How The Democratic Elite Betrayed Their Party And Paved The Way For Donald Trump
The Republican elite is struggling to understand why so many of its core supporters have abandoned them for an authoritarian demagogue. After decades of cozy cohabitation, the plebes are moving out, leaving the cufflink wing of the party to wonder what went wrong.
Last week, the leading journal of elite conservative opinion presented a blunt, honest and unapologetic answer: Republican intellectuals loathe the rabble.
“The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture,” writes Kevin D. Williamson, one of several vocal Trump critics on staff at National Review. Williamson assails in scoffing prose what he calls the “immoral” “lie” of the current political moment. Specifically, “that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t.”
Surveying rust-belt desolation in upstate New York, Williamson concludes: “Nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.”
Liberal writers are reveling in Williamson’s straightforward poverty-shaming (which his colleague David French defended). The New Republic’s Jeet Heer sees the piece as a return to National Review‘s founding “aristocratic conservatism,” which has more recently been “obscured by a populist mask.” For Jonathan Chait, Williamson is exposing the perverse moral logic of hardline libertarianism. “The marketplace hasn’t failed the white working class,” he mocks. “The white working class has failed capitalism.”
They could go further. Republican elites have relied on such ideas for years. In the depths of the Great Recession, Paul Ryan worried that the social safety net was becoming “a hammock that lulls able-bodied people to lives of dependency.” Unemployment had spiked not because of a financial crisis, but because the poor had suddenly decided in unison to be very lazy. Mitt Romney’s “47 percent” comment was nearly as dismissive as Williamson’s vitriol.
But this only explains why the rabble are abandoning their well-heeled overlords in the GOP. It does not explain why they have embraced a xenophobic authoritarian instead of, say, the Democratic Party.
The most comforting rationale for Democratic true believers is that these voters are racist and ignorant and hostile to Democratic policies on social issues. That’s part of the explanation. But the full truth is a bitter pill for Democrats to swallow. Thomas Frank’s new book Listen, Liberal Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of People?documents a half-century of work by the Democratic elite to belittle working people and exile their concerns to the fringes of the party’s platform. If the prevailing ideology of the Republican establishment is that of a sneering aristocracy, Democratic elites are all too often the purveyors of a smirking meritocracy that offers working people very little.