If the sharper writers and thinkers who support President Donald Trump want to find their original source, they could look to the Jewish intellectuals of postwar America.
As is explored in the fascinating new book Write Like a Man: Jewish Masculinity and the New York Intellectuals, in the years following World War II, America saw the rise of a Jewish intelligentsia that helped shape journalism, literature, and politics.
Writers such as Norman Podhoretz, Irving Kristol, and Lionel Trilling were anti-communist liberals who defended America and the traditional family while praising modern art and culture. These Jewish thinkers were outsiders to the social and political establishment. They focused more on domestic policy than foreign affairs. While anti-communist, they did not want to get involved in foreign wars. They championed strong families, a good work ethic, and the ability to demolish an ideological opponent with words. They believed in Martin Luther King Jr.’s message of equal treatment before the law.
They also, according to Write Like a Man, represented a potent form of masculinity. In his 1967 memoir Making It, Jewish intellectual and journalist Norman Podhoretz characterized these postwar thinkers as a “Jewish family.” He wrote, “The family’s prose had verve, vitality, wit, texture, and above all brilliance. Here the physical analogy would be with an all-round athlete.”
There was also a Jewish analogy to “Talmudic scholars,” which is to say to men who “not only regard books as holy objects.” Podhoretz was brilliant and well-read and also talked about ”sissy” being “the worst insult imaginable” when he was growing up as a child in Brooklyn in the 1930s.
In Write Like a Man, author Ronnie Brinberg argues that “masculinity and Jewishness were linked in the minds of the New York intellectuals. Men and women, Jews and non-Jews in the group all came to espouse a secular Jewish machismo. This evolved into an ideology of secular Jewish masculinity.” The writers who embraced this ideology “prized verbal combativeness, polemical aggression, and an unflinching style of argumentation. Hard-hitting and impassioned arguments, especially in print, undergirded their understanding of a new kind of masculinity.” This “American Jewish masculinity, as the New York intellectuals came to define it, was an amalgam of Jewish and Anglo-American ideals that formed something new: the combative secular intellectual.”
When you put that all together, there is a parallel between the 20th-century intellectual Jews of New York and today’s Trump supporters. Like the New York Jewish writers, today’s MAGA scribes are pugilistic defenders of masculinity and traditional values who despise foreign wars. They started as outsiders and now affect mainstream politics and culture. Many use language as a weapon to dismantle their opposition. Woke is the new manifestation of the communism battled by the New York Jews.
The most famous piece of journalism produced in defense of Trump is “The Flight 93 Election” by Michael Anton, who combined the macho imagery of storming the cockpit during a flight that was taken over by terrorists with the verbal lashing reminiscent of Norman Mailer, himself a leading light of the postwar Jewish intellectuals. Anton was just named director of policy planning for the State Department. In his essay, he savages establishment conservatives as bemoaning the slow collapse of society but not being willing to do the hard work to fix it.
“Conservatives spend at least several hundred million dollars a year on think tanks, magazines, conferences, fellowships, and such,” Anton wrote, “complaining about this, that, the other, and everything. And yet these same conservatives are, at root, keepers of the status quo. Oh, sure, they want some things to change. They want their pet ideas adopted – tax deductions for having more babies and the like. Many of them are even good ideas. But are any of them truly fundamental? Do they get to the heart of our problems?” This sounds like Hemingway, the manly man who famously wrote, “Never mistake motion for action.”
Anton is particularly brutal on neoconservative author Mathew Continetti — you might even say he emasculates him. In reaction to crime, illegal immigration, illegitimacy, and drug addiction, Continetti offers “the usual litany of ‘conservative’ ‘solutions,’ with the obligatory references to decentralization, federalization, ‘civic renewal,’ and — of course! — Burke. Which is to say, conservatism’s typical combination of the useless and inapt with the utopian and unrealizable.” Anton then lands the death blow: “’Civic renewal’ would do a lot of course, but that’s like saying health will save a cancer patient. A step has been skipped in there somewhere. How are we going to achieve ‘civic renewal’? Wishing for a tautology to enact itself is not a strategy.”
There is an irony here. Continetti is the son-in-law of William Kristol, the neoconservative thinker despised by the MAGA movement. Kristol is the son of Irving Kristol, one of the leading lights of the “family” of postwar New York Jewish thinkers. To many Trump supporters, Bill Kristol represents where the neoconservatives went wrong. He pushed for the invasion of Iraq in 2003, a move that broke away from neoconservatism’s usual stance of avoiding policing the world.
This blunder could represent the dark side of the masculine ethos. Midge Decter, a leading thinker of “the family” and the wife of Norman Podhoretz, proposed that, as Write Like a Man notes, “the gender anxieties she first articulated in articles about feminism filtered into neoconservative discourses on foreign affairs. After Vietnam, neoconservatives lamented a ‘failure of nerve’ in American foreign policy and warned that a resistance to flex military might had rendered America impotent.”
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Trump doesn’t seem to ever suffer any failure of nerve. Yet, in terms of foreign policy, he seems much more in line with Irving Kristol, who was against the invasion of Iraq and foreign wars in general.
“[No military] alternative is attractive,” Irving Kristol wrote about the aftermath of the Iraq War, “since each could end up committing us to govern Iraq. And no civilized person in his right mind wants to govern Iraq.”
Sounds a lot like Trump.
Mark Judge is an award-winning journalist and the author of The Devil’s Triangle: Mark Judge vs. the New American Stasi. He is also the author of God and Man at Georgetown Prep, Damn Senators, and A Tremor of Bliss.