The March 28th edition of National Review ran a column that described Donald Trump as a “Father-Fuhrer” for poor white men raised without a strong male figure. “It is easy to imagine a generation of young men being raised without fathers and looking out the window like a kid waiting for Daddy to come home,” National Review’s Kevin Williamson wrote, “waiting for the Father-Fuhrer figure they have spent their lives imagining.”
Williamson concluded that white working class men victimized by globalization were not actually victims at all, but rather losers whose own poor choices have led them down a path of “welfare dependency, drug and alcohol addiction, and family anarchy.”
It is not quite as rosy a lens as what conservative writers once used to focus on these same Reagan Democrats. “The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles,” wrote Williamson.
“Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin.”
Wow.
Imagine the reaction from William F. Buckley if such an article were written about the same voters who helped propel candidates like Reagan, Gingrich and Bush 43 to power.
“Suggesting that faithful Christians and life long conservatives like my brother cannot support Donald Trump while believing in Jesus is offensive enough. But denigrating millions of working class Americans let down by a quarter century of Bush-Clinton rule as drug addicts or white supremacists is even more destructive to the conservative cause.”
I didn’t leave the GOP, the GOP left me.
I’m no Trump fan but that characterization is as condescending as can be. Can everyone be a writer or a doctor? A nuclear scientist? I dare say if everyone would attempt to be a journalist the writer would be one of the unemployed who made a bad choice.
Trump 2016
Kevin Williamson is a vile pile of ordure.