{"id":89949,"date":"2016-03-13T18:19:49","date_gmt":"2016-03-14T02:19:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=89949"},"modified":"2016-03-13T18:27:07","modified_gmt":"2016-03-14T02:27:07","slug":"conservatism-is-dead","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=89949","title":{"rendered":"Conservatism Is Dead"},"content":{"rendered":"

From the Journal of American Greatness<\/a>:<\/p>\n

I’m afraid we were too easy on Kevin Williamson<\/a>. It’s not just his punditry that’s of low character. Kevin insists in baring his id to the world and it’s not pretty.<\/p>\n

He\u2019s so inordinately proud of himself for having risen above his hardscrabble beginnings (or at least environment, since he doesn\u2019t reveal much about his personal circumstances beyond where he grew up) that he dismisses as losers everyone who hasn\u2019t managed to become an NR pundit. \u201cLosers,\u201d hmmm\u2014where have we heard that before? Must be a coincidence.<\/p>\n

There is a higher purpose to Williamson\u2019s splenetic garbage, however. Can their now be any doubt that the Republican establishment and its intellectual court jesters despise the people they ostensibly exist to represent and serve? Williamson\u2019s message to the white working class is, literally, you \u201cdeserve to die.\u201d That\u2019s a vote-getter for sure!<\/p>\n

Lest Williamson accuse us of quoting him out of context, we acknowledge that he qualifies his death wishes with a reference to \u201ccommunities.\u201d But what\u2019s the difference? A people is at least party defined by where and how they live. Williamson\u2019s glib order to get in a U-Haul and leave behind all they\u2019ve ever known\u2014and presumably still love\u2014takes let-them-eat-cake to a new level. When the Davoisie\u2014with Williamson\u2019s eager assistance\u2014is finally done hollowing out every middle class community in America, to where does Williamson suggest the American people U-Haul?<\/p>\n

Aside from Williamson\u2019s sneering contempt\u2014which rises mellifluously from every word and appears to be the only device in his rhetorical bag of tricks\u2014several things are notable about the piece. First, wasn\u2019t it only a month ago that NR\u2019s editor\u2014presumably the same one who approved this disgraceful screed\u2014wrote that the Republican Party needs to reach out to the working class and embrace at least a moderate level of populism? At the time, we found that too little, too late and reminiscent of a deathbed conversion. That initial reaction has now been completely vindicated. As we suspected, it was all a put-on\u2014an ass-covering lie.<\/p>\n

Second, Williamson\u2014and by extension NR\u2014unwittingly reveal their core liberalism, which is moreover liberalism of a certain kind: what fired-former-NR-writer John Derbyshire calls \u201cwhite gentry liberalism.\u201d The policy prescriptions of white gentry libs and their doppelgangers on the \u201cright\u201d may differ. But that hardly matters since to both, policy is secondary to virtue signaling, which appears to be the real point of Williamson\u2019s piece. He seems ashamed of his origins and wants to rub in the faces of those who didn\u2019t\u2014like him\u2014manage to rise above them that he\u2019s their superior. Adding \u201cf\u00fchrer\u201d to the title, which at this point ought to embarrassingly disqualify any piece not actually about an actual Nazi, is dog-whistling to the left that Williamson and NR\u2019s editors have more in common with Central Park West than with the white trash Republican base.<\/p>\n

Speaking of Derbyshire, remember the essay that got him fired (published, we note, not in NR but by another magazine)? Whatever one thinks of it, Derb did not say that blacks\u2019 problems were 100% their fault nor that they \u201cdeserve to die.\u201d Yet when Williamson says that about whites, not only is he not fired, he gets prime real estate in NR itself plus a plug on the cover.<\/p>\n

And speaking of policy, remember Williamson\u2019s piece about Detroit? In that one, he attributed the Motor City\u2019s every pathology to its refusal to embrace Williamson\u2019s own doctrinaire libertarianism. Lack of virtue or even bad habits among the people\u2014could those possibly play a role? Nah. But in this latest, Williamson insists that the problems of the white working class have absolutely nothing to do with policy and are wholly the result of their own failures. Gee, I wonder what the difference could be that causes a lib like Williamson to diagnose causation so differently for what\u2014at least outwardly\u2014seem like similar symptoms? (But only \u201cseem\u201d: compare the crime rate for Beattyville, KY\u2014the poorest town in Appalachia\u2014with Detroit\u2019s).<\/p>\n

Williamson recently spent some time in Silicon Valley, where he naturally (finally!) felt at home among so many other \u00fcbermenchen of his own caliber. Palo Alto sure is a long way from Lubbock! But true to form, he doesn\u2019t understand Northern California at all. The \u201ccapitalists\u201d he tongue-bathes are statist, rent-seeking oligarchs who view the likes of him with even greater contempt than he views his old high school classmates and their families.<\/p>\n

Williamson did unwittingly make a case for deserved\u2014swift, unmerciful\u2014death. But not for his intended target. It is rather Williamson\u2019s brand of \u201cconservatism,\u201d NR and\u2014if it continues on its current path\u2014the Republican Party that deserve to die. Certainly, they\u2019re well on the way to \u201cconservative\u201d Valhalla (where every night is November 4th, 1980, every keynoter Jack Kemp, and every meal rib-eye and Freedom Fries). If this wretched revelation of the hatred for the American people at the heart of Conservatism, Inc. doesn\u2019t finish them off, we have to wonder what will?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

From the Journal of American Greatness: I’m afraid we were too easy on Kevin Williamson. It’s not just his punditry that’s of low character. Kevin insists in baring his id to the world and it’s not pretty. He\u2019s so inordinately … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[21791,201],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-89949","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-america","category-conservatives"],"aioseo_notices":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89949","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=89949"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89949\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":89956,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89949\/revisions\/89956"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=89949"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=89949"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=89949"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}