I used to like watching House of Cards, the HBO show starring a conniving politician aspiring to the presidency. He is ruthless and brash but also intellectually robust with a wealth of historical knowledge at his fingertips that he could call up in a verbal joust. In sum, he represents the epitome of what Americans are supposed to think of as an intellectual member of the political class. However, times are changing and I can’t really watch a show like that anymore. We’re seeing more clearly how that kind of political duplicity is harming us, and how little the regular person’s opinion matters to intellectual elites.
The majority of Americans must feel similarly given the popularity of Donald Trump since he campaigned in 2016, the fact that he did actually win in 2020, and the fact that even in “left-wing” California it’s almost impossible to find someone who plans to vote for Kamala Harris. It’s not hard to find Trump rallies though and most days there are Trump banners hanging from freeway overpasses. If you look around you rather than on CNN, everyone is going Trump. Even the prissy types who used to say ‘his tweets just aren’t presidential” have either changed their minds about Trump by now or they’ve realized how much of a non-sequitur that complaint is for most people. The only group of people who still seem baffled by Trump’s appeal, who still wish for a political environment with characters like those from House of Cards, are the Ivy-League intellectual types.
It’s not just that they don’t prefer Trump either. They have a visceral, irrational hatred of him. It’s worth asking what makes Trump so much worse than their other political opponents. I don’t think that it can be his statements that the “liberal elites,” “deep state,” or “the swamp” are the enemy of America. As true as the statement may be, I went to school with a lot of aspiring Ivy-League students and can’t really see how that would threaten them. Yes, they did all want to be lawyers, reporters, politicians and any other one of the professions that are effectively a part of the Democrat party machine in America. But most of them didn’t make it to those dream jobs, so they can’t really be threatened by attacks against that particular set of groups. Even so, these types are the ones you will run into who say things like “Trump is dangerous” and you have to ask, what makes him so dangerous to these people in particular, that they respond with outsized ferocity?
The answer lies in two things Donald Trump does that signal a denial of the core worldview that intellectual culture promotes — since you don’t need to have achieved intellectually to have bought into this world view, it’s equally threatening to wannabe intellectuals and other beta males like that. We can thank two authors, George Orwell and Nassim Taleb, for their observations on this issue. Orwell’s input relates to how and why intellectual language is structured the way it is, something Trump doesn’t take part in. Meanwhile, Taleb’s key point is that Donald Trump takes his lumps like any ordinary person, rather than acting like a committee-made politician. Combined, these make him a disturbing figure for intellectuals in a variety of ways — basically, if their worldview is right, he shouldn’t be able to exist. However, before I get into that I want to step back and see intellectualism for what it really is, otherwise the Trump question isn’t going to make a lot of sense.
When we call someone an intellectual it’s usually a fancy term for “they’re smart.” It’s unfortunate that we do this since, when you meet most “intellectuals” they tend to be pretty stupid — with regard to the things they are supposed to be knowledgeable about, and overconfident in things they know absolutely nothing about. They also tend to be apathetic. Everything they do or think is so brilliant to them (I guess), that they expect oversized returns on their contributions — applause for some kind-of clever remark, accolades, etc. They went to college, then more college, then law school, then back to college and that apparently makes them superior. Normal people listen to them and the usual thought is, “say that in plain english please” — but in plain english, nothing they have to say is very impressive.
The reason they are so unimpressive in person is that intellectuals are people who have done whatever they can to avoid exposure to the real world. In an older generation, they were driven to it to avoid fighting in war (then they vilified those who couldn’t for fighting). If they were in my generation, they went to college because it was sold as the path to high income for less strenuous effort on the job. This fear of the real world, with real effort and real consequences, where you get a more realistic output for your input is the driving impulse for their reaction to Donald Trump. So let’s look at what he’s doing that creeps under their skin in such a terrifying way.
The intellectual’s first big fear is a plain-speaking person. In 1945 George Orwell wrote an essay called Politics and the English Language, in which he made the point that anti-freedom philosophies like Communism were using the English language to stupefy the British population. The fundamental issue being that plain-speaking English was dying out, replaced by an unnecessarily intricate way of speaking. Writers and speakers were using more syllables to say something simple, and somehow were even saying less. In Orwell’s words:
“Each of these passages has faults of its own, but, quite apart from the avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery: the other is lack of precision. The writer either has a meaning and cannot express it, or he inadvertently says something else, or his almost indifferent as to whether his words mean anything or not. This mixture of vagueness and sheer incompetence is the most marked characteristic of modern English prose, and especially of any kind of political writing.”
Orwell wasn’t just worried about bad writing or insubstantial ideas. He was concerned that political language promoted them by design. Political ideologies that oppose freedom must also oppose not only free speech but free thinking as well. Orwell identified the purpose of distorting the language was actually to distort the mind: when the words you think and write in cannot easily express a thought, then you’re going to stop thinking in the first place. Orwell describes modern political writing and thinking as “letting the ready-made phrases come crowding in. They will construct your sentences for you — even think your thoughts for you, to a certain extent — and at need they will perform the important service of partially concealing your meaning even from yourself.” It’s exactly the kind of intellectual style of communication that people like Noam Chomsky use to fill books while saying basically nothing. It’s why the vast majority of ‘peer-reviewed’ papers have never actually been read. There’s no point doing so because ‘the peers’ already know what’s said: nothing that matters. But it sounds smart and fancy, which is the cloak of the intellectual.
When we look at almost any of our well-established political figures — the Clintons, Obamas, Bush family, the Bidens, and now Kamala Harris — you can actually see that form of communication happening in real time. When Harris throws out statements like the following, we need to understand how different our reactions are to the intellectual’s. Your appetizer:
“Believe in what can be, unburdened by what has been,”
and your main course,
“This is an extraordinary testament to the importance of having a president who understands the power of diplomacy and understands the strength that rests in understanding the significance of diplomacy.”
Modern commentators are calling these statements “word salad” and Harris’s critics see them as a sign of her inherent stupidity. While, yes those are both accurate responses, they don’t tell the full story.
Orwell takes it a lot further. He says “The political dialects to be found in pamphlets, leading articles, manifestos, White Papers and the speeches of Under-Secretaries… are all alike in that one almost never finds in them a fresh, vivid, home-made turn of speech. When one watches some tired hack on the platform mechanically repeating the familiar phrases…one often has a curious feeling that one is not watching a live human being but some kind of dummy.” Harris is definitely a dummy, but if we agree with Orwell then we have to agree that she’s saying exactly the kind of thing that appeals to intellectuals and politically-minded people. Nothing is new or exciting, and none of it is concrete enough to burst in on their safe spaces. It doesn’t work for us normies, but it’s comforting language to her brand of intellectual political animals. When they hear these nonsense diatribes, no matter what the actual words are, it always translates to “We’re keeping the status quo. You can still count on praise for your gender-studies degree. No, you won’t have to show results as long as you toe the line.”
The worst possible thing for intellectuals to hear from their politicians is a simple, objective statement. If you are talking about the border with them, they are hoping for noncommittal statements like “bipartisan plan to support border integrity” not “we’re going to build the wall and have the largest illegal immigrant deportation program ever.” Which is why Donald Trump freaks them out. He never performs a mumbo jumbo jig. He just says it. He cooks up fresh, vivid, home-made turns of speech every time he opens his mouth. It’s very threatening to intellectuals because they would never risk betting their own reputations on a verifiable claim with an original delivery that is easily distilled to “I will do X.” An adversary who does is clearly not playing fair. How can they respond to him? The only way to do it without evading the issue is to respond with either “No you can’t do X,” which is the same as saying “No, I think we should do Y.” But then they would be making concrete statements and that’s too risky for people whose primary motivation is not to work or have to show results.
Engaging at this direct level is also somehow too simplistic for them. It’s clearly an infuriating experience. Imagine building your ego on ostentatious wordplay — A.K.A. politics for sport — only to have someone meander in, call all your B.S. in a few short sentences, then knowing that none of your responses are going to feel as sincere or relatable. We can’t help but laugh and concur when Trump says to Elon Musk that “Biden’s, you know, close to vegetable stage, in my opinion,” and of Kamala that “She’s a radical left lunatic.” Even though these statements effectively say it all, with economy, to intellectuals this lacks sophistication. It’s too direct to pick apart, too “dumb-sounding” to respond to with excerpts from a thesis paper. They can’t believe he would dare punch up at them. That’s why these people who are usually so good about spinning intricate rebuttals (non-statements with a lot of syllables, obviously) against their usual political opponents instead end up falling back to calling Donald Trump either “Hitler” or “A threat to democracy” or usually both.
Of course, we love it when Donald Trump speaks in his way. But that’s because the way he speaks signals something to us that the intellectual just can’t find appealing: a real engagement with life. He actually has failures in his life and personal deficiencies. You know, the things that a professional politician could never admit to having. Or as Nassim Taleb says, Donald Trump has skin in the game (Skin In The Game, 2018). Taleb wrote of Donald Trump’s 2016 race:
“When I saw Donald Trump in the Republican primary standing next to other candidates, I became certain he was going to win that stage of the process, no matter what he said or did. Actually, it was because he had visible deficiencies. Why? Because he was real, and the public — composed of people who usually take risks, not the lifeless non-risk-taking analysts…would vote anytime for someone who actually bled after putting an icepick in his hand rather than someone who did not. Arguments that Trump was a failed entrepreneur, even if true, actually prop up this argument: you’d even rather have a failed real person than a successful one, as blemishes, scars, and character flaws increase the distance between human and a ghost.”
This is not even a subconscious thing. We ALL know in the front of our minds that there’s more real person to Donald Trump than there is to Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, or Mitt Romney. The rest of them are built by committee, whereas his advisors say “he’s going to tweet what he’s going to tweet.” It’s just nice that he cares more about what is right than what is necessarily good for optics. He’s willing to take political damage for the American people. Ironically, Donald Trump has even now been shot and received actual scars in the course of his current campaign but you’ll notice that intellectuals don’t talk about it except to mock his bandages during his RNC speech. Their aversion to reality and risk are undeniable here — when confronted with his hair-thin brush with death, they actually can’t process that it was real. None of them have ever been close to death or really fought for something that risked their well-being. So Trump’s wounds can’t be real, in fact those bandages look way too big and cartoony. He must be playing it up. In fact it was probably staged — because in the intellectual’s world everything is staged anyway.
Perfection is not something that regular Americans are looking for — and it’s not even a thing we’re worried about. The attacks on Trump for saying of women in a private conversation that “They let you do it. You can do anything. Grab ’em by the pussy,” really miss the mark. There may be some prudish people for whom this is a game changer, but virtually all regular people have said similarly offensive things at some level. We know people aren’t perfect — they have good and bad qualities. We know for a fact that Donald Trump has also said and done many kind things. More importantly, he accounts for his own actions either way. For us, cheap attacks like these from intellectuals who simultaneously promote mutilating children in the name of trans-rights and killing babies in the womb, are just a big “so what?”
Intellectuals can’t understand that normal people forgive imperfection. They can’t live with losing an argument, for example. If you catch them in a contradiction, they will always have a workaround explaining it away to defend their sterling record of not losing arguments. That explanation will usually involve the kind of verbal labyrinths Orwell described rather than a straight-forward fact-based rebuttal. Winning arguments is an existential need for them akin to the normal person’s need to speak freely. But because intellectuals can’t ever lose, they can’t therefore respect a person who deals with a life that involves wins and losses.
Despite the fact that Donald Trump has literally “created a skyline” in the words of Mark Levin, intellectuals will go on TV and try to turn normal people against him because he’s had to declare bankruptcy — like that’s going to ruin his perfect record and therefore spell death to his credibility. However, Taleb writes that they “failed to realize that, by advertising his episode of bankruptcy and his personal losses of close to a billion dollars, he removed the resentment…people may have had toward him. There is something respectable in losing a billion dollars, provided it is your own money.”
This is really a point to drive home. Donald Trump’s losses are his losses, and he gets back up. Kamala Harris and her counterparts have all lost far more than a billion dollars — they gave at least 6 billion to terrorists in Iran for starters — but their losses are all with our money, lives, safety and freedoms while they never have to take a fall for it. The intellectual’s greatest dream is to have that kind of immunity from consequences so they fight hard to maintain the artificial boundaries that fuzzy language and noncommittal action set between them and the world that regular people live in. The minority community of Ivy-league political types absolutely hate that Donald Trump will walk through non-metaphorical bullets to say “Let’s change that.”
In fact, he said the most damning thing they can ever imagine when he said of the Harris-Biden performance (in other words, all Democrats) that the rest of the world “is looking at us like we’re a bunch of stupid people.” You’re not supposed to insult an intellectual’s intelligence. You’re not supposed to question their facade, let alone toil to replace it with something real. But that’s exactly what Donald Trump does and it’s why he’s the candidate that intellectuals hate, but nearly everyone wants.