What Trump Does for Democracy
5th September 2023
Pauline Kael knew she wasn’t a representative American.
The onetime New Yorker film critic is famous in folk memory for having said she didn’t know anyone who voted for Richard Nixon in 1972, when he won a 49-state landslide.
The way her words are misremembered, she was surprised that someone so reviled by her social set could win the White House.
In fact, she wasn’t surprised: Kael told the Modern Language Association in a Dec. 28 speech that year, “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they (i.e., Nixon voters) are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.”
Kael’s example is worth keeping in mind when thinking about next year’s election.