"Some people simply do not belong" at the exclusive Bushwood country club, Ted Knight's Judge Smails reminded Ty Webb (Chevy Chase) — privileged son of the club's founder — in the 1980 comedy classic "Caddyshack." Indeed, they don't. But who doesn't belong at Bushwood? The scion who takes a personal interest in everyone down to the lowliest caddy or the ego-driven judge who cheats at every game and wouldn't recognize a good time if it showed up in loud plaid pants and bought drinks for everyone?
"The slobs versus the snobs" might be America's greatest contribution to the art of cinema, and when I say, "art of cinema," I mean "movies" because I'm not one of those snobs — and we're watching that classic theme play out once more in the presidential election.
New York Times TV critic James Poniewozik noted the "Caddyshack"/Donald Trump connection in his newspaper column and in his 2019 book, "Audience of One." In an interview with Vox, Poniewozik described Rodney Dangerfield's funloving, nouveau-riche Al Czervik like so: "He is definitely richer than the other people at the country club, and this gives him the freedom not to care about them. It gives him this liberating... [trails off] — and this is what made him run away with the movie."
Poniewozik continued:
Donald Trump is a pop culture figure. He has lived in pop culture all of his life. I’m not saying that he sat down with a notebook and he plotted all this out. But these archetypes come to him because archetypes are how leaders and candidates in politics tell stories. He’s like the Clampetts against Mister Drysdale. He’s Rodney Dangerfield against Ted Knight. It’s the rich guy that you want to be against the f****** snobby rich guy that everybody hates.
Going back to 2017, Elizabeth Williamson tried to scold Trump for serving in office like Czervik might. "This is rule by Al Czervik," she chided in her New York Times op-ed, "a reckless, clownish boor surrounded by sycophants, determined to blow up all convention. But this is real life, and every time Mr. Trump strikes a pose, the rest of the world holds its breath."
How have NYT-approved conventions worked out for this country's institutions and half our citizens for the last two or three decades? How have they worked out for the world at large? If you're part of the privileged establishment, you've probably done well. Your portfolio has grown, your son didn't get sent to fight in the Sandbox, and your job didn't get outsourced to China or Mexico. Nobody told you to "Learn to code" when your industry got wiped out by some Washington diktat.
But Williamson wasn't done. "His rhetoric is much like that of a stand-up comedian, says Marc Jampole, a blogger and poet from New York City." That Williamson expected anyone to care what a no-name blogger/poet from New York City thinks might be the best-ever example of Establishment cluelessness.
#ProTip: Don't invite Elizabeth Williamson to your party unless it involves high tea and zero fun.
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If you've never been to a Trump rally, the former prez opens his events with the same spirit Czervik closed the movie: "Hey everybody, we're all gonna get laid!"
I mean that comparison figuratively, of course.
It isn't just the lefties, of course. Plenty of established figures on the Right have become no-fun scolds, too. From Mitt Romney to Dick Cheney — aren't they a pair? — it's been one Establishment GOP figure after another deciding that it's better to protect The Swamp than to take just one chance (or two) on an outré figure who doesn't belong there.
"You'll get nothing, and like it," indeed.
The most notorious current example might be Kevin D. Williamson's (no relation to Elizabeth) "The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio" in The Dispatch last week.
I know Kevin a bit. A decade ago, the two of us hung out talking for endless hours at a conference where neither one of us had many official duties — and we got deep into political issues, philosophy, and even personal stuff. I ended up bumming so many cigarettes off him that I bought him a fresh pack.
Kevin is a seriously erudite guy with a genuine working-class background, and I've learned a lot from his columns over the years. But when he wrote, "You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich... but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll," he certainly showed me who is putting on airs — and it wasn't Vance.
(Also: "It was the last time I had any cigarettes, honey, I swear.")
There's no denying that Trump brought much-needed convention-denying fun to a capital city where the only thing more revolting than the endless stream of debt, regulation, and self-dealing it produces is the increasingly intertwined relationship between government officials and the press so incestuous it would make a Habsburg monarch blush.
And Another Thing: "Caddyshack" did not end up quite the movie that writers Brian Doyle-Murray and Douglas Kenney and writer-director Harold Ramis intended to make. Based on Doyle-Murray's experiences as a young caddy, the original script focused much more on the goings-on in the caddy shack. Hence the name. But the studio insisted on more and more screentime for big stars like Bill Murray, Chevy Chase, and Rodney Dangerfield. So the no-name actors who played caddies like Danny and Tony ended up with less screen time. Ironic, yes?
Look, we know who Judge Smails would vote for in November. He might quibble with Kamala Harris's color or that she's from Berkeley but — those small quibbles aside — Smails would recognize a kindred spirit. Like himself, Harris is an Establishment figure fully committed to the vanity-based status quo.
"As California attorney general, [Harris] spent years subverting a 2011 Supreme Court ruling requiring the state to reduce its prison population," the leftwing American Prospect reported in 2019. "The overseeing judicial panel nearly found the state in contempt of court." But Harris — California's chief law enforcement officer — wanted the state to keep its pennies-on-the-dollar prison labor and had to be "ridiculed and flagged" (and sued) before her department would give them up.
"I've sentenced boys younger than you to the gas chamber," Smails told Danny the caddy with his usual air of menacing self-importance. "Didn't want to do it. I felt I owed it to them."
The only distinction between Smails and Harris is that one is fictional and unintentionally funny, while the other is real and intentionally frightening.
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Chavey Chase's Ty Webb, despite his wealth and privilege, was no snob. Smails, despite his wealth and power, had no class — and no appreciation of the institutions he was supposed to nurture and respect, not twist for his own ends. Trump, for all his seeming crassness, gets America in a way the Establishment no longer does.
Watch Trump at a recent rally in Pennsylvania:
Trump gets it. The man actually gets it. This is what a true conservative sounds like.
— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) September 24, 2024
TRUMP: "It takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. But reckless migration policy can change it quickly and permanently. Just like we’ve seen in London, and Paris, and… pic.twitter.com/dtkVc56onC
Here's the money quote so you can copy and paste it: "It takes centuries to build the unique character of each state. But reckless migration policy can change it quickly and permanently. Just like we’ve seen in London, and Paris, and Minneapolis."
(Forget the copy and paste. Just share this article with your friends and family. )
Legal immigration with assimilation helped make this country great. Illegal immigration without assimilation is a foreign invasion — colonization, really. The elites were meant to protect and nurture the culture that makes this constitutional republic possible, but in endless illegal immigration, the Establishment gets what it wants now instead: cheap labor and harvest-ready ballots.
The Establishment believes that Trump is the foreign invader, and to them, I suppose he is. With his loud outfits, giant yacht, and crude humor, Czervik never did fit in at Bushwood. But he gave that crusty country club a good shakeup just when it needed it most.
Policy-wise, I have a few differences with the team Trump is putting together, but that's hardly the point. The big picture is that our elites have failed us spectacularly and in almost every possible way. Worse, the failures haven't been by accident. The first time Al Czervik — er, Donald Trump — won the White House, he didn't give crusty old Washington half the shaking up it deserved and we needed. The second time had better be the charm because that's all get.
Trump's rallying cry isn't, "Hey everybody, we're all gonna get laid!" but if the Establishment wins one more election, it's for sure that we're all going to get screwed.
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