Scapegoat, prophet, moron, rogue—the poor white is a shapeshifter. He changes forms as the needs of his beholders change. When liberals need to blame a class for Donald Trump’s presidency, the poor white will do; never mind that two-thirds of all Trump supporters made $50,000 or more a year. When conservatives need to cast liberals as aloof elitists they appoint themselves the poor white’s defenders—until their ideology is threatened, and then it is time to take out the trash.

In a recent piece for National Review, Kevin Williamson chooses the latter, though he makes a few sound observations before settling on the poor-bashing. Central to Williamson’s argument is the existence of a phenomenon he calls “acting white,” a performative affect infecting the conservative class. This performance, he claims, assumes that authenticity “is not to be found in any of the great contemporary American business success stories, or in intellectual life, or in the great cultural institutions, but in the suburban-to-rural environs in which the white underclass largely makes its home.” It involves conservatives painting poor whites as this country’s principal victims and “valorizing” their “underclass dysfunction.”

There’s some validity to this observation. We can see it in the mutant campaign of Ed Gillespie, a moderate Republican who now panders to Trumpists so he can become Virginia’s governor. It is present in Roy Moore’s success in Alabama’s Republican primary for Senate, and it is embodied by Sarah Palin, who owes her lingering D-list celebrity status to a conservative movement once convinced of her blue collar bonafides. Beyond this, however, Williamson fears to tread. He will not indict the extreme free-market obsession rotting the conservative movement from the inside out, so the poor white must answer for his personal deficiencies.

“The more you know about that world, the less sympathetic you’ll be to it,” he asserts. “What the Trump-style would-be tribunes of the plebs most have in common with self-appointed progressive advocates for the poor is ignorance of the actual subject matter.” Once you know anything at all about that white underclass, he implies, you’ll be as harsh on them as he is.

Why the animosity? He gives up the game soon enough. “It weren’t the scheming Chinaman what stole ol’ Bubba’s job down Bovina, ‘cause ol’ Bubba didn’t really have him a job to steal,” he writes. “And it isn’t capitalism that made rural Appalachia or small-town Texas what it is.” But if the problem actually was capitalism, would Williamson be able to admit it?