EX-LIBERAL RELUCTANTLY SUPPORTS TRUMP
An Ex-Liberal Reluctantly Supports Trump
How historian Fred Siegel came to appreciate the president’s defense of ‘bourgeois values’ against the ‘clerisy.’
Brooklyn, N.Y.
Donald Trump can count at least one new supporter in this year’s election. “I had a close friend who’d been a business partner of Trump in the ’90s,” the critic and historian Fred Siegel tells me. “Trump ripped off a quarter of a million dollars from him. He told me this when we were discussing the election” four years ago. “Trump just said, ‘So, take me to court.’ I couldn’t vote for him.” Mr. Siegel couldn’t abide Hillary Clinton either, so he “slept through” the 2016 election. Next month he’ll be wide awake—though not woke—and will vote for Mr. Trump.
Joe Biden needn’t worry too much, perhaps. Mr. Siegel, 75, has only twice backed a winning presidential candidate since he reached voting age. But while he’s no bellwether, he does make an energetic case for the incumbent.
Mr. Siegel, a professor emeritus at New York’s Cooper Union and a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, says he overcame his distaste for Mr. Trump for three reasons. First, foreign policy: “Crushing ISIS, pulling us out of the Iran nuclear deal, moving our embassy to Jerusalem, and making fools of those people who insist that the Palestinian issue is at the heart of the Arab-Israeli conflict.” Second, by his “ability to withstand a prolonged coup attempt by the Democrats and the media,” which started with the Steele dossier: “If I’m saying what I find impressive about Trump, it’s that he’s survived. He has an extraordinary amount of arrogance, egotism, and self-confidence.”
Mr. Siegel’s third reason goes to the heart of his own political philosophy. He sees the president as a champion of “bourgeois values,” under threat from the “clerisy,” Mr. Siegel’s word for the dominant elites who “despise” those values. He regards Mr. Biden as a “captive” of this clerisy, and running mate Kamala Harris as the “embodiment of it.”
“I don’t want to see her as president,” Mr. Siegel says of Sen. Harris. “I don’t want a San Francisco Democrat who’s likely to impose elements of the Green New Deal, which she sponsored but lied about sponsoring on television. If Biden wins, she will be president in short order. I don’t know how long Biden will last.”
In Mr. Siegel’s view, “hard work, faith, family and autonomy” have enabled America to thrive, and Mr. Trump stands for these values, even if he doesn’t always exemplify them. “The elite is largely detached from the middle class,” Mr. Siegel says. “The two major sources of wealth in the last 20 years have been finance and Silicon Valley. Neither of them has much connection to middle-class America, or Middle America.” Mr. Trump is “in favor of manufacturing jobs, which are often middle-class.” The president also “recognizes the ways in which China is a threat to the survival of middle-class life in America, directly and indirectly.”
Mr. Siegel takes heart from Mr. Trump’s hostility to political correctness. “Wokeness is a force that undermines the middle class,” he says, “and you couldn’t have had wokeness without an elite contempt for the values of the middle class.” Middle Americans see political correctness “as a threat to the democratic republic they grew up in, where people could speak their mind.” I ask Mr. Siegel to define political correctness: “The inability to speak the truth about the obvious.”
As we sit on his porch in the Brooklyn neighborhood of Ditmas Park, his opinions—unfashionable in a borough where Mrs. Clinton outpolled Mr. Trump by more than 60 points—cause passersby to turn their heads. When he offers examples of political correctness that annoy him, a young man walking by the house looks startled. “Why can’t you say ‘Wuhan virus’?” Mr. Siegel exclaims. “Why can’t you say there are two genders?” The young man scuttles past as if singed, and Mr. Siegel says, with palpable sadness, that people don’t stop to talk to him on his porch as much as they used to. Word has got around that he is “a Trump supporter, so fewer people schmooze with me.”
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.
He started as a man of the left, and still describes himself as a protégé of Irving Howe, the democratic socialist literary critic. “Howe died young,” Mr. Siegel notes—in 1993, at 72. He was a doctoral candidate at the University of Pittsburgh in 1968, studying the political economy of tobacco in Virginia, when he cast his first vote. But he sat out the 1972 election. “I voted for Humphrey. I did not vote for McGovern or Nixon. I worked for McGovern as a spokesperson in Western Pennsylvania, and I was stunned to discover that he thought Henry Wallace had been right about a lot of things. Lightbulbs went off.”
In 1976 he voted for “Gerald Ford, the man.” Ford was “moderately competent and unpretentious. Jimmy Carter was pretentious. I thought his religiosity was painted on.” His aversion to Mr. Carter persisted, and in 1980 he backed John Anderson, a liberal Republican running as an independent.