Thanks to Donald Trump, the specter of class war is haunting the Republican Party. But this isn’t a traditional class war wherein the masses overthrow capitalism. Instead, it features the poor and the working class destroying the country-club establishment.

In response to Trump’s successful use of populist rhetoric (although rarely populist policies) to woo less well-to-do Republicans, some conservative intellectuals have taken the curious tack of wholesale condemnation of the working class. In a widely discussed article in National Review, Kevin Williamson argued that it is wrong to believe that

the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t. The white middle class may like the idea of Trump as a giant pulsing humanoid middle finger held up in the face of the Cathedral, they may sing hymns to Trump the destroyer and whisper darkly about “globalists” and—odious, stupid term—“the Establishment,” but nobody did this to them. They failed themselves.

National Review has been struggling mightily to convince Republicans not to nominate the real estate mogul, going so far as to publish an entire issue devoted to the cause, “Against Trump.” But if Williamson’s article is part of National Review’s larger persuasive agenda, it seems like a singular misstep. After all, you rarely win people over by telling them that all their woes are their fault.

However, Williamson’s argument that the white working class “failed themselves” makes more sense if we place it in National Review’s intellectual lineage. The magazine was founded as the organ of a distinctively aristocratic conservatism, one that in the early days never concealed its scorn for ordinary people. In recent decades, that aristocratic conservatism has sometimes been obscured by a populist mask, but under the pressure of Trumpism, National Review is showing its true face.

To understand National Review, we have to go back to its founder William F. Buckley Jr. In 1944, while training to be an officer in Camp Wheeler, Georgia, Buckley found that he could barely contain his contempt for most of his fellow soldiers. The son of an oil magnate, Buckley had been raised in great wealth and had attended Andover. The army was full of people he had rarely encountered before. According to biographer John Judis, Buckley “found it difficult to share quarters with men of inferior manners and intelligence.” In a letter to a colonel, Buckley said that while “some” of the noncommissioned officers were fine men, others were “crude, course, vulgar, and highly objectionable.” Told by a platoon leader that condoms were available for soldiers on leave, Buckley priggishly insisted that he, for one, didn’t need them—the implication being that he was better than the fornicating riffraff that surrounded him. According to one of his colleagues, Lieutenant John Lawrence, Buckley had a “definite air of superiority which alienated a tremendous number of people.”

