When does naivete segue into stupidity? The case of Peggy Noonan
I don’t know the exact point at which naivete segues into stupidity, but Peggy Noonan crossed it long ago.
So why would I pay any attention to her? Well, she still has a WSJ column, for some reason. Plus, her latest piece is a good example of a relatively common genre of stupid columns (not just with Noonan), which I’ll call “advice to people who are completely and constitutionally unable to take it,” or “let’s pretend the person I’m addressing is a different person than that person has long proven him or herself to be.”
I’m speaking of Noonan’s most recent column of advice to Kamala Harris. A sampler [my emphasis]:
[Harris] could lend what skills she has to the public presentation of the administration’s stands. Mr. Biden isn’t strong there; he’s uneven in his attempts to explain and advance policy thinking.
To do this Ms. Harris would have to decide to become serious — to inform and immerse herself, meet with party thinkers, study her briefing books. Her current strategy, to the extent it exists, appears to rely on her sense of her own personal charisma — delighted laughter, attempts to connect personally, to convey zest.
She should speak instead with sincerity and depth. She shouldn’t confuse Happy Warrior with Hungry Operative.
Ms. Harris has never seemed especially earnest. This would be a good time for earnestness.
In what universe would this be possible? In the same universe in which Noonan originally praised Obama this way (in 2008):
[Obama] has within him the possibility to change the direction and tone of American foreign policy, which need changing; his rise will serve as a practical rebuke to the past five years, which need rebuking; his victory would provide a fresh start in a nation in which a fresh start would come as a national relief. He climbed steep stairs, born off the continent with no father to guide, a dreamy, abandoning mother, mixed race, no connections. He rose with guts and gifts. He is steady, calm, and, in terms of the execution of his political ascent, still the primary and almost only area in which his executive abilities can be discerned, he shows good judgment in terms of whom to hire and consult, what steps to take and moves to make.
Noonan praised Kamala Harris in August of 2020, and in a piece Johnson wrote in September of 2021 he made this prediction at the conclusion:
Noonan hasn’t yet turned on Harris based on her patent idiocy or her actual performance as vice president, but I am quite certain we can look forward to the column in which Noonan turns on her without mention of her previous adulation.
Bingo! That’s where Noonan’s most recent column comes in.
For a long time, Noonan has been trading on the Reagan speechwriting gig that initially brought her fame. But although, much like Andrew Sullivan, she’s still right every now and then – and a bit more often than a stopped watch, but just a bit – those times are few and far between. When she’s wrong, she’s wrong in a particular way: juvenile, lightweight, naive, and conventional.
As with many another, the brain of Peggy Noonan has been thoroughly addled by TDS; the list is long indeed, including George Will, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, and Jonah Goldberg, to name but a few. A few months ago, the WSJ posted, by a colleague of Noonan’s, a review of HBO’s so-called “documentary” on the “insurrection” of J6 (far worse, naturally, than Pearl Harbor and 9/11) by Dorothy Rabinowitz, another “conservative” from the WSJ who might just as well have published her inane screed in WaPo or HuffPo. Another of the same ilk (Ralph Peters. another Trump-hater once destroyed by Tucker) recently appeared on CNN spouting the most unhinged drivel.
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No doubt it was further addled by TDS, but it was already quite addled in 2008, as her admiration for Obama indicated.
Noonan is such a fantastically guileless and gormless creature it’d be almost charming if she wasn’t compensated so handsomely for the production of such absurd sophistry and nonsense. It does make you wonder at what age did Noonan stop believing in Santy Clause.
She was an employee of CBS Radio (working for Dan Rather, among others) who scored a position in the White House PR apparat. She worked for Bentley Elliot, who employed a staff of five or six people to draft public remarks for the president to deliver or to be released in his name. The public speeches attributed to her struck me as insipid, YMMV. She did not then and does not now know anything special about public policy. She’s a word merchant. She can turn in copy on time. No clue who reads it.
Her domestic life was a bust. She married late (at 35) to a man who’d been divorced twice; she bore one child; she then separated from her husband after three years and change, insisting on a divorce the following year.
I can recall reading one column by her. It was composed just after Ronald Reagan’s funeral. Fifteen years after departing the White House staff, she was still butt-hurt about intramural office rivalries and chose the occasion of Reagan’s death to issue catty put-downs of Peter Robinson and Dana Rohrbacher (omitting their precise names) tarted up as a tribute to their boss Bentley Elliot, whom she maintained had been protecting Robinson and Rohrbacher from the wrath of suits at the White House and had got himself fired in the process. Her whole presentation of what happened between Elliot, Robinson and Rohrbacher, and the suits was internally contradictory in addition to being puerile and low class.
I can’t remember whether or not she reprised her mean girl routine on Sarah Palin. (Kathleen Parker, a better writer, certainly made a clown of herself in that endeavour).
Noonan is part of a mass of conventional wisdom dispensers who simply refuse to acknowledge the facts of the world in which we now live.
Biden is “uneven in his attempts to explain and advance policy thinking.” Ya think?
Biden is uneven in almost everything he attempts — from reading the name of a mayor off the teleprompter to walking across the White House lawn — but the cause of his unevenness is rarely explored.
Noonan and her ilk treat Biden and Harris as if they fully functional politicians capable of the job to which they have been selected.
They refuse to acknowledge Biden’s obvious decline and the obvious incompetence of Harris.
They refuse to acknowledge the corrupt process by which Biden was “elected”.
They refuse to acknowledge the corruption of our intelligence and investigative agencies.
In short they are no longer living in the real world. I’m not sure if Noonan actually believes what she writes or if she just delivers the conventional wisdom that is expected.
This allows Noonan to throw Kamala under the bus for not taking all that excellent advice.
I agree with Neo. I tuned Noonan out about ten years ago.
I thought that she wanted to wave a small conservative banner, while being careful not to alienate her peers. I question whether she did either very successfully.
I am also pleased to reflect that I took the measure of Chris Wallace some time back. To be honest, I find it hard of late to listen to any of the pontificators–most of whom I call Yappers. Even those that I admire, like Levin.
Before Scott Johnson at PowerLine talked about her the other day I didn’t even realize she was active.
Who is her target audience?
One does not read Noonan for insight or wisdom, rather for a certain register on the zeitgeist of a slice of Manhattan.
George Will, Charlie Sykes, Mona Charen, and Jonah Goldberg, to name but a few. A few months ago, the WSJ posted, by a colleague of Noonan’s, a review of HBO’s so-called “documentary” on the “insurrection” of J6 (far worse, naturally, than Pearl Harbor and 9/11) by Dorothy Rabinowitz,
If Rabinowitz is trading in refuse, I’m distressed. I’ve had occasion in the past to be impressed with her work.
Charen, like Noonan, is a publicist. Deep down, she’s pretty superficial. Will, I think, has revealed what his actual motors were all these years: political discussion was a valued occasion to look down on others. Sykes wrote an engaging book on Dartmouth College about 30 years ago, but summaries of his career make him look like an opportunist, so taking Pierre Omidyar’s money seems on brand. Goldberg as far as I can tell is butt-hurt that he and his colleagues at National Review were revealed to have no influence on the course of public discussion in 2015 and 2016; it was all a potemkin enterprise.
None of these people are deranged. They’re just not the people we thought they were seven years ago.
Oldflyer,
‘find it hard to listen to any of the pontificators’
That’s me too. Even one’s I agree with, mostly, like Tucker Carlson I find so incredibly depressing I just can’t.
One does not read Noonan for insight or wisdom, rather for a certain register on the zeitgeist of a slice of Manhattan.
Disagree. I think her only audience is the editors who hired her. I doubt she has any particular rapport with her neighbors, few of whom are Republicans. (By one account, she lives in Brooklyn Heights).
Noonan had a brief moment of realism in 2016 when she wrote that some people she knew in New York actually liked Trump and planned to vote for him. She puzzled why that might be so and seemed almost to understand. For a moment. She, of course, trashed Sarah Palin as low class. Noonan, like so many in the Beltway, have a social circle that all think exactly alike. Trump was acceptable when they thought he was a Democrat.
I might add that I had my doubts before the 2016 election but, lo and behold, he was unique in doing what he had promised. What a shock that was !
(Ralph Peters. another Trump-hater once destroyed by Tucker) recently appeared on CNN spouting the most unhinged drivel.
I hadn’t seen anything by Peters in about 15 years. I seem to recall he wrote for the New York Post, not the Journal. IIRC, he’s retired military, so does have a technae other than turning in copy on time.
I was intrigued by this Noonan column from 2005. It seemed prescient.
_________________________________________
A Separate Peace:
America is in trouble–and our elites are merely resigned.
Our elites, our educated and successful professionals, are the ones who are supposed to dig us out and lead us. I refer specifically to the elites of journalism and politics, the elites of the Hill and at Foggy Bottom and the agencies, the elites of our state capitals, the rich and accomplished and successful of Washington, and elsewhere. I have a nagging sense, and think I have accurately observed, that many of these people have made a separate peace. That they’re living their lives and taking their pleasures and pursuing their agendas; that they’re going forward each day with the knowledge, which they hold more securely and with greater reason than nonelites, that the wheels are off the trolley and the trolley’s off the tracks, and with a conviction, a certainty, that there is nothing they can do about it.
I suspect that history, including great historical novelists of the future, will look back and see that many of our elites simply decided to enjoy their lives while they waited for the next chapter of trouble. And that they consciously, or unconsciously, took grim comfort in this thought: I got mine. Which is what the separate peace comes down to, “I got mine, you get yours.”
–Peggy Noonan (Oct. 27, 2005)
https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB122487970866167655
_________________________________________
Perhaps Noonan has made that “separate peace” she describes. It’s hard to call her an elite, but for practical purposes she is
I wonder what the occasion was in October 2005. There was Katrina and the Iraq War, I suppose.
I began to see Will as a basic snob when he wrote so admiringly of Daniel Moynihan. Yes, Moynihan said many good things, but when it came down to actually putting his job on the line for the good things he said, he choked.
“After all it’s not that awful. You know what the fellow said – in Italy, for thirty years under the Borgias, they had warfare, terror, murder and bloodshed, but they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, they had five hundred years of democracy and peace – and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock. ”
And Regula Mühlemann
https://music.youtube.com/watch?v=3lUmvPI3lpw
I read many of the very many comments which followed Noonan the Airhead’s piece. Almost all were negative.
Here is my posted comment: ” My disapproving comments about Kamala were censored by WSJ. I’ll try again: There is no way to make an incompetent person competent. Sorry, Peggy. But you are wrong, as is usual. I have been reading you for a long time, and your correct postures approach zero in frequency.”
Oops that was meant for the open thread!
Can’t stand the Noonan.
I guess there are some Wall Street wives who read Noonan. They probably also ignore Strassel, Henninger, Freeman, Riley, and Baker. They pick up their husband’s WSJ to make themselves look informed.
What the Left is waging, so far, is an Intel-War using all the tricks of that trade. When someone is turned there are only so many ways it is done. They can have become a “true believer” in the other side, they can be bought with money-fame-sex whatever it takes, or they can be forced, gun to the head actual or through blackmail/extortion. Which one is Peggy? I don’t know, perhaps a combo-pak.
Huxley, in regards to Noonan’s 2005 column about the “elites”. Once the makeup is removed they are just a bunch of mediocrities who moved seamlessly from high school student council and debate club through various Ivy league colleges to well paid positions in professions that only required the ability to speak well and join the right clubs to succeed. None of them made a damn thing that required building and making things, employing people, and taking real risks to succeed.
To supplement what Paul in Boston provided, here’s something from Christopher Roach, writing at American Greatness in 2018:
“Today we have an aristocracy of opinion made up of the managerial elite. Their chief credential is their credentials, as well as their having professed the right opinions. Among this class, much of what passes for deep thinking—whether on economics, foreign policy, or anything else—is in fact a repetition of stale conventional wisdom.”
I share the general sentiment here about Peggy Noonan. Nevertheless, in February 2016 she produced what I consider to be one of the essential writings about that presidential campaign. Here’s the whole thing:
Trump and the Rise of the Unprotected
We’re in a funny moment. Those who do politics for a living, some of them quite brilliant, are struggling to comprehend the central fact of the Republican primary race, while regular people have already absorbed what has happened and is happening. Journalists and politicos have been sharing schemes for how Marco parlays a victory out of winning nowhere, or Ted roars back, or Kasich has to finish second in Ohio. But in my experience any nonpolitical person on the street, when asked who will win, not only knows but gets a look as if you’re teasing him. Trump, they say.
I had such a conversation again Tuesday with a friend who repairs shoes in a shop on Lexington Avenue. Jimmy asked me, conversationally, what was going to happen. I deflected and asked who he thinks is going to win. “Troomp!” He’s a very nice man, an elderly, old-school Italian-American, but I saw impatience flick across his face: Aren’t you supposed to know these things?
In America now only normal people are capable of seeing the obvious.
But actually that’s been true for a while, and is how we got in the position we’re in.
Last October I wrote of the five stages of Trump, based on the Kübler-Ross stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Most of the professionals I know are stuck somewhere between four and five.
But I keep thinking of how Donald Trump got to be the very likely Republican nominee. There are many answers and reasons, but my thoughts keep revolving around the idea of protection. It is a theme that has been something of a preoccupation in this space over the years, but I think I am seeing it now grow into an overall political dynamic throughout the West.
There are the protected and the unprotected. The protected make public policy. The unprotected live in it. The unprotected are starting to push back, powerfully.
The protected are the accomplished, the secure, the successful–those who have power or access to it. They are protected from much of the roughness of the world. More to the point, they are protected from the world they have created. Again, they make public policy and have for some time.
I want to call them the elite to load the rhetorical dice, but let’s stick with the protected.
They are figures in government, politics and media. They live in nice neighborhoods, safe ones. Their families function, their kids go to good schools, they’ve got some money. All of these things tend to isolate them, or provide buffers. Some of them–in Washington it is important officials in the executive branch or on the Hill; in Brussels, significant figures in the European Union –literally have their own security details.
Because they are protected they feel they can do pretty much anything, impose any reality. They’re insulated from many of the effects of their own decisions.
One issue obviously roiling the U.S. and Western Europe is immigration. It is the issue of the moment, a real and concrete one but also a symbolic one: It stands for all the distance between governments and their citizens.
It is of course the issue that made Donald Trump.
Britain will probably leave the European Union over it. In truth immigration is one front in that battle, but it is the most salient because of the European refugee crisis and the failure of the protected class to address it realistically and in a way that offers safety to the unprotected.
If you are an unprotected American–one with limited resources and negligible access to power–you have absorbed some lessons from the past 20 years’ experience of illegal immigration. You know the Democrats won’t protect you and the Republicans won’t help you. Both parties refused to control the border. The Republicans were afraid of being called illiberal, racist, of losing a demographic for a generation. The Democrats wanted to keep the issue alive to use it as a wedge against the Republicans and to establish themselves as owners of the Hispanic vote.
Many Americans suffered from illegal immigration–its impact on labor markets, financial costs, crime, the sense that the rule of law was collapsing. But the protected did fine–more workers at lower wages. No effect of illegal immigration was likely to hurt them personally.
It was good for the protected. But the unprotected watched and saw. They realized the protected were not looking out for them, and they inferred that they were not looking out for the country, either.
The unprotected came to think they owed the establishment–another word for the protected–nothing, no particular loyalty, no old allegiance.
Mr. Trump came from that.
Similarly in Europe, citizens on the ground in member nations came to see the EU apparatus as a racket–an elite that operated in splendid isolation, looking after its own while looking down on the people.
In Germany the incident that tipped public opinion against Chancellor Angela Merkel’s liberal refugee policy happened on New Year’s Eve in the public square of Cologne. Packs of men said to be recent migrants groped and molested groups of young women. It was called a clash of cultures, and it was that, but it was also wholly predictable if any policy maker had cared to think about it. And it was not the protected who were the victims–not a daughter of EU officials or members of the Bundestag. It was middle- and working-class girls–the unprotected, who didn’t even immediately protest what had happened to them. They must have understood that in the general scheme of things they’re nobodies.
What marks this political moment, in Europe and the U.S., is the rise of the unprotected. It is the rise of people who don’t have all that much against those who’ve been given many blessings and seem to believe they have them not because they’re fortunate but because they’re better.
You see the dynamic in many spheres. In Hollywood, as we still call it, where they make our rough culture, they are careful to protect their own children from its ill effects. In places with failing schools, they choose not to help them through the school liberation movement–charter schools, choice, etc.–because they fear to go up against the most reactionary professional group in America, the teachers unions. They let the public schools flounder. But their children go to the best private schools.
This is a terrible feature of our age–that we are governed by protected people who don’t seem to care that much about their unprotected fellow citizens.
And a country really can’t continue this way.
In wise governments the top is attentive to the realities of the lives of normal people, and careful about their anxieties. That’s more or less how America used to be. There didn’t seem to be so much distance between the top and the bottom.
Now is seems the attitude of the top half is: You’re on your own. Get with the program, little racist.
Social philosophers are always saying the underclass must re-moralize. Maybe it is the overclass that must re-moralize.
I don’t know if the protected see how serious this moment is, or their role in it.
That was the column where I thought for a moment she got it.
Zaphod:
Thank you for that video of Regula Mühlemann.
I wonder if it has not always been the “protected” vs the “unprotected.”
Today, the Venn diagrams are roughly the same, with the same minimal overlap, but the critical description is whether a person or family is coming out of the WuFlu hysteria better or worse than they were at the start of 2020.
My whole family is better- no jobs lost, 401k nicely enhanced, only 1 got the WuFlu and was never hospitalized. Even so, spouse and I are confirmed deplorables, having been red-pilled decades ago. Of our 2 kids, one is on our side, the other I have no idea but I know the spouse is a lefty. Their kids are all vaxxed to prevent the 0.000001% risk to them but I think mostly to adhere to their lefty religion.
May the silent, unprotected, deplorable majority awaken and take this country back in 2022, 2024, and forevermore.
The Woke Street Journal news pages are downright leftist,openly calling for and admiring companies who hire based on race or sex, eye rolling articles about everyone’s poor “feewings” in the office, panic mongering covid and so forth. If you’re tripled vaxxed, work in an office that requires everyone to be vaxxed and wear masks, and are still deathly afraid to go into the office, they’re your paper.
The opinion section is socially conservative but lackey corporatists. They’re full globalists with an almost frightening interventionist foreign policy outlook, never meeting a war they didn’t like. They hated Trump and called for his resignation, but now moan and moan about everything Biden is doing, which was pretty damn predictable, and they don’t seem to recognize their own dissonance.
Noonan fits in with most of these views so has a job on the opinion page despite her deep stupidity and naïveté. I don’t read her articles and gloss over most the paper anyway for all the reasons I stated above.
The Noonan article from 2016 that Paul Nachman quotes above is astounding in its acuity, powers of observation and pin-point analysis.
Maybe Peggy Noonan is actually two people?
Or maybe it was simply impossible for her (for a variety of reasons relating to “change”) to follow her correct instincts, as expressed in the article, to their obvious conclusions.
What amazes me, though, is that as a media person she seems either unable to understand—or she preferred not to see—the total hatchet job that was perpetrated by
the media on Trump and his supporters. And continues to be perpetrated on them…and essentially on the entire country.
Unless she agrees with it; but if so, she seems to be suffering from a huge disconnect…which, come to think of it, is probably why she thinks Kamala Harris can just “switch” her personality and attitudes “on” and “off”….
I have difficulty listening to most talking heads since Charles Krauthammer died.
She should set up a conference with Jimmy the shoe repair guy every week.
I bet Jimmy can tell her how the unprotected feel about Joe Biden and Kamala Harris.
But Jimmy is probably gone. Put out of business by the Covid panic–no more people working downtown, no more expensive shoes to repair.
Why is she still writing?
Can’t they offshore her work?
I began to see Will as a basic snob when he wrote so admiringly of Daniel Moynihan. Yes, Moynihan said many good things, but when it came down to actually putting his job on the line for the good things he said, he choked.
Morton Kondracke posed the question in 1983 as to why Daniel Patrick Moynihan had ceased to be a critic of regnant lines of discussion in the Democratic Party. He said an aide to Moynihan told him, “He hates being attacked in The New York Times. More than you can believe”. (That was the Rosenthal-era Times, which was a respectable newspaper).
I admired Moynihan too, but he proved to have his limitations. I wouldn’t hold that against Will. A half dozen other things, yes. Not that.
Noonan’s inexplicable half truck of inanity on the WSJ’s editorial page each week is a major reason my husband and I think about canceling our subscription of several decades.
Noonan has a certain mellifluous prose style. And nice hair. She has never produced insight.
We stopped reading her entirely soon after Trump was elected.
neo,
This was a wonderful takedown of Noonan and the WSJ!
There are so many more qualified and thoughtful writers who could fill those column inches. Difficult to fathom.
Thanks Paul Nachman for Peggy’s quite insightful 2016 opinion. As Jeanne said “Noonan has a certain mellifluous prose style.”
When she’s on your side, it’s easy to believe she is right, correct. But she mostly stopped being on the America First side as she gave up on Bush and began supporting Obama.
She’s an elitist, tho she’s best when she interviews non-elites and fairly accurately conveys their opinions. I only see any of her stuff if linked by those I do follow.
Far Far better is Greenwald guest Cooper from July (did I miss it then? still great):
https://outsidevoices.substack.com/p/author-of-the-mega-viral-thread-on
Greenwald and substack, plus some Rumble, is becoming a better way for news & truth seeking. Even more news than neo comments – but not as interactive or satisfying the involvement urges.
Easy to not link Noonan behind a paywall:
https://www.wsj.com/articles/kamala-harris-needs-to-get-serious-biden-administration-competency-approval-rating-polling-11639093358
I didn’t ever read much Noonan; couldn’t see the there there.
However, after 9-11, she wrote “Welcome Back, Duke”, which is easier found if you use the comma. Forgive a lot, that will.
https://peggynoonan.com/156/
@Richard Aubrey:
It’s good.
But she can turn it on and turn it off at will as it suits.
In good King Charles’s golden days,
When loyalty no harm meant,
A zealous High-Churchman I was,
And so I got preferment;
Unto my flock I daily preached
Kings were by God appointed,
And damned was he that durst resist
Or touch the Lord’s anointed.
And this is law, I will maintain,
Until my dying day, Sir,
That whatsoever king shall reign,
I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, Sir.
When royal James obtained the crown,
And Popery came in fashion,
The penal laws I hooted down,
And read the declaration:
The Church of Rome I found would fit
Full well my constitution,
And had become a Jesuit,
But for the Revolution.
And this is law, I will maintain,
Until my dying day, Sir,
That whatsoever king shall reign,
I’ll be the Vicar of Bray, Sir.
Und so weiter und so fort.
Plenty more where she comes from.
Re the comment about Jonah Goldberg, way back up the thread.
I read a fairly recent ‘The Tuesday’ by Kevin Williamson that talked about what could be called the ‘prestige factor’ in political association, how social status can drive party affiliation, and how the Democrats tend to have it now and the Republicans don’t. I got the feeling from reading other parts of Williamson’s work, and postings by various and sundry others who now anguish about their personal identification with the Republican Party and the conservative movement more generally, that it was a lot more biographical than he wanted to let on. I think there was a time when being Conservative had a certain cachet, the Alex P. Keaton era, when such an outlook was identified with being an Earnest Striver and a hard-eyed Iconoclast not taken in by the hippie-dippie crowd but still able to kick back, loosen your tie, and light up your choice of smoke. If Slick Willie had been able to keep his pants zipped this group might have continued to gravitate to the Democrats but the Bubba style just didn’t fit the way W’s socially liberal conservatism did. This was the era when Goldberg produced Liberal Fascism, a pretty precise explanation of the trajectory the Democrat Party has followed over the intervening years even if Goldberg himself seems to have repudiated it. Along these same lines I read a remark about David Brook’s recent disavowal of Republican affiliation that his conservatism appears to have been one largely of manners, and not any real connection to principles of natural rights or opposition to the overall Leftist project of straightening crooked human timber. All of these folks seem to share the angst that a whole lot of socially unacceptable people are now identifying as Republicans, among them vax-mandate and NPI skeptics, non-globalists, and other champions of populist causes.
Christopher
The need for social acceptance is, I suppose, a relict of our evolution. Too far in the outgroup and you’re dead.
Still, as in a lot of things, there’s too much of a good thing and doing politics as a price of acceptance is ‘way too much.
How about Groucho Marx who wouldn’t join a club whose standards were so low as to accept him?
Or, if they don’t like me, there’s something wrong with them?