Somebody called Kevin Williamson has written an article in National Review that everybody quotes but nobody can access in full. Here is an excerpt:
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. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down. 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. Forget your goddamned gypsum, and, if he has a problem with that, forget Ed Burke, too. The white American underclass is in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture whose main products are misery and used heroin needles. Donald Trump’s speeches make them feel good. So does OxyContin. What they need isn’t analgesics, literal or political. They need real opportunity, which means that they need real change, which means that they need U-Haul.
I don’t know who this Kevin Williamson fellow is but what a ray of sunshine he is among the idiot blabberers who analyze the rise of Trump. This is all very harsh but it’s honest. And ultimately, it’s a lot more kind than duping people some more with the lies that manufacturing jobs can come back and the lifestyles of the 1960s can be recovered. Everybody is terrified of speaking this unwanted truth but it’s got to be done.
Here is where I found the long quote but I wish I could read the whole piece.
Clarissa's Blog 
What a self-righteous piece from the very same people who used to rally their base with this exact same rhetoric until one day an orange buffoon found a way to do it better. National Review lol.
Can’t wait for their November issue. “We endorse Trump because Clinton is a left wing radical who will destroy our country by taxing capital gains 5% more, also she did the Benghazi herp derp.”
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If Trump provokes this moment of honesty, then at least he will have served some useful purpose.
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I just discovered that this Kevin Williamson fellow wrote an article back in summer calling Bernie a Nazi. What a shame, the fellow writes so well and he’s just got to be a raging lunatic.
You were completely right about him, Stringer Bell.
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Clarissa, if you have university library privileges, you can read the whole thing. It is on EBSCOhost Academic Search Complete.
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That’s a brilliant idea, thank you!
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I just downloaded it from EBSCOhost Academic Search Complete! Thank you for the great suggestion. I would have never thought of it myself.
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I feel like if you did a find and replace for some key terms it would be indistinguishable from an article about the inner city or the ghettos from the mid-1980s-1990s.
Tangentially: do you feel that wages were artificially high 35-ish years ago or they artificially low now? For example the average steelworker in 1985 made 13.53/hr or 21.30/hr if benefits were added in. Throw those numbers into an inflation calculator, assume 2000 hr/yr (40 hr a week, 50 weeks a year) and you get 59,580 and 93,800 per year in today’s dollars with a high school degree. Keep in mind that’s one worker’s income and the median household income (which often implies more than one adult working) is $53,657 .
What is your honest gut reaction to that?
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My honest reaction is that one should be deranged to pay $93,000 per year for the work a Chinese worker can do better at 1/5 (or whatever) the pay.
The real problem is that it’s been clear for at least 30 years that this is the case. This is ample time to do something about it. Yet politicians prefer to lie to people that the 1950s are about to come back and people prefer to believe it.
This is actually very similar to what we experienced when the USSR fell apart. Some people are still waiting for it to come back.
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My initial honest gut reaction is disgust and bafflement. I guess I’ve never lived in a country or reality where people get princely wages for manual unskilled repetitive labor and minimal education, so when people long for those days they seem entitled and exceedingly mediocre. And when they start blaming me for it I just lose any sympathy I have.
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Absolutely. I can’t disagree.
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Just for some reference around how big the pay gap is, average manufacturing wage in china (differs by what “tier of city” and such) is around $3-5k per year, so in many cases 10-20x.
It baffles most to hear that factor. Also, combine it with how china steals intellectual property and makes it very hard for the us to leverage our technology, financial, and heallth / pharmaceutical expertise we do get a pretty raw deal in many cases. Not simple solutions, but the magnitude of the problem / situation is interesting to discuss at the least.
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Chinese are no longer the greatest competitors American workers have in terms of manufacturing. Robots are starting to displace humans in these repetitive, unskilled jobs.
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I drove a Ford Escape SUV last week and something dawned on me …
First, however, come the disclaimers: it isn’t an amazing vehicle, and in fact it’s essentially a mad box on a large car frame that occasionally wants to be driven like a rally car until you realise this is at least mildly suicidal.
What dawned on me wasn’t any of that at all.
It’s how all of the pieces fit together so incredibly well, despite what it is and what it has to live with in terms of limitations, that it could not have possibly been built by hand.
It was built by the guidance of hands that position assemblies that are made by machines, which is to say that the “factory workers” don’t actually create the car so much as orchestrate its machine-led coming into being.
The workers who are guiding the assembly process are both a source of error as well as a solution for it, which means that all of the ISO 9000 series quality controls actually appear to be working.
Ultimately this means that we are at the point where the only workers who have any business doing this work are the ones who are skilled and aware enough that they can stop production issues before they become production issues, while they are still in a minor defect stage.
Bubba Gypsum and the Sheetrock Brothers do not have a place in this world, a world in which the high performance of machines is needed to help ensure safety and fit for purpose, rather than bodging it up as they go along …
The Toyota Management System had a way to stop the assembly process if things started to go wonky. How could you possibly know what “wonky” means in a highly automated manufacturing system unless you were capable of understanding the theories and practices behind it?
This to me is more about aptitude and less about credentials — I could expect a self-taught mechanic to come to grasp some of the essentials of the systems theories involved, for instance, and he would do reasonably well when it comes to repairing and maintaining the automated manufacturing hardware …
That may in fact be all that’s required to ensure everything the machines create turns out as it should. Everything else tends to be engineered into place or out of existence by forward-thinking systems engineers.
After all, it really is cheaper that way.
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You are absolutely right. Every day there is less hope of restoring the Fordist model because robotization is developing all the time.
And it’s the same in all professions. Nobody wants even a secretary without a college degree any longer because the job qualifications have changed.
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Counterpoint to Kevin D. Williamson Misrepresenting the White Working Class; What the Narrating Class Gets Wrong
Quote: Take the assumed popularity of Trump among the white working class, for example. There appears to be supporting evidence for that. According to Brookings, for example, in a national survey 55% of “Republicans and Republican-leaning independents who support Trump are white working-class Americans.” But this does not mean what Brookings thinks it means. Among all adult whites, nearly 70% do not have bachelor’s degrees (the definition of “working class” used here). This means that at 55%, the white working-class is under-represented among Trump supporters. Conversely, unless Trump is getting much more minority support than reported, his supporters are disproportionally college-educated whites. They make up 30% of the white population, but they are at least 40% of Trump voters in the Brookings survey.
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What won’t people tell themselves to avoid accepting the painfully obvious.
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