The Republican Elites Have Finally Turned on the

Quote:

---

The Republican Elites Have Finally Turned on the Rubes They've Swindled for Decades
The "Reagan Democrats" who once proved useful have been relabeled as deplorable drug addicts.



BY CHARLES P. PIERCE
MAR 15, 2016

"There is something at work in my soul, which I do not understand."
—Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, Frankenstein

The big yappity-yap this week has been about what Kevin D. Williamson, the stormy petrel of really bad ideas, has written in National Review, America's most venerable journal of white supremacy, about how poor white people are worthless parasites and how the places where they live could do with a good napalming or three. I am paraphrasing. But not by much.

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 am unclear as to whether "Ed Burke" refers to the Irish-born political theorist, or to some bartender in West Virginia, but that's only because I am not entirely fluent in the High Wingnut in which Williamson generally writes.

My money's on the Irishman. Also, the word "forget" is pretty plainly doing the work of a shorter, more emphatic Anglo-Saxonism here.)

The piece is seen as an indication of two things: 1) the ongoing nervous breakdown of the Republican Party over its current frontrunner and the people who support him, and 2) the final reveal of the long con on the white once-middle class that began when they were first flattered by the empty term, "Reagan Democrats."

Now they're just meth-addled Oxy addicts who forget each other on the couch and produce kids that are just like them and who will grow up as couch-forgetting Oxy-addled meth-addicts who vote for President Ivanka Trump.

And Kevin D. Williamson has had his forgetting fill of them. If only they'd sober up and vote for a religious fanatic like Ted Cruz, they'd go back to being the salt of the earth again.

---