This has been going around for a while already, but I haven’t seen it on Slog and I don’t want anyone to miss the novel spectacle of conservative intellectuals turning on the white working class over that group’s support for Donald Trump.
In the National Review, Kevin Williamson scoffed at all the white working class anger that’s clearly propelling Trump, saying of poor, rural whites:
Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America…
The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too.
The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
If you were paying attention in the 80s and 90s, you’ll recognize this as precisely the kind of language that conservative intellectuals used to reserve for talking disdainfully about poor black Americans.
Defending his colleague, the National Review‘s David French wrote that the above was “fundamentally true and important to say,” and then he called for the kind of present-day intellectual consistency that the right failed to practice for decades as it mostly lionized the white working class and berated liberals for offering “excuses” about the plight of the black underclass. Except French didn’t dwell on the intellectual inconsistencies of the past—like really, really didn’t dwell. More like skipped right over them:
For generations conservatives have rightly railed against deterministic progressive notions that put human choices at the mercy of race, class, history, or economics. Those factors can create additional challenges, but they do not relieve any human being of the moral obligation to do their best.
Historical revisions aside, what French is really saying is this:
Poor white Americans, you are hereby put on notice: because Trump has broken the hold we conservative intellectuals used to have over your political imaginations, we no longer relieve you of your moral obligations.
(Here’s Krugman on why the current plight of the white working class actually proves that those so-called “deterministic progressive notions” were correct.)
