An Ex-Liberal Reluctantly Supports Trump

How historian Fred Siegel came to appreciate the president’s defense of ‘bourgeois values’ against the ‘clerisy.’

By John Berlau and Seth Carter. By Tunku Varadarajan. 

"Mr. Siegel, a professor emeritus at New York’s Cooper Union and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute"

"Mr. Siegel is the author of several books, including “The Future Once Happened Here: New York, D.C., L.A. and the Fate of America’s Big Cities” (1997) and “The Revolt Against the Masses: How Liberalism Has Undermined the Middle Class” (2014). Just out is “The Crisis of Liberalism,” a selection of his recent political essays, published by the small, independent Telos Press."

"Yet Mr. Siegel traces the origins of the “present-day contempt” for the middle class back a century. He cites H.L. Mencken’s demeaning of the bourgeoisie, in the celebrated editor’s coinage of “booboisie.” Mr. Siegel has written extensively on Herbert Croly, the political philosopher and co-founder of the New Republic, as well as on the novelists H.G. Wells and Sinclair Lewis (who, in 1930, became the first American to win the Nobel Prize for Literature). These three men, Mr. Siegel says, laid the foundation for an elite revolt against the American middle class that endures to this day.

“Croly’s idea was that the college-educated, the elite, should become a new aristocracy,” Mr. Siegel says. “Croly believed that the middle-class and their allies—latter-day Jeffersonians who advocated individual freedom and acted in their own self-interest—were impeding the path of the experts, who were ‘disinterested.’ ”

Wells and Lewis bolstered the view that the professional class was above the fray, giving the argument an almost aesthetic hue. “They thought the middle class was vulgar,” Mr. Siegel says. Mr. Siegel cites a passage in Lewis’s novel “Main Street” (1920), which he regards as “a sardonic sally at the small-town American middle class and its commercial culture.” In the passage, Carol Kennicott, a young woman from the big city trapped by marriage in small-town America, describes Americans as “a savorless people, gulping tasteless food, and sitting afterward, coatless and thoughtless, in rocking chairs . . . and viewing themselves as the greatest race in the world.” In a word, deplorables.

Croly has been largely forgotten, Mr. Siegel says, because liberalism has been largely eclipsed. “Wokeism is not liberalism,” he says. “I don’t want to be unfair to liberals. I was very critical of liberals, but they were in favor of debate; they were in favor of empiricism, of open argument.” Wokeism, by contrast, is a “new secular revealed religion,” which involves no “investigation or empirical study.”

The eclipse of the old “Crolyite liberalism” began, Mr. Siegel says, in the 1980s and ’90s, with the eruption of postmodernism into American intellectual life. “There began to be an emphasis on ‘narratives’ and feeling, which undermined the Crolyite emphasis on empiricism and evidence.” Liberalism had already been weakened by Reagan’s victory in 1980. “There was questioning among liberals, and some self-doubt,” Mr. Siegel says. “But the questioning didn’t go far enough, and blame was placed squarely on Carter. He didn’t check all of Croly’s boxes, he wasn’t a natural, Ivy League aristocrat. He was a farmer”—in contrast with John F. Kennedy, an archetypal Crolyite president.

There was, Mr. Siegel says, an ideological “hiatus” under Mr. Clinton, in which a party that had been “demoralized by the defeat of the technocrat Dukakis in 1988” recovered some of its mojo. But “postmodernism turning to wokeness was churning” in the 1990s. The 2000 election was “a trauma” for the Democrats, and Howard Dean’s unsuccessful candidacy for the 2004 nomination previewed “some of the craziness and hysteria that would come full-bore, on a broader scale, a decade later.” Wokeism achieved its apotheosis in 2014, in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s shooting. “Ferguson allowed Ivy League grads to assert their ‘natural leadership,’ in opposition to lowlife cops and guys with pickup trucks—again, the deplorables.”

In Mr. Siegel’s understanding, wokeism holds that “the important truths are already known, and that the American aristocracy has to impose those truths on the country.” These are “given positions”—irrefutable and sacrosanct. Wokeism, he says, is a “perilous threat” to America and particularly to the First Amendment. “It says we don’t need debate. We don’t need free speech. We don’t need freedom of religion. We need to obey.” Mr. Siegel’s vote is his personal act of disobedience."