National Review takes on Trump Supporters

[DrDoug]

So this is how NR sees its conservative supporters now that they are rebelling against the Republican establishment?

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and — odious, stupid term — “the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

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.
...

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.

...

I guess the knives come out when the idiots aren't being useful any more. Absolutely brutal, especially the parts about drug/alcohol dependency and the whelping of children as if they were dogs.

It almost made me forget he was talking about white people.

 

[disappoint]

Wow. Was that written by the second coming of Adolf Hitler?

Suspend your Godwin's Law enforcement for just a moment as I don't agree with that law anyway. If someone is acting like a genocidal fascist maniac I will call them on it.

This is exactly some of the tactics used by such persons. Dehumanization: Equating children to dogs.

And genocide or ethnic cleansing: "...they deserve to die."

I'm sure it'd be much easier to murder the problem than deal with it in a more humane fashion for example oh I don't know helping them. But has he really learned nothing from the mistakes of the past?

Furthermore, if the problem isn't Washington, then we should see the same problem in all nations on Earth to the same extent as in the United States. Do we?

 

[MongGrel]

Holy wtf ...

 

[LegendKiller]

This, written by a rag supported by globalists, PNAC cronies, and MIC blood suckers. Is it any surprise?

Its sad to see the victim blaming. They took the jobs and now don't understand why people are pissed. One way or another, they are losing this party, whether by alienating them repeatedly through shitty trade deals, or calling for them to die and saying they are "low information" idiots.

 

[disappoint]

This, written by a rag supported by globalists, PNAC cronies, and MIC blood suckers. Is it any surprise?

Its sad to see the victim blaming. They took the jobs and now don't understand why people are pissed. One way or another, they are losing this party, whether by alienating them repeatedly through shitty trade deals, or calling for them to die and saying they are "low information" idiots.

They took those jobs and sent them to China, Mexico and other developing nations specifically to circumvent the laws of the United States protecting blue collar workers so they could increase their profits. People are not only starting to see that, but more effectively (to change human behavior) they are starting to feel that.

 

[Vic]

Only poor blacks are responsible for the cultural problems that have hindered their advancement in society.

 

[Vic]

This, written by a rag supported by globalists, PNAC cronies, and MIC blood suckers. Is it any surprise?

Its sad to see the victim blaming. They took the jobs and now don't understand why people are pissed. One way or another, they are losing this party, whether by alienating them repeatedly through shitty trade deals, or calling for them to die and saying they are "low information" idiots.

You do realize that Trump is just a front man for Carl Icahn, right?

 

[Genx87]

Implosion imminent. Hopefully what comes out the other side in the conservative movement is more sane than what has been going on for nearly the past 2 decades.

 

[sunzt]

They took those jobs and sent them to China, Mexico and other developing nations specifically to circumvent the laws of the United States protecting blue collar workers so they could increase their profits. People are not only starting to see that, but more effectively (to change human behavior) they are starting to feel that.

Do you mean Trump?

 

[dank69]

I am going to play devil's advocate and suggest that he meant communities that are built around these principles need to die and not that the actual people need to die. As in, this demographic needs to shrink and eventually disappear. Poor choice of words, even so.

 

[fskimospy]

I am going to play devil's advocate and suggest that he meant communities that are built around these principles need to die and not that the actual people need to die. As in, this demographic needs to shrink and eventually disappear. Poor choice of words, even so.

I agree this is what he meant. It's still funny to see how quickly they turn on people though. These communities were Real 'Murrica only a few years back, now they need to die.

 

[IronWing]

There are towns out there that no longer have economic reason to exist and only continue to exist through tax funded subsidies. The author mentions eastern Kentucky because there are coal mining towns there where the mines closed generations ago leaving no reason for the towns to remain. Pouring money into the towns hasn't revived the towns but has simply prolonged the dying. Kentucky law encourages people to stay in these economic dead ends by allowing people to remain on welfare if they can't find jobs within their home, postage stamp sized counties. The jobs aren't coming back. The mines are played out in many areas and technology ensures that orders of magnitude fewer workers are needed to mine coal where it is still plentiful. So I agree with the author that it is well past time to pull the plug on towns that have no reason to be.

The west is littered with ghost towns that experienced a boom, a bust, and were gone. That's far better than hanging around with nothing much to do.

Case in point: Meet Playas, NM. It was a company town of 1000 residents built around a copper smelter. When the smelter closed, the company closed the town. The town had no remaining economic reason to exist. If it had not been a company town, how large would the subsidy have to be to "save" a community that no longer has an economic function?

 

[Phokus]

The only reason why i don't have more compassion for these folks is because working class whites used the exact same arguments about black communities as well. Now they're experiencing the exact same thing. Now they have new targets to blame their lot in life.

 

[Jhhnn]

technology ensures that orders of magnitude fewer workers are needed to mine coal where it is still plentiful.

That pretty much applies to all jobs other than personal services. It puts the lie to the Job Creator meme entirely.

 

[Jhhnn]

The only reason why i don't have more compassion for these folks is because working class whites used the exact same arguments about black communities as well. Now they're experiencing the exact same thing. Now they have new targets to blame their lot in life.

That's been a function of their divide & conquer leadership. Trump is no better, just different.

 

[glenn1]

I am going to play devil's advocate and suggest that he meant communities that are built around these principles need to die and not that the actual people need to die. As in, this demographic needs to shrink and eventually disappear. Poor choice of words, even so.

No, they should rely on the Democratic platform of increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour for all the jobs that don't exist in that town, carbon taxes, and for tax hikes for the super wealthy. They'll still be poor and miserable in dead-end towns, but dammit the Democrats really truly care about people like them. It shows in every policy they advocate and how much they've changed their lives for the better over the years.

 

[Jhhnn]

I agree this is what he meant. It's still funny to see how quickly they turn on people though. These communities were Real 'Murrica only a few years back, now they need to die.

You mean that Repub leadership has ruthlessly exploited fear & prejudice in support of the greed of the financial elite?

 

[dank69]

No, they should rely on the Democratic platform of increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour for all the jobs that don't exist in that town, carbon taxes, and for tax hikes for the super wealthy. They'll still be poor and miserable in dead-end towns, but dammit the Democrats really truly care about people like them. It shows in every policy they advocate and how much they've changed their lives for the better over the years.

Excellent unrelated rant! A+ Would read again! A++++++++++++++

 

[Jhhnn]

No, they should rely on the Democratic platform of increasing the minimum wage to $15/hour for all the jobs that don't exist in that town, carbon taxes, and for tax hikes for the super wealthy. They'll still be poor and miserable in dead-end towns, but dammit the Democrats really truly care about people like them. It shows in every policy they advocate and how much they've changed their lives for the better over the years.

Just imagine how much better off they'd be if the Job Creators! had their way entirely.

 

[Atreus21]

I read this yesterday. This was David French defending the text cited in the OP, which was written by Kevin Williamson, who is probably one of the best writers NRO has.

I haven't been a supporter of Trump, but if it comes down to him vs Clinton, he's getting my vote.

At any rate, French's defense of this seems legit.

These are strong words, but they are fundamentally true and important to say. My childhood was different from Kevin’s, but I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.

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. Yet millions of Americans aren’t doing their best. Indeed, they’re barely trying. As I’ve related before, my church in Kentucky made a determined attempt to reach kids and families that were falling between the cracks, and it was consistently astounding how little effort most parents and their teen children made to improve their lives. If they couldn’t find a job in a few days — or perhaps even as little as a few hours — they’d stop looking. If they got angry at teachers or coaches, they’d drop out of school. If they fought with their wife, they had sex with a neighbor. And always — always — there was a sense of entitlement.

And that’s where disability or other government programs kicked in. They were there, beckoning, giving men and women alternatives to gainful employment. You don’t have to do any work (your disability lawyer does all the heavy lifting), you make money, and you get drugs.

At our local regional hospital, it’s become a bitter joke the extent to which the community is hooked on “Xanatab” — the Xanax and Lortab prescriptions that lead to drug dependence. Of course we should have compassion even as we call on people to do better. I have compassion for kids who often see the worst behavior modeled at home. I have compassion for families facing economic uncertainty. But compassion can’t excuse or enable self-destructive moral failures.

I don't see how this is any different than what conservatives have been saying for years - that an excessive welfare apparatus is an incentive to laziness and sloth.

 

[Phokus]

I read this yesterday. This was David French defending the text cited in the OP, which was written by Kevin Williamson, who is probably one of the best writers NRO has.

I haven't been a supporter of Trump, but if it comes down to him vs Clinton, he's getting my vote.

At any rate, French's defense of this seems legit.



I don't see how this is any different than what conservatives have been saying for years - that an excessive welfare apparatus is an incentive to laziness and sloth.

I think it can be both true that people don't try hard enough and there aren't enough opportunities around.

 

[BoberFett]

Excellent unrelated rant! A+ Would read again! A++++++++++++++

Just because you don't understand the words doesn't mean it's unrelated.

Just imagine how much better off they'd be if the Job Creators! had their way entirely.

They'd still not have a job? What are you saying?

 

[Atreus21]

I think it can be both true that people don't try hard enough and there aren't enough opportunities around.

I agree.

WTF?

 

[Phokus]

I agree.

WTF?

If opportunities are disappearing, can't really blame people for being demotivated. Imagine if everyone abandoned dying towns and moved to where people are all employed? People would be fighting for jobs driving wages down, crime will go up, cost of living will go up as people fight for housing, etc.

No win situation here.

 

[Subyman]

Wow, what a shit article. There are arguments to be made against Trump, but laying the blame for economic struggle at the feet of the middle class is crazy.