From the Journal of American Greatness:
It may surprise some readers to know that this journal quite enjoys John Podhoretz. He has an excellent voice for Twitter, and his monthly GLOP podcast, especially, is not to be missed. We have sharp disagreements on several recent foreign policy adventures, to be sure, but this post is neither the time nor the place for that. Besides, we would never expect expertise in 1970s pop culture to translate into expertise in foreign policy, and so we are happy to agree to disagree there.
Nevertheless, we cannot ignore his recent misinterpretations of two of our favorite cultural satires: Mike Judge’s film Idiocracy and Anthony Trollope’s novel The Way We Live Now. Not only does Podhoretz misunderstand basic elements of these works, but the nature of his errors reveals a great deal about the inability of conservative pundits to comprehend the appeal of Trump’s campaign.
In the Weekly Standard and elsewhere, Podhoretz has compared Trump to Idiocracy’s President Camacho, a former wrestler who becomes leader of the free world in the dystopian future in which the film is set. (Basically, Idiocracy imagines a United States grown progressively more idiotic over the generations until it becomes a garbage strewn, consumerist hellscape with no culture or appreciation for intelligence.) And, indeed, no one watching the present campaign can deny Trump’s frequent vulgarity, lack of policy knowledge, and overall coarsening effect on the race—though Roland Barthes may disagree with the implicit critique of wrestling.
The film, however, does not present Camacho as the cause of the country’s degeneration. He is at most an exploiter or even unwitting beneficiary of it. The main source of the decline presented in the film is the effect of less intelligent people having more offspring than intelligent people (which we will assume is pure parody and not comment on the policy implications thereof). The other reason given—and a much more compelling one—is the gross culture of consumption promoted at all costs by a (presumably global) corporate elite. “Brawndo,” a Gatorade-like drink, famously replaces water in irrigation and drinking fountains not because of Camacho but because its corporate owners succeed in buying off the government and installing it by official mandate.
It is not an accident that the idiocrats’ lives are totally commercialized, and any comprehensive interpretation of the film must acknowledge Judge’s critique of the dehumanizing effects of a consumer economy run amok and the selfishness of the corporate masters that sponsor it. Podhoretz ignores these elements of the film completely, yet it is precisely this interpretation which may explain so many voters’ willingness to embrace unconventional (and conventionally unappealing) candidates. They see that their country is being turned into an idiocracy—or at least a social and cultural wasteland—as its government and the leadership of both parties seem incapable of deviating from the preferences of the donor class.
Podhoretz misses a similar point in his discussion of The Way We Live Now. On the latest GLOP podcast, he summarizes the novel as the
“…greatest novel ever…involving a mysterious financier who takes London by storm because he announces that he is building the intercontinental Chinese railroad [the railroad actually runs from Mexico to Salt Lake City—ed.], and of course it all turns out to be a Madoff-like scheme. So that’s a book about a really disgusting rich person that, if you’re interested in thinking about the kind of damage that really disgusting rich people can do to a perfectly civilized country, you might want to read.”
This interpretation is so simplistic (and factually incorrect) that one wonders if Podhoretz has actually even read the book. It is true that the central character, the financier Augustus Melmotte, is a hustler and a con man. But Trollope’s portrait of him is at times quite sympathetic, and his real disgust is directed much more at the decadent British society that enabled a character like Melmotte to succeed and which flattered him profusely for a time. Various dissolute aristocrats, in hoping to get something from Melmotte, laid the foundations for and actively contributed to the unfolding disasters. Trollope’s Britain is anything but a “perfectly civilized country,” nor would a serious reader consider it ruined by one “disgusting rich person” alone. In placing all of the blame on the Jewish Melmotte, Podhoretz oddly takes the position of the anti-Semitic British aristocrats who are shown to be the most venal characters in the book.
Once again, in Podhoretz’s interpretation, Donald Trump alone is responsible for all the ills of the conservative movement. In his view, apparently, the movement was without flaw before Trump: Conservative intellectuals were not at all out of touch with the movement’s constituency. The party’s policies had produced splendid results in the last Republican administration. And certainly nothing about the state of the party could have enabled Trump’s rise; certainly no introspection over its basic agenda is required.
Please.
One does not have to like Trump to see that the party is in critical need of intellectual revival. Those positions Trump has attacked, impulsively but successfully—including immigration, trade, and indiscriminate democracy promotion—require serious reappraisal at least, if not a fundamental rethinking. We would prefer that the party improve itself rather than be destroyed, but the responses of Podhoretz and others so far inspire little optimism.
