not the conservative party, for a reason. The striking thing about American parties is that, traditionally, they are not ideological. They are groups of broadly like-minded people who share an (admittedly) unfocused, shifting worldview—in which politics is just one element and rarely the most important. In return for our ideological laxness, for the tendency of our two major parties to equilibrate—like tanks of two different liquids separated by a thin wall, reaching the same temperature eventually—we have a remarkably stable political culture.
We have avoided the bitterness and the constant itch to invent new parties that afflicts such ideologically charged democracies as France, Italy, or Israel. You can see our traditional refusal to ideologize our politics in the very names “Democrat” and “Republican,” which are impossible for children and foreigners to understand—and make no sense anyway.
Look at history: Truman was no ideologue, just a hardworking pol. Ike was so nonideological Democrats and Republicans both wanted to nominate him. Nixon and JFK were famously close on the issues. (In the ’50s, JFK made a donation to Nixon’s campaign fund.) When Republicans tried to turn the GOP ideological by nominating Goldwater in ’64, they lost in a landslide. When Democrats tried the same maneuver in ’72, McGovern lost big.
Reagan was a huge event in many ways; he was the first ideological president of modern times. But look at the GOP’s presidential candidates since Reagan: Of George H. W. Bush, Bob Dole, George W. Bush, John McCain, and Mitt Romney, only W was a serious conservative. Granted, W won twice. But he’s the only one, also, whose personality approximated the sunniness of Reagan’s and (in a lesser way) Bill Clinton’s. Americans are optimists and like voting for optimists. But this year, they wanted an angry optimist. (And didn’t get one.)
For all the GOP’s anguish, Trump could turn things around tomorrow if he chose. A Trump presidency will come down to the people around him. Trump ought to tell us, now, who will be his close advisers and inner cabinet. Unless he does that, there is no telling how he will govern. But if he made the announcement and did it right (having convinced his chosen advisers to work with him for the good of the country), he could win over nearly all Republicans by the next day.
Suppose he were to announce that John McCain would be his secretary of state or defense, that other top people would be drawn from (say) John Bolton, Lindsey Graham, and Elliott Abrams, and Rubio, Cruz, Jindal, Walker, Fiorina—with Giuliani or Mukasey for attorney general and Bill Bennett (history’s only useful secretary of education) returning there, or taking over HHS or Homeland Security—he’d go far towards unifying the party at a stroke. You might say that these politicians don’t think like Trump. But Trump is guided by personality, not doctrines. He has no doctrines. He will bring his personality to bear on any thoughts that catch his eye.
Will Trump do anything like this? Name his advisers and run as a grown up? Everything about him says no, except this: He wants desperately to win. And this announcement would be the sort of dramatic, unexpected gesture he loves. So don’t put it past him. It could happen, and this season could have a happy ending (happyish, anyway) after all.
There’s just one other possibility: Mitt Romney is the only third-party candidate who makes sense, because of unique circumstances. The country is full of people who regret not voting for Romney last time, and remorse is one of the most pressing of human emotions. More important, Romney’s strongest attribute is gentlemanly decency—usually a lukewarm attraction; but this year he’d be running against two of the most obnoxious, unlovable politicians in modern history. No backdrop could bring out Romney’s virtues better than Hillary and Trump. He would shine in a way he never has before.
Although it won’t happen, credible rumors to the contrary would be good for the country. They’d force Trump to become less irritating. Assuming he’s not going to run, Romney could still do an important patriotic deed just by telling people he’s reconsidering. Although I have no inside line to the third-party advocates, my guess is that this is just where they are going. They can’t win and would never conspire to elect Hillary. But if they work hard and get Trump worried, they could make him a far stronger candidate and better president.
There is a last point that transcends this election. Intellectuals have underestimated the importance of emotion versus reason for a long, long time. After all, they are reason specialists, supposedly; and often they have the wrong idea that reason is a better, steadier guide than emotion to the average human life. But emotion and reason are parallel routes through the mind to the same destination. Reason does no better than emotion on average; and emotion, not reason, runs the mind. Reasoning is transparent and usually easy to explain. Emotion is faster, unmethodical, and usually opaque; we are often unable to explain our emotions. But that doesn’t make them wrong.
Understanding emotion better is a good way to know the mind better, society better, and politics better. Trump is no populist, nationalist, or anything else-ist; his personality is fixed but his ideas (obviously) wander. The sooner conservatives accept the fact, the sooner they can see its good points and use them.
David Gelernter, a professor of computer science at Yale, is a contributing editor to The Weekly Standard. His latest book is Tides of Mind (Liveright), published this spring.
