"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.

Jonathan Chait puts paid to a lot of this, shrewdly pointing out that Williamson is coming from a position in which there is an almost theological dimension to economic theory. (Conservative economics cut itself loose from Planet Earth the moment that Ronald Reagan bought the supply-side con in 1979.) Usually, of course, this is the kind of rhetoric aimed at people who are not white people. But in this, as in so many other things, this is an unusual campaign. The reliable suckers on whom conservative politicians have relied for four decades now seem to be thinking for themselves. If they're going to be taken for granted, and played for marks, they're going to have a little fun getting their hate on while it happens. And that's making even the most recent generation of extremist conservatives nervous.

Check out the signatories to that epistle. In addition to the ancient New Right Undead, like Morton Blackwell and Richard Viguerie, and in addition to the spouse of a damn Supreme Court justice, you will see the likes of Erick Erickson and even Jenny Beth Martin, the lavishly remunerated head of the Tea Party Patriots Citizenship Fund. Remember when the Tea Party was the hot new thing? Remember all those people in the tricorns demanding "their country" back? Now, the people who ginned them up are timorously giving their support to a nut theocrat from Texas whom no living human being apparently likes, and all because a vulgar talking yam has hijacked all the passionate bigotry that was the Tea Party's basic fuel source. And, if you happen to be someone whose personal finances went down the drain when sharpsters wrecked most of the economy and stole what was left, unless you're willing to line up behind Tailgunner Ted Cruz, you're just a worthless leech staggering from pharmacy to pharmacy with ragged fake prescriptions clutched in your shivering fists.

This was always coming. The contempt dripping from Williamson's writing, and from that pathetic appeal from alleged conservative "leaders" never was far from the minds of the Republican elites. They so easily distracted the "Reagan Democrats" with shiny-object social issues while shoving most of the nation's wealth upwards that they almost can be forgiven for thinking that the tactic would work forever. I mean, it worked for George W. Bush, for god's sake.

Now, I love good schadenfreude as much as the next guy. Watching the Republican Party turn itself into the Donner Party has been wonderful entertainment. But it's depressing to think that people in legitimate economic peril, and people in areas that have been stripped bare while being fed fairy tales about the new globalized economy, have traded one lethal form of political anesthetic for an even more deadly one. What's most depressing about it is how completely predictable that transformation actually was.

Charles P. Pierce Charles P Pierce is the author of four books, most recently Idiot America, and has been a working journalist since 1976.

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