I know that our weekend blogger, David Atkins, wrote about Kevin Williamson on Sunday, but at the risk of saying more about him than is warranted, I want to add my two cents. The first time I took any notice of Mr. Williamson was about three and a half years ago. The National Review has just published a piece by him entitled “Like a Boss.” It was an astonishing piece, and it’s even more noteworthy in retrospect.
What caught my attention was Williamson’s strange belief that alpha animals (“from red deer to mink to Homo sap.”) have more male offspring and that this somehow proved that Mitt Romney is more of a natural leader than Barack Obama.
The offspring of rich families are statistically biased in favor of sons — the children of the general population are 51 percent male and 49 percent female, but the children of the Forbes billionaire list are 60 percent male. Have a gander at that Romney family picture: five sons, zero daughters. Romney has 18 grandchildren, and they exceed a 2:1 ratio of grandsons to granddaughters (13:5). When they go to church at their summer-vacation home, the Romney clan makes up a third of the congregation. He is basically a tribal chieftain.
Professor Obama? Two daughters. May as well give the guy a cardigan. And fallopian tubes.
This was all a prelude to some campaign advice he wanted to impart to Romney. Because Romney is so wealthy, Williamson thought that “From an evolutionary point of view, Mitt Romney should get 100 percent of the female vote. All of it. He should get Michelle Obama’s vote.” The reason Romney wasn’t cashing in on his obvious advantage was because he refused to flaunt his wealth.
…Romney should quit pretending that he’s an ordinary schmo with ordinary schmo problems and start living a little larger. He should not be ashamed of being loaded; instead, he should have some fun with it. He will discover something that the Obama campaign has not quite figured out yet: Americans do not hate rich people. Americans love rich people. Americans will sit on their couches and watch billionaire Donald Trump fire people on television — for fun.
Given Romney’s failure and Trump’s (so far) success, maybe Mr. Williamson’s advice wasn’t so bad. Maybe Romney should have acted less defensively about his fortune. Maybe he should have worn a big gold R-MONEY chain around his neck and behaved a lot more like a failed casino magnate than a humble, yet mind-bogglingly successful, vulture capitalist.
In any case, Kevin Williamson has been clear about two things for a long time: he doesn’t care an iota about political correctness and he worships money.
So, on a personal level, I was not surprised to see him attack the Republican base with contempt.
“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.”
“The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. The white American under-class 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. If you want to live, get out of Garbutt [a blue-collar town in New York].”
It’s interesting that this echoes what outspoken racists like to say about the people living in our more drug-infested inner city neighborhoods. Williamson doesn’t differentiate between black scum and white scum. If they’re broke and their family structure isn’t exactly Ward Cleaver and they’re weighed down with substance abuse, then “they deserve to die.”
Or, maybe they can get a U-Haul and move somewhere more affluent and less enamored with opioids. (Good luck on finding the latter, but that’s another story.)
So, Williamson doesn’t excel at empathy, that’s clear. But there’s also an opportunity for some schadenfreude here, because the irony is so rich.
After all, the column that is currently arousing such controversy is an anti-Trump jerimiad entitled The Father-Führer. In the last election cycle, Williamson held up Trump as an example that Romney should follow. By emphasizing his success in business, Romney would project himself as an alpha male and this would more than compensate for his other faults as a candidate. It would attract people to him, including all the ladies, who wouldn’t notice or care that they didn’t agree with him on policy.
Well, who better to try this theory out than Trump himself?
And now that Trump has had so much success with this strategy that he’s on the verge of winning the Republican nomination, Williamson is upset. He calls Trump “the Führer” and denigrates his white working class supporters for falling for his act.
I don’t think Williamson really speaks for all that many conservatives. He seems like an extremist.
But you probably can’t understand the appeal of Trump to white working class voters without understanding that there’s a widespread suspicion that Republican elites think like Williamson. They want their votes, but they don’t want their problems. They’ll campaign in their communities and make promises, but in their hearts they think these communities are filled with white trash junkies who should die quicker so they cost less to maintain.
In any case, Republican politicians haven’t done anything for these communities lately, and their ideology argues against doing anything for them. As I said this weekend:
When the Republicans cannot even identify an AIDS-size epidemic in their communities and give up on the political process as a way to help their people, their people turn to an anti-political movement. You cannot expect people to remain dedicated to democratic institutions when their representatives are unwilling to use those institutions to better their lives.
What you get, then, is support for fascism. You get people semi-rationally calling for a strong man who will smash the weak legislature and stick a boot on the necks of their elites who have abandoned them.
Williamson wishes these Trump supporters would just drop dead and that their communities would be replaced by tumbleweeds, but they’re still alive. And they’re well on their way to making Trump the head of Williamson’s party.
It turns out, Williamson was right. “Americans do not hate rich people. Americans love rich people. Americans will sit on their couches and watch billionaire Donald Trump fire people on television — for fun.”
Now those same Americans are sending Trump to fire the people who run the Republican Party.
Go figure.
Without them, Williamson has NO Party. You can’t win elections with 1% of the vote.
But they are dying in those communities. Indiana lets rural heroine addicts die of HIV/Hep C. You can make the case that what happened in Flint was a deliberate act. It also explains why Ohio’s police can kill 12 yr old African American and face no sanctions from the Kasich administration.
Very true, but off the point.
I’m glad you read WIlliamson’s quote this way, too. He tried to word it carefully enough that he was referring to the “community” that deserves to die, but what is a community but its people? What an asshole.
He doesn’t understand math either. When I was a boy, our next door neighbor had four girls. His brother had four boys. Improbable but 256 to one shots do happen. Williamson would have us believe the brother was more “alpha”.
The probability of four children of the same sex is 1/2 raised to the 4th power, or 1/16.
1/8 if you don’t specify the sex. ( sorry can’t help jumping in when I see a probability question). Also, to be really pedantic girls are slightly more likely than boys apparently, but 50/50 is pretty close.
It’s actually remarkable that the biological process of meiosis (spermatogenesis) works out to an even distribution of sex chromosomes. Especially when you consider that the Y chromosome is so much smaller than the X.
A very good piece. From 3,000 miles away, it does look like many Americans are obsessed with Mammon and on my visits to the US many years ago I was appalled by the equating of wealth and status by even otherwise quite liberal people.
Perhaps Trump is exploiting a constituency that was always out there but which was almost always excluded from mainstream political discourse. Throw in the degree to which the white male middle class has felt hollowed out by science and technology, free trade, the advancement of minorities and their relative lack of educational attainment, and you have the makings of a winning coalition of voters – for the Republic nomination at least.
But how will this play against the presumptive Democratic Nominee Hillary? She too, in may ways, represents all they hate – advocacy for women and minorities, free trade, science and educational attainment. Is there a National majority supporting the Trumpian position? For the sake of the US, and the world, I hope not. I would even be prepared to overlook some of her corporatist excesses if the alternative were Trump and his potential to mobilise a fascistic mop which could take over the institutions of the state whether in an absolute majority or not. (Hitler never got much over 30% of the popular vote).
But what will the Republican elite, the moderates, and the independent do when faced with a choice of Hillary vs. Trump? Some will no doubt endorse Trump in the hope of influencing/co-opting him to some degree. Many will no doubt cling to stories of pragmatism in practice not being reflective of his rhetoric in public. Many of the German elite thought the same about Hitler.
But the very fact that we can credibly talk in Hitler analogies should give all pause for thought. Is this really where the USA is heading? Right down to Williamson’s pathetically simplistic eugenic genetic theories? How far away is talking about “communities which deserve to die” away from the anti-Jewish pogroms of old – and this is in an organ of the Republican establishment. No wonder his supporters so like Trump’s scapegoatism of Mexican or Islamic communities. It has to be someone elses fault! And it is. The very Billionaire class trump so ably represents which has been systematically raping the rest of America.
Are they really so stupid that they can’t realize this? Tell me it isn’t true.
Sadly, they really are that stupid or delusional or whatever. Those who are often the most downtrodden always think, when they hear the unvarnished truth as to how they are viewed by the 1%, that these descriptors apply to someone else, not to them.
That’s the sad reality that, while all citizens are sort of pawns in this “game,” those citizens who are the worst off are the willing dupes of billionaires like the Kochs. All admirably led astray by the usual suspects in nearly all of our media.
These people’s new Pied Piper is Donald Trump. What they emphatically don’t get is that he despises them, as well, but is more than willing to use them gain power. IF (shudder) Trump should win, he’ll do just what everyone else has done – sell these constituents down the river to the highest bidder. Trump is well known to use so-called “illegal” workers, as well as H1(b) visa indentured servants. All for jobs that could easily be accomplished by US citizens. But they want to make more than what Trump is willing to pay.
Trump’s supporters are impervious to this glaring FACT. It’s the way it has been for the past 30 years. These people want to live in their fairytale world, and they’re not interested in reality.
I don’t think I’ve ever read a satisfactory explanation of why this is the case. After all the “false consciousness of the lumpen proletariat” problem is as old as Karl Marx and the “Mass Psychology of Fascism” (Reich). Maybe its a weird vaient of the Stockholm syndrome where a captive identifies with their captor. Maybe if Hillary put on blacl leathers and wielded a whip she could capture some of that vote…
Everyone ought to become familiar with this paradoxical phenomenon… social justification:
Most theories in social and political psychology stress self-interest, intergroup conflict, ethnocentrism, homophily, ingroup bias, outgroup antipathy, dominance, and resistance. System justification theory is influenced by these perspectives–including social identity and social dominance theories–but it departs from them in several respects. Advocates of system justification theory argue that (a) there is a general ideological motive to justify the existing social order, (b) this motive is at least partially responsible for the internalization of inferiority among members of disadvantaged groups, (c) it is observed most readily at an implicit, nonconscious level of awareness and (d) paradoxically, it is sometimes strongest among those who are most harmed by the status quo.
This article reviews and integrates 10 years of research on 20 hypotheses derived from a system justification perspective, focusing on the phenomenon of implicit outgroup favoritism among members of disadvantaged groups (including African Americans, the elderly, and gays/lesbians) and its relation to political ideology (especially liberalism-conservatism)
Read more: http://freethoughtblogs.com/crommunist/2011/10/20/why-are-you-hitting-yourself-an-intro-to-system-ju
stification-theory/#ixzz42uoeAV6R
System justification theory might provide a description of the problem. I’m not sure it provides an empirical, testable explanation. Even more importantly, I’m not sure it provides a “solution” to people acting against their own, objective, self interest. Sure, self harm is a close to universal human phenomenon, but why does it effect some and not others. Why is it more prevalent in certain circumstances, and more importantly, how can it be prevented. Let’s call it the political self-harm phenomenon.
Depends on how self interest is defined.
If we view self interest through the lens of relative status in society, they are falling and they latch on to a candidate that promises to halt their relative decline by stomping hard on groups that used to be below them. This would halt their relative decline, so they are voting in their interest in a way. At the same time, their position compared to the bosses keeps sliding, but at least they can feel superior to people further down the ladder.
And if this is the problem, then the solution is to halt their slide versus the bosses. Full employment policies, easier unionisation, etc. Then they get an option for self interest bot in terms of relative status, and in terms of material goods.
These people have been screwed exactly the same way as has been every other gene-sink community in the U.S. Educational levels are…and have been for at least the last 50+ years…ridiculously low and the corporate greed of which Ross Perot spoke in 1992 has broken the economic culture that sustained their forebears for generations.
We didn’t cut it out. We elected Bill Clinton instead.
And it has wrecked the country.
In Garbutt NY…and folks, I spent over two hours two weeks ago in a similar town 30 miles away, Mt. Morris (I used to spend summers there as a kid and was curious about what had happened there)…in places like Garbutt. NY, the corporatization of the agricultural system plus the shipping of manufacturing jobs to places with low wages has completely killed the small town system that worked as the backbone of the rural parts of this country for hundreds of years.
It’s gone. Dead as a doornail. Everybody with any talent whatsoever has left there and what’s left is the dregs of what was once a vibrant part of the nation’s culture.
“We” did this. Democrats. Liberals. Progressives. We elected neoliberals who…along with the neocons that ‘we” didn’t elect…essentially sold the country down the river. And now we are reaping the fruits of our mistake while simultaneously working as hard as “we” can to elect another neolliberal in the process. (What’s that you say? “Bernie?” Forget about Bernie. He doesn’t have a chance. Clinton is the nominee and if something awful happens and Bernie does get nominated the minority vote will disappear and Trump will run the table.)
And the people who got screwed? The white ones? Here they are:
The contemporary white working class in all its media-inspired, ignorant glory, buying the con man’s spiel just as they always have when times get tough.
We’re in for it, now.
All of us.
Watch.
AG
From a comment i made on my own post, PermaFix Backfires!!! Blows Itself Up Real Good!!!:
Watch.
I personally do not think that there is a damned thing that anybody can do about what’s going to happen, short of another JFK/RFK/MLK coup act of some kind.
And look where that got us.
Watch.
AG
I do wonder what those newly inspired Bernie voters will do when Hillary gets the nomination. my guess is some will just not vote, others will vote for Trump if he is the nominee, but not Cruz or Kasich.
Most of them simply won’t vote. Or…they’l vote for HRC as the least of several evils. Maybe for Kasich…he’s the sanest of the RatPub lot by a landslide…but Kasich is going nowhere. It’s Trump, w/Cruz as a second possibility if Trump blows up..
Not many will vote for Trump. That’d be like supporting Gandhi and then when he’s not available, voting for Hitler. Too far apart, to say the least.
Even fewer for Cruz. It’ll be either HRC or they’ll just sit this one out.
AG
Don’t think it will be Hillary. They are not newly registered to vote for her. Most will probably not vote.
Reason is that they were inspired for change. When they don’t get it they will go back to their parent’s basement.
‘Fraid so…
AG
USA Today poll shows millenials would overwhelmingly favor Clinton over Trump
I make no judgments about the quality of the polling, but there it is.
It seems that we can presume that Kevin D. Williamson (the Wikipedia bio of sorts insists on the D.) is himself not at all loaded. It is clear that he is a climber who would like to be loaded.
There is no personal data about him. Can we assume that at age 43 he is “burdened” with nothing but daughters?
It is also clear that he is driven by ideological ideas to the exclusion of scientific ideas, political ideas, or sociological ideas.
And that his compassion extends (like so many hard-right conservatives) rises to the limits of Donald Trump’s.
Yes, from an economic point of view of the current economy, there are a shipload of little communities all across America that should have dried up and blown away in the 1930s. That sort of economic dominance of value judgements is exactly what Marx wrote about 150 years ago and why his critique of capitalism has regained salience.
But those same communities under different organization and management have also been seen since the 1960s as the core of approaches to transforming the waste of natural resources that is destroying post-industrial economies. And those people who used to understand face-to-face community relations key to re-establishing communities in America that serve people. The dysfunction that he describes is the result of the agricultural consolidation and Wal-Mart commercial rot finally reaching the smallest of American communities. Exactly at the point in time that inner cities are being gentrified. All with outside decisions and money. No wonder there is so much anger around.
It insists on the D because Kevin M Williamson is a hugely successful screen writer. And indeed still the person I think of without the initial.