I recently took a part-time job at a grocery store chain in what was, until recently, a small, rural, southern town. You know, the type of place National Review writer Kevin D. Williamson infamously refers to as a “dysfunctional, downscale community” that “deserve[s] to die.”
Of course, that wasn’t all Williamson, who is also director of the National Review Institute’s William F. Buckley Jr. Fellowship Program in Political Journalism, said about my new co-workers. He also referred to them as barnyard animals “whelping … human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog.”
According to Williamson, the root of the stupidity of the white working class is their misapprehension of the magical golden finger of global economics, and their default response to economic change is to become vicious, whinging, racist junkies:
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.
Note, here, that Williamson is carefully singling out the white working class. He wouldn’t dare say such hate-filled things using genocidal modifiers about the black or Hispanic community. Those are firing offenses at National Review, and pretty much everywhere else. Such is the preening, toxic, actually racist, deeply dishonest political correctness of the pseudo-conservative establishment libertarian elite.
But I do like a job done well, and I want to thank Kevin Williamson and his pariah peers such as David French and Bill Kristol for doing such an extraordinarily efficient job of clarifying, not what is wrong with America, but what is wrong with establishment pseudo-conservative libertarianism.
Setting aside for a moment their deep-rooted, projection-based psychological disorders and intellectual cowardice, what is wrong with establishment pseudo-conservative libertarians is that they’re just really bad at economics.
And what they get really wrong about economics is where their own paychecks come from. From personal exchanges on comment threads and also the drivel he churns out, I get the sense that Kevin Williamson thinks all the fatted honoraria for conferences and cruises and columns comes his way because what he has to say about Hayek and the free market is intellectually groundbreaking and logically incisive.
This is precisely the sort of dumb and tedious error academicians make when they assume that they have been chosen for tenure and elevated above all the adjunct temps doing the real teaching because their Derridean reading of cissexual heteronormativity is just that much better than all the other Derridean readings of cissexual heteronormativity.
Whether it’s a job servicing shadowy libertarian donors at National Review or a lifetime appointment to act out against capitalism for mid-six-figure remuneration at Yale, the gig comes with what is usually an unspoken (though I imagine they have to spell it out for Kevin) understanding that whenever you encounter the fallacies and untruths of the ideology you have been hired to defend, you’ll just speak louder.
As I hustle up and down the aisles of the grocery store at 3 a.m. dodging a small army of workers making the next day’s commerce possible, I think a lot about the way the world has changed and hasn’t changed since I held my first grocery store job in 1981, when I was 16.
The things that haven’t changed in spite of all that has are what really fascinate me. Best of all, as I careen in the darkness towards the brightly lit entrance of the box store where the time-clock awaits, I can still turn on the radio and hear the thrilling alto of Freddie Mercury belting “I’m just a poor boy, I need no sympathy” — the same song to which I careened to work 37 years ago in my brother’s used Audi.
Kevin Williamson eloquently mocks this emotion as “crap.” In reality, it is a sense of place, of community, of roots, of the very things Williamson thinks we need to toss in the gutter before climbing into a U-Haul to drive to the nearest left-wing megalopolis to become Uber drivers for the new global economy’s winners (even Uber drivers aren’t buying this crap anymore).
When I get to work, there are indeed people there who have at one time or another succumbed to alcoholism or drug addiction. The same is true of Williamson’s workplace. The same is true of academia. In fact, having worked in all these spheres, I strongly submit that substance abuse, especially of the active kind, is far more common in magazine offices and faculty lounges than it is in lower-income worksites.
I don’t think this point needs defending.
The difference, as Freddie Mercury might say, is that a poor boy (and contrary to the palpitating zeitgeist, that would be any poor boy, not just the non-white ones) has to deal with the consequences of his behavior in a much more immediate way than does a pampered magazine columnist or a tenured professor. Fail one drug test at most blue-collar jobs and you’re in a world of hurt. In contrast, if they started making journalists pee in a cup, there would immediately be no more CNN, and National Review would have to hire back Mark Steyn and John Derbyshire just to keep the presses rolling.
The people I work with now aren’t perfect: they’re just a whole lot better than virtually all of the people I know in academia or politics, and the new economy is (in real life, rather than Kevin Williamson’s fantasy) really hurting them. There is the mom who works overnight while her husband watches their four kids; the woman who had to leave a corporate job to care for her mother and is now juggling two part-time jobs; the middle managers who uncomplainingly work overtime whenever the computer system glitches. OK, they do complain; everyone complains at work, but it’s the stoic get-the-job-done sort of complaining that one never sees among the preening mandarins plucking intellectual fields or the show ponies prancing for politics.
The other day I watched a supervisor stick around to help out with an order overload that she could have easily left to the next shift. She didn’t have to do so, and she probably didn’t get paid for it, and it’s not the sort of thing that gets noticed in the front office, but she clearly felt a loyalty to the people working under her. She didn’t leave them behind. She didn’t tell them to quit and pack their whole lives into a U-Haul if they couldn’t handle the workload.
She also didn’t tell them it was just their imagination that the economy is increasingly structured solely to benefit the well off and to placate the non-working at the expense of ordinary wage earners.
My co-workers want to stay in the town they were born in. Should they die for that? Kevin Williamson thinks so. Bill Kristol dreams of replacing the “decadent, lazy, spoiled” white working class with endless waves of third-world slave laborers. The astronomical deductive fallacy isn’t that paid-off pseudo-intellectual fabulists like Williamson and Kristol think this way: the deductive fallacy is that they haven’t been fired for saying so.
When it becomes this commonplace to scapegoat certain people and get away with it, all bets are off. A country cannot hold together while intellectually eating its own. Every single time I clock in and work alongside normal people, I think of the words of Williamson and Kristol and the widening chasm between the globalist intellectual classes and the people they are harming.
They should be grateful we have Bohemian Rhapsodies to distract us. Take that away, and more people might actually notice what they’re saying.