Trump as a Champion of ‘Bourgeois Values’? Not So Fast

On the weekend of October 17, the Wall Street Journal ran a lengthy interview with political writer and historian Fred Siegel, conducted by a Journal contributor, Tunku Varadarajan. The piece is headlined “An Ex-Liberal Reluctantly Supports Trump”—but Siegel never considered himself a liberal; he viewed himself as a democratic socialist and his support for Trump is anything but “reluctant.” The piece’s subheadline notes how Siegel “came to appreciate the president’s defense of ‘bourgeois values’ against the ‘clerisy.’”

The first question to raise is what did the pro-Trump Journal editors think they would achieve by giving Siegel this important slot in their paper just two weeks before an election? Siegel has a new essay collection out from an obscure press, but that’s a flimsy hook on which to hang this interview. One gets the sense that the Journal wanted to portray someone who purportedly shifted to deciding to vote for Trump in the hope that some readers who are on the fence might be persuaded to do the same. Unlike a conversation with, say, Victor Davis Hanson or Roger Kimball or other avid, longtime supporters of Trump, an interview with Siegel might give such wavering readers the cover they need.

Fred Siegel and I have been friends for decades, going back to the late 1980s and early ’90s when we were both democratic socialists who belonged to the socialist group started by Michael Harrington that eventually became Democratic Socialists of America. In January 1993, Siegel and I both spoke at a major conference in Washington, D.C., sponsored by an anti-Communist offshoot of the democratic socialists, Social Democrats U.S.A. Called “Does America Need a Social Democratic Movement?” the conference featured heavy hitters such as William Galston, Seymour Martin Lipset, Will Marshall, Michael Novak, Paul Starr, and Charles Lane. Charles Krauthammer also attended the sessions.

Siegel’s comments then were prescient and help us to understand how he came to be where he is today. He brought up the issue of immigration, at a time when few were talking about it as a problem. Immigration, he said, once produced “social solidarity.” However, at present (remember, the “present” is 1993!), “a new wave of immigration” has “shattered that solidarity.” He explained:

Talking to people who are workers, ordinary middle-class people in New York, I sense a tremendous danger. A combination of the downward pressure on wages exerted by free trade plus some of the downward pressure created by immigration creates a combustible situation in which people feel themselves enormously vulnerable.

In the same manner, another man of the political left made much the same argument in 1998, but on a broader canvas. Richard Rorty wrote in his pathbreaking book Achieving our Country—which did not get a good reception or reviews at the time—that soon in America, unorganized skilled workers and union members would realize that their jobs would be exported. Then the nonsuburban electorate would “decide that the system has failed and start looking around for a strongman to vote for—someone willing to assure them that, once he is elected, the smug bureaucrats, tricky lawyers, overpaid bond salesmen, and postmodernist professors will no long be calling the shots.”

Next, Rorty wrote, many gains made by black Americans and women would disappear. Then “jocular contempt for women will come back into fashion. . . . All the resentment which badly educated Americans feel about having their manners dictated to them by college graduates will find an outlet.”

Rorty was thinking about Pat Buchanan, Trump’s demagogic predecessor, when he wrote those words. Were Rorty still with us and writing, he would likely be saying the same thing and using the same words to describe and warn about Donald Trump. But unlike Siegel, Rorty remained a social democrat—albeit one who, like Siegel, was in despair because a new cultural left had distanced itself from trade unions and, by turning away from programs to reduce inequality, stressed only group identity politics. He was particularly worried that programs like NAFTA, introduced by Bill Clinton, would harm those who had been traditional Democratic voters.