Late last month the revered film director David Lynch, creator of idiosyncratic surrealist classics like Blue Velvet, Mulholland Drive, and the TV series Twin Peaks, said something truly odd. Speaking to the Guardian, Lynch said that Donald J. Trump “could go down as one of the greatest presidents in history because he has disrupted the thing so much.”
One can see, perhaps, where Lynch is coming from. Although Trump has governed in many ways like a standard Republican, he has behaved like a raging bull in a china shop. You can see why handing the single-most powerful job in the world to a person of his temperament might seem like a great disruption.
It certainly has seemed so to a great many Americans. Since long before the moral grotesquerie of Stephen Miller’s recent immigration crackdown, every bien pensant within melting-down distance of a MacBook Pro has been tweeting bloody, bloody murder. Relatively sober, learned adults have taken to labeling their late-night tweets, lapel pins, and knit hats acts of important political #resistance. A distinguished Yale professor has publicly promised that Trump—who has now played golf 121 times since taking office—will enact an autocratic takeover of the United States sooner or later. One could go on.
But if rumors of Trump’s fascism are greatly exaggerated—and they are—rumors of his very, very poor manners are very much on point. That, actually, is the revolutionary thing about him. Donald J. Trump defies the expectations of polite society, saying things at the dais and negotiating table that are normally reserved for the locker room or construction site lunch break. He’s a Bronx pit boss of a president, swinging his gruff, incurious opinions around like a gold-plated shovel. It shouldn’t work. Our sort of people don’t speak this way. And to do it in this office? This is entirely unbecoming.
Polite society is not necessarily wrong in wanting him to tone it down. And it’s not really trivial, either—manners are one important quality of a group’s deep values. Do we hold doors open for old ladies? That’s because we revere elders, value women, and take care of the weak. Slamming doors in old ladies’ faces does mean something significant, and we have elected a shameless door-slammer.
So the freak-out isn’t about nothing—it’s a reaction to the fact that a substantial part of the American population has decided that the manners of the governing class are hollow, concealing within themselves no great, deep values, but rather prim self-interest and hypocrisy. Nice speeches about inequality on the surface, Goldman speaking gigs the rest of the way down.
Trump himself is a fairly unimpressive man, but it’s a very big thing when the governed turn against their governors. If it happens in the realm of law, then the police are called, and then maybe the National Guard. What if it happens in the realm of manners? Then I suppose the governors run around like chickens with their heads cut off, collecting Russia-probe trading cards and issuing shocked denunciations until they fall asleep at their keyboards.
David Lynch misspoke when he said Trump might go down as one of the greatest presidents. He should have said one of the most momentous, though not for any particular virtues or accomplishments of Donald J. Trump himself, but rather because of the cultural revolt he signifies.
Continuing on in the interview, however, Mr. Lynch did not misspeak, observing that “No one is able to counter this guy in an intelligent way.” That is almost entirely true. If you doubt this, I suggest you visit the free website Twitter.com and take a gander. We have a ruling class that is morbidly confused and apoplectic about its confusion. Professional knowers who shared the New York Times’s 97 percent certainty that Hilary Clinton would handily defeat Trump in 2016 are now entirely at sea in Trump’s America.
As a matter of simple fact, the better intelligence, right now, is on the fringes. A 28-year-old socialist bartender named Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez just defeated sitting U.S. Congressman and Democratic Caucus Chair Joseph Crowley in the Democratic primary of New York’s 14th Congressional District. It was a surprising upset. But it need not have been. Leaving aside for a moment the correctness of their analysis, Ocasio-Cortez and her fellow socialists have in hand a coherent story about just why it is so many Americans have found the Official American Manners worthy of derision and rejection. This is the kind of tool required to counter Trump in an intelligent way. Our official cultural leaders have yet to put their hand on such a tool. I honestly wonder if they will.
