To say Peggy Noonan is one of our finest political columnists is not wholly fair to her, since she writes so often about topics and people that are not political, or at least not overtly so. She is deeply fair and empathetic, and she writes in such a deceptively easy style that reading her every week is akin to sitting across the table from her and listening as you drink your coffee.
Her latest book, A Certain Idea of America, is a collection of 80 of her recent Wall Street Journal columns, culled from about 400, and in re-reading them I was struck not just by how timeless they are (a neat trick for a weekly columnist) but by how broad her knowledge is. There is an old saying that a columnist can be wrong but can never be in doubt; however, Noonan brilliantly disproves that rule by gently suggesting rather than loudly proclaiming a way to think about a person, an issue, or life itself.
JIM KELLY: The election results will be diced and sliced right up to the inauguration, and there are lots of lessons worth discussing (The electoral power of Taylor Swift! The effectiveness of scolding Black male voters! Calling yourself a “knucklehead” during a TV debate to seem more down-to-earth!), but if you had to boil it all down to explain why our twice-impeached 45th president is our 47th president, is it because working-class Americans want a more promising future for themselves and their families, and enough of them felt they had a better chance with Donald Trump? So many analysts say voters went with fear, but what if they went with hope?
PEGGY NOONAN: I agree with your analysis—I think a lot of regular people came to see him as the hope-for-change candidate. Another way to say it is that given a choice between depression (not economic but emotional) and anxiety, they chose anxiety, which is the more awake state and so more hopeful. They wanted change. Americans always do.
In a broad sense, the majority did not like what the Democrats were selling—Bidenomics, acquiescence to what struck them as off-putting and off-point cultural obsessions. No one could quite understand what Biden, or later Harris, were saying when they spoke. They didn’t offer much you could hold in your head on the way home from the rally.
People understood what Trump was saying, at least in terms of broad policy goals—“Illegal immigration bad, will stop.” I have a sister who is a great Trump supporter, and at rallies she would relish the crazy parts. She agreed with him on policies but also views him as an entertainer, like Ed Sullivan when we were kids, and found him hilarious and therefore endearing. She liked the Al Capone references and enjoyed the boat battery and the shark.
But, overall, I think there was an element, too, in the election of … Good-bye to All That. To 2020–24, to the pandemic, to the restrictions and the closed schools and the medical and scientific elite they came to lose faith in.
Something that I believe hurts the Democratic Party is that it came, in the past four years, to be broadly understood as the creature of the teachers’ unions. They don’t like that.
The Democrats will come back, in four or eight years—no defeat is ever total, no victory either—and they will struggle around trying to figure out how they should change. I have a suggestion. Elected Democratic officials run most of our major cities. All of those cities, in the estimation of regular Americans, are deteriorating. Make one work. Make it thrive. Make it safer, improve education, shine it up. They need to show in one great city that Democrats can run things. That will help their national reputation a lot.
“Given a choice between depression … and anxiety, [voters] chose anxiety.”
J.K.: I always marvel when politicians win a close election and then think they have a mandate to execute dramatic change. I think Trump made that mistake in 2017, the first days in office, and I think Biden made that same mistake the first day he took office with his executive orders. I assume Trump will once again over-interpret his mandate.
P.N.: I don’t know. I don’t have a sense of Trump’s mind and mood since the election because he’s been so quiet and off the scene, enjoying watching his enemies attack each other—“It’s your fault with your stupid student-loan forgiveness”; “It’s your fault with your stupid woke!”; “Why did you lie about Joe Biden’s true intellectual condition until it was revealed to the nation?”; “Why didn’t we have some kind of jerry-rigged primary to pick his replacement?” Trump loves when his foes attack each other, so he’s lying back and not interfering.
Both Yuval Levin and Ezra Klein have noted that all incoming presidents over-interpret their mandate and thus rile people. Yuval notes that America went left under Trump One and right under Biden. The Trump folk right now are excited and loaded for bear and will go around saying things like “the Great Realignment.” Political enthusiasts do this.
J.K.: I am not sure what I grew more tired of during this campaign: Trump’s speeches or the reactions of people appalled by his comments. That said, some of the things he did say shocked me, so much that I began to accept that some folks just heard him differently than I and some of my friends did, and that what I thought coarsened the political dialogue others just saw as a comic routine. You yourself became rally fodder last August, at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania, when he called you a “so-called Republican” whom Reagan did not like and was “highly overrated.” Does something like that just make you laugh?
P.N.: The day before that rally, I received from him in the mail a copy of a recent W.S.J. column I’d written, which he’d warmly inscribed with his Sharpie, telling me that now all he needs is my endorsement, and the Democrats will kill our country, and best wishes, and that big electrocardiogram signature. He sends those things to journalists, as you know.
Then, at the rally, he said he didn’t know who I was but I’m a bad one, and I thought it might be mischievous to tweet out what he’d sent, and then I thought, Nah, don’t ask for more! Maybe I’ll frame it.
Once, he attacked me at a rally, in about 2018. I was in Washington, had been to dinner, and came into my hotel room and put on the TV to catch up on the news. A Trump rally came up on CNN. I thought, Oh my gosh, I forgot, he’s speaking in Pennsylvania tonight, I should watch because I am going to be on Meet the Press the next morning and he might say something we’ll talk about. So—Jim, I swear this is true—as I upped the volume, the first words he said were “And that Peggy Noonan!”
He said I write about him like he’s a Neanderthal. I had two thoughts. One: “I am the only person in the world named Peggy Noonan who is standing in a hotel room with a clicker in her hand hearing the president put down Peggy Noonan and she is Peggy Noonan.” Which may be an idiotic thought but was my own. My second thought was: Google Neanderthals! So I did and found they were thought to have been highly organized and artistically gifted, so on Meet the Press I got to say, “He’s no Neanderthal.”
“I think there was an element in the election of … Good-bye to All That. To 2020–24, to the pandemic, to the restrictions and the closed schools and the medical and scientific elite they came to lose faith in.”
J.K.: Here is what I will always wonder about Trump. I had assumed that once he took office the first time, he would be awestruck that here, against all odds, he was sitting in the Oval Office, and that he would assume a gravitas he had not shown before. You alluded to the magic of the place in those wonderful remarks you wrote for Reagan when he spoke at a fundraiser for the J.F.K. library. How did I get this so wrong?
P.N.: A hope is never wrong. We all hoped this on some level, even if just a little. I think his nature is not one that can be deeply penetrated by thoughts of nobility, sacrifice, heritage, objective greatness, deep sentiment. He doesn’t do “Here Lincoln trod.” He does “I bet they overpaid for the marble.”
J.K.: You are an optimist, but a hard-earned optimist who appreciates struggle and understands that life is full of chance, and it is up to you to deal with that. How do I know this? Because I read your columns, and your essence shines through your prose, whether you are writing about the songwriter Paul Simon or Maine senator Margaret Chase Smith or the Titanic. Your outlook on life, I am sure, was shaped long before you knew what a lede was, so who gets the credit for shaping the way you look at life? Your parents? A teacher? The books you read as a child?
P.N.: The books, very much. When I was little, 9 and 10, I loved reading children’s biographies—of Beethoven, of the Mayo brothers, Abe Lincoln. The first one I read, I burst into tears, not because it was sad but because it was over.
That and … I was born in Brooklyn, grew up on Long Island and in Jersey, lower-middle-class family, lots of noise and clamor, and in such families in those days the TV was always on, morning through night, and we were always watching it, and the local TV stations couldn’t afford original programming and just played, over and over, three times a day, the old movies of the 1930s and 40s and 50s. And those movies, I knew the dialogue by memory. I can still do pages and pages of Yankee Doodle Dandy and The Best Years of Our Lives and On the Waterfront and Young Abe Lincoln.
Amid the clamor of the family I was absorbing the idea, through the TV, through the movies, that the world outside could be a pretty wonderful place—and probably is. And this country—a wonderland! So all that shaped me, seriously.
And an old great-aunt who was my friend, named Jane Jane. She had come to the U.S. at about 20 from Ireland, and she was so grateful for this place, and for her job, among the fancy people of Manhattan, as a maid in their great apartments. When she had a few days off, she’d come to our home and sleep on the couch and tell me stories of Manhattan. Also, she was very truly a deeply religious woman and imparted the Catholic faith to me, her great gift, which never left.
“Trump doesn’t do ‘Here Lincoln trod.’ He does ‘I bet they overpaid for the marble.’”
J.K.: Tell me the advantages of writing a weekly column from New York that deals mostly (but not exclusively!) with Washington politics.
P.N.: I lived in Washington from 1984 to 1989, five years, then scooted back home to New York. I love Washington, but New York is my place. Professionally, where I live does this: I do not get to hear the overheard comment that is revealing—I mean the things Washington people say. It deprives me of the rhythm of the city of Washington, the federal city. I’m there a lot, but still, I’m not in it, as Henry Adams was in the belly of the beast. It is now easier to compensate for this than it was in Henry’s day, of course—members of Congress text and phone and e-mail, and give you a sense of the mood and the feel of things. And they themselves are barely there, being in Congress only three days a week. (It’s a depopulated city! None of the federal offices are full!)
But what living in New York City gives me is … a sense of apartness from D.C., of not being of it, of seeing it as a thing, which is how most Americans see it. Of helpful detachment. People in D.C. have tongs—magazine tongs, right- and left-wing tongs, newspaper tongs, party-infrastructure tongs, movement tongs, think-tank tongs. I just have a sense it’s good for me not to be in a tong, and not to have my judgment of things affected by them, and by old affections and loyalties.
J.K.: What I so love about your new collection is that it reminds me of the breadth of your work, and how one week you can write about a movie you just saw and another week about what a storied tabloid columnist might have to say about the death (suicide? murder?) of Jeffrey Epstein. A weekly column as varied as yours is hard work! How do you organize your week, how many ideas do you usually have percolating, and how often near deadline do you have to rip up what you did and write to the news?
P.N.: I am never not thinking about the column. Deadline is Thursday, three P.M. I keep notebooks of thoughts, or half-thoughts that might with time amount to a thought. I also, if I think of something as I’m walking along Madison Avenue, stop and send it to myself in an e-mail. I settle on a subject by Tuesday, usually.
It has to be an opinion that’s worthy of my readers, but after all these years I feel I know them, and they give me room and space to be a little off, to get it wrong. Recently I wrote about the Uglification of Everything, which was not a topic people were thinking about to my knowledge, but I just had to blow, and thought maybe others are feeling this way too, and from my mail I’d say yes, they were.
I do work hard at it. I think it doesn’t count if it doesn’t come from all of you—brain, heart, soul, psyche. If it does, even if it’s hilariously wrong or off, it will be O.K.
Also, a funny thing: I have never been able to write an evergreen. I don’t know why.
J.K.: You make it clear that since 2016 you have always written in a candidate for president, and I am too much of a gentleman to ask who that is. But I will ask this: Is there anyone on the horizon for 2028 that you might consider voting for if he or she were actually on the presidential ballot that year?
P.N.: I voted for Mitt Romney in 2012, and in 2016 I wrote in John Kasich as a Republican I would have been satisfied to vote for if he’d got on the ballot. In 2020 I voted for Edmund Burke, because it pleased me. In 2024 … you really are a gentleman, Jim. I have a feeling it might be a column someday, so I’ll keep it till then. But thank you for the gracious way you put your question.
Jim Kelly is the Books Editor at Air Mail
