You whelp 'em, we use 'em

You whelp ’em, we use ’em

The National Review, conservative journal of record and close ally of the Republican Party, has been struggling with Trump’s impending nomination victory. They ran a special issue “against Trump” in which all of their columnists whaled on him; they invented the #neverTrump hashtag that is clearly failing; and they have been running a constant series of attacks on him, leavened of course with conspiracy theories about how he is really a Democrat and anyway it’s all Obama’s fault. Finally, though, they realize that the writing is on the wall and have given up on any chance of  holding him off. Today’s National Review is full of articles claiming he is no worse than Bill Clinton, it’s all the left’s fault, the media are all just like Breitbart, and he won’t be so bad as president anyway. I guess this is the bargaining part of the five stages of grief, which leaves just depression and acceptance to go. And make no mistake, the journal that was formed to “Stand athwart history, yelling stop!” is almost certainly going to accept Trump in the vain hope that they can cut a deal with him – or more likely, so that they can stay connected to the wingnut welfare dripfeed. We’ll see about that.

But before acceptance comes depression, and the National Review’s subscription journal released a perfect model for that stage of grief today, in the form of a vicious attack on the “white working class” that make up the Republican base, and that is deserting its mainstream candidates for Trump. In this article we get to see what the Republican establishment really thinks of its base, through the voice of a Republican stalwart, Kevin Williamson. And what he has to say should put to rest any doubts that the Republican leadership have any respect for ordinary people. Here is a taster:

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…

…The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible… The white American under-class 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 want to live, get out of Garbutt [a blue-collar town in New York].

There’s a lot more where that came from, all of it vicious and bitter, and defended by another close friend of the establishment, David French, in a follow-up article. This stuff is so cruel, so bitter and so vicious that it’s hard to comprehend that these people see white working class Americans as anything but their greatest enemy. I want to particularly isolate this phrase for special attention, from the above quote:
the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog
Roll that phrase around in your mouth for a moment. How does it taste? That’s some bitter fruit, right there. I’m having difficulty thinking of anything I’ve read in political discourse from a mainstream commentator any time in the past ten years that compares to this piece of vileness. The language is carefully designed to remove the humanity of its object, not just through the banal comparison to stray dogs (we all know what to do with them!) but through its careful transformation of the phrase “human children” into a soulless other. It’s a phrase so dripping with contempt that no one who deployed it will ever be able to walk back from it. It’s clear to everyone what Williamson and his defenders think of the white working class, and it’s not pretty.
Unfortunately for the puppy-beaters at the National Review, the “white working class”[1] is all that stands between their precious party and electoral oblivion, and for the past 20 years they and their political friends and their donor masters have been assiduously alienating themselves from every other slice of American life. It’s pretty clear that they’ve been running a long con on their main voters, promising them racism and religious fundamentalism in exchange for an economic policy platform built entirely around shoveling money into the bank accounts of their rich mates, no matter what the price to their voters. They’ve sustained that con through deceptively blaming all the problems on Democrats, and maintaining the image that they are the only people who really care about or understand mainstream America. But now a brave new figure has promised that “white working class” base a new, shinier agenda with more racism and an economic message that appeals to their real economic insecurities. The National Review’s “intellectuals” and Republican leadership have been telling their base that the economy is fucked and it’s all Mexicans fault for 20 years now, while stealing their income, and now some philistine has come along to play to the same insecurities with a much louder racist message.
This has the sheisters at the National Review mad for two reasons. It isn’t just that the victims of their con have proven as faithless to them as they were to their victims; it’s also that they realize their position at the wingnut welfare feeding trough is in danger. These trust fund babies who have never done a decent day’s work have made a very good living from writing attack screeds on poor black people and pretending that Obama was born in Kenya, but they thought the skills they were offering were in real demand. Now Trump has shown that the GOP doesn’t need policy nuance or subtly-crafted dog-whistle rhetoric. You just have to call Mexicans rapists and promise people everything they want, and the vote is yours. Why would the Koch brothers bother funneling money to the likes of Kevin Williamson when any old red-faced carnival barker can win the nomination just by screaming at foreigners? If the folks at National Review had any use, it was laying the groundwork for Trump. Their work is done now, the earth properly salted – who needs them any more?
Over the next few months, as the Republican thinktank establishment realize that their base has deserted them, and then also start to worry that the wingnut welfare will follow, you can expect a lot more of these vicious attacks on the white working class. They’re going to show what they really think of the marks they’ve been fleecing over their whole career. And as you read this venom, remember that a central part of Republican “intellectual” mythology is that the Democrats are the party of the inner-city elites, people who don’t care at all about the troubles of ordinary Americans, never move amongst them and don’t understand them. In popular Republican orthodoxy Democrats sneer at blue collar workers and all the schmultzy paraphernalia of workaday America, and only Republicans truly understand these salt-of-the-earth Americans. Then compare Williamson’s phrases with the way Bernie Sanders talks about (and has fought for) the rights and lives of ordinary Americans, or the way Obama engages with the victims of mass shootings. Who really cares about these people?
Everything you need to know about the Republican party’s agenda is in that Williamson article. Let’s hope it becomes their epitaph.
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fn1: I put this phrase in quotes because there is no such thing as a monolithic “white working class” in a country as geographically and economically yooooge as America. White workers in the coastal South are completely different to workers in the megalopolis of the north east, the farming communities of flyover country or the sun-drenched west. In truth the Republicans haven’t been able to maintain a monolithic control over this group, but American political scientists (as well as Republican “thinkers”) seem to see everything in terms of demographics, so I’m stuck with the idea.
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picture note: That beast is from the BBC TV Torchwood series special issue, Children of Men, in which [spoilers!] aliens come to earth to harvest human children to use as recreational drugs. The language that alien in the picture uses to describe its drug dispensary is pretty much on a par with Williamson’s.