November 11, 2016
The second enabler was correspondent Kevin Williamson, a crackerjack writer who excels at maligning liberal hypocrisy. But for whatever reason, Williamson has an issue with working-class whites and their refusal to shut up and take the hate they get from multicultural snobs. In one particularly nasty screed, Williamson wrote, “The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible.”
Now, trailer-park folk aren”t reading National Review in between working two jobs and preparing brown-bag lunches for their kids. But Williamson’s sentiment is no doubt shared by his colleagues, and is prevalent in America’s elite institutions. That contempt has worked its way down multiple channels to reach whom sociologist Donald Warren called “Middle American Radicals.”
The MARs reacted to the scorn as any average person would: They gave the elites the bird.
When Battle of New Orleans hero and all-around badass Andrew Jackson won the presidency in 1828, he didn”t seek the approval of editors and journalists who soiled his good name. He ran the office like it was rightfully his. “To the victor belong the spoils,” said New York senator William L. Marcy upon hearing about Jackson’s electoral rout.
With his schlonging of Hillary Clinton’s overprepared campaign, the spoils belong to Trump. The conservative movement that holds National Review as an urtext won nothing. The hacks, chatter heads, scribblers, fact vetters, pontificators, and number crunchers all served as dead weight. Their opinions have little, if any, effect on the electorate.
National Review is now an arbiter of nothing. Why not say “So long!” to it as Buckley did to the Birchers a half century ago?
The Era of Trump begins now.
