Sometimes you read something that stops you in your tracks, and you say out loud, “Holy F&$k, did he really write that?” That happened to me reading excerpts from Father-Fuhrer, an anti-Trump piece by Kevin Williamson in the National Review:**
If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog — you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be. It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that.
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. (Emphasis added.)
Wait. “They deserve to die?” Is he referring to the people or just the communities? Does it make a difference?
The National Review is clarifying that its contempt extends not only to minorities, but to poor whites, who have only themselves to blame. Who is left? Clearly not we liberals. Only the elite right wingers who deserve to rule their Randite realm and let people and/or communities die.
Williamson’s rant comes from his and his National Review colleagues’ shock and despair at the rise of Trump — Their loss of control over the white working class they’ve been happy to use for 40 years to implement their reactionary agenda. Doug! at Balloon Juice writes in We are all strapping young bucks now:
I wish that just for one minute, these right-wing idiots would consider what it’s like trying to raise kids on one insufficient income or two barely sufficient incomes. If they did, they’d realize that most working class parents, in these downscale communities that deserve to die, are heroes in a way that some talentless douche at a money-losing rag will never be.
Yes, Trump has unleashed the Id of base Republicans, but he has also laid bare the complete moral corruption of the so-called “intellectual” right that truly does not care if the lower orders, of any color live or die — whether it’s by intentional deprivation of health care, pointless war, or poisoned water.
*Charlie Pierce
**Link is to Balloon Juice’s piece. I won’t link to NR.