WarSclerotic

Trump leaves the conservative establishment arrogant and unmoored, Washington Post, Joe Scarborough, April 2, 2016

When members of Manhattan’s media elite come to Mark Halperin’s home for dinner, Halperin likes to ask his guests whether they have spent more time in Paris or Staten Island. More often than not, his guests select the destination that does not offer regular ferry service from Battery Park.

Halperin’s dinner quiz provides a glimpse into what conservatives have long mocked as the cloistered existence of liberal elites who report on a nation they don’t understand. Republican critics have long complained that these media elites are schooled, spend their summers and live most of their lives in urbane enclaves that provide little insight into how the rest of America lives.

But in 2016, conservative commentators are sounding as cocooned from their own political party as any liberal writing social commentary for The New Yorker or providing political analysis for ABC News. Even after the passing of Antonin Scalia and the Paris and San Bernadino attacks, many right-leaning pundits are spending their days scolding readers and declaring that no true conservative or God-fearing Christian could support Donald Trump. This simmering rage has now risen to such a level that many conservative opinion shapers are spending their waking hours coping with a festering Zapruder-like obsession over video frames of the Corey Lewandowski-Michelle Fields confrontation while obsessing over the GOP frontrunner’s latest embarrassing gaffe.

Even as the Manhattan billionaire is enduring his most dreadful period of the campaign, attacks against Donald Trump have reached new heights, with commentators focusing their withering criticism on supporters, ignoring the fact that many of those same voters helped make Ronald Reagan president, Newt Gingrich Speaker of the House and Marco Rubio a United States senator.

But now these voters formerly called common-sense conservatives are now considered drug-addled losers who are too stupid to determine what is in their best interest. The left-wing’s “What’s the Matter With Kansas?” is now the GOP establishment’s “What The Hell’s Up With Upstate New York?

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.

Williamson, of whom I am an admirer, is not alone in launching such blistering broadsides against GOP voters. My friend Erick Erickson provided an equally rough assessment of white working-class Trump followers in an April 1, 2016 tweet.

This entry was posted on April 3, 2016 at 6:02 PM and is filed under Christians, Conservative establishment, Donald Trump, Republicans. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: Christians, Conservative establishment, Donald Trump, Republicans