Back in 2015, when Donald Trump’s candidacy started to look serious, my liberal friends and colleagues had a ready explanation: Uneducated people with bigoted attitudes naturally gravitate toward a manipulative blowhard who seems to respect their condition and dignify their feelings, but in truth merely exploits their fears and failures. In Trump’s rise, liberals believed, we had an exact illustration of Obama’s famous 2008 characterization of the insecure (and white) conservative voter:
And it's not surprising then that they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations.
Candidate Obama had to back off from that judgment when it didn’t go down well with some traditional Democratic voters, but it matched what people in the faculty lounge and the NGO boardroom think. It gave a social dimension to the political competition, a morally pleasing one. To liberals in the professional classes especially, office-seeking in America was not merely a competition among rival factions with distinct interests. It was a question of intelligence, the enlightened vs. the benighted. In 2015, they still had the professorial Obama on their side, a standing rebuke to Americans who chose as their champion a real-estate guy from Queens, a TV personality with vulgar tastes and politically-incorrect sentiments. Professors, entertainment notables, mainstream journalists, successful writers, people who run foundations and cultural institutions, leading scientists, and other figures of center-left status believed that they had transcended the crude understanding of elections as one outlook or set of interests battling against another. The 2016 election was a contest of smart and not-smart.
Now, of course, there is a problem. The recent presidential debate between Biden and Trump crystallized it. The social construct that raised one side above the other has collapsed, and the psychological stress on liberals in the professional class is strong. For more than a hundred years, since the days of another professor-president, Woodrow Wilson, Democrats have claimed the mantle of expertise, of technocratic agility and up-to-date thinking, the best and the brightest. They claimed the cool savvy of JFK and the rhetorical skill of Bill Clinton. The other side (in their eyes) had the cowboy style of Ronald Reagan and comic bluster of George W. Bush. Democrats have nuanced minds, we were told over and over; Republicans are dangerously simplistic and maladroit.
The framing gained its warrant in influential books and essays such as The Authoritarian Personality and “The Paranoid Style in American Politics.” It appeared in Hollywood’s version of social and religious conservatives in films such as Footloose, and in nonstop news stories and commentaries reiterating the enmity and ignorance that motivates the right.
Now, what can they say? It’s embarrassing for them. Every time Vice President Harris delivers remarks, they shudder and turn away. Jill Biden’s stage management of her husband makes them long for the pensive sobriety of President Obama and the canny triangulations of President Clinton. They enjoyed episodes such as Dan Quayle and the spelling bee. But the intelligence factor no longer goes their way. The liberal columnist who in the past has berated the doltish, unsavory conservative voter for backing a Republican, as Paul Krugman has done many times over the years, no longer has the authority to do so, not when Joe Biden and Kamala Harris are the columnist’s own champions.
It’s a sore defeat. The liberal elite is filled with people who excelled in school and earned admission to the top programs, interned at the most prestigious workplaces, and demonstrated their superb talents with words and numbers. Only the gifted ones made it through. They have been conditioned to admire brilliance and sophistication. With President Biden, it doesn’t work.
Mark Bauerlein is a contributing editor at First Things.
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Image by Gage Skidmore, licensed via Creative Commons. Image cropped.
