At this point making jokes about Kevin D. Williamson being an obvious closet case is as tired and worn out as his excuses for going out to the park at midnight with a specially colored handkerchief in his back pocket. But given the way things are going, it’s possible that National Review might not be around in the next five to ten years, so I think it’s worth chronicling the stupid shit these guys publish so future generations will learn why “conservatism” was a cancer upon the American right. So once more, Kevin has shown us his exceptionally shitty hack writing, this time with his National Review Online piece called “The Buchanan Boys are Back”. And boy oh boy is it ever some steaming-hot garbage.
Donald Trump’s performance in this year’s Iowa caucuses was identical to Pat Buchanan’s in 1996: second place, enjoying the support of approximately one in four Republican caucus-goers. Trump’s campaign, like Buchanan’s, is powered by the resentment and anxiety of the white working class.
I’ve seen a lot of people both in the cucked mainstream and the alternative right draw comparisons between Donald Trump and Pat Buchanan. Since I was two years old at the time of the 1996 election, I don’t recall it very well. Thankfully, with the magic of the internet, I can look at the historical data and compare them. It’s not an entirely inaccurate comparison to make, but I think a few key differences are missing here. I’ll do you all a favor and list them off:
1) Pat Buchanan did not dominate nation-wide polling for the six months leading up to Iowa, nor was he the center of media attention.
2) Pat Buchanan lost Iowa to establishment favorite Bob Dole, it was not stolen out from under him by an anti-establishment republican who was hated by his own party.
3) The GOP field in 1996 was 2/3rds the size that was for 2016 both at the beginning and right before Iowa.
4) Primary debates were not widely publicized. Also at no point during the 1996 debates did any of the viewers begin to wonder which non-Buchanan candidate would be going home and putting a fucking gun in his mouth.
5) Social media did not exist, and so the easily-bruising overblown egos of shitty hack political writers were not blatantly overt and ripe for the deflating.
The Buchanan boys are economically and socially frustrated white men who wish to be economically supported by the federal government without enduring the stigma of welfare dependency. So they construct for themselves a story in which they have been victimized by elites and a political system based on interest-group politics that serves everyone except them. Trump is supported by so-called white nationalists, as Buchanan was before him, but the swastika set is merely an extreme example of the sort of thinking commonly found among those to whom Trump appeals.
There’s a lot going on here. First off, the implication is that these “Buchanan Boys” are basically white versions of welfare queen blacks. At no point outside of maybe some stuff Matt Heimbach has thrown around have I ever seen anyone in a nationalist sphere really advocate for “MO’ MONEY FO’ DEM PROGRAMS!”. I’ve seen a few people advocate for “MO’ MONEY FO’ DEM POGROMS” which is a noble cause I can get behind, but certainly no one wanting white gibsmedat. But hey, who cares about intellectual honesty when you can just say “oh they’re all just nazis anyway.” No seriously, that comes later.
If you want to understand the patron-client model behind the appeal of a man such as Pat Buchanan, then begin by consulting one of the keenest political minds of our time: Pat Buchanan. In a memo to Richard Nixon, he sketched out his model: “There is a legitimate grievance in my view of white working-class people that every time, on every issue, that the black militants loud-mouth it, we come up with more money. . . . If we can give 50 Phantoms to the Jews, and a multi-billion dollar welfare program for the blacks . . . why not help the Catholics save their collapsing school system?”
See, this is where the dishonesty of Williamson’s argument is evident. What Buchanan is saying to Nixon can be easily interpreted as “Hey, if we’re going to throw all this money at Jews and dindus, why can’t we also help white people?” The point is not to advocate for white gibs, the point is that if there’s going to be special government handouts, whites should benefit from it just as much as anyone else. I mean, you don’t need any missing context or anything to understand the intention of that quote, you just have to not be a fucking retard. But then again, if the conservative “elite” were actually intelligent, they wouldn’t have hyped up a man who married a fucking oompa-loompa as the next presidential candidate. Again, this is a little easy.
The Jews Buchanan is writing about here presumably were those in Jerusalem rather than those in Brooklyn, but the conflation of overseas national-security projects with domestic interest-group politics is hardly restricted to self-conscious white nationalists. Bernie Sanders complains that money spent overseas ought to be spent servicing his constituents’ interests at home, and Trump dreams of turning our foreign adventures into a profit-making scheme, looting oil and other assets from foreigners to fund the British-style socialist health-care system of his dreams.
See what I’m talking about in terms of these people being fucking stupid? They’re trying to dismiss Trump and (((Sanders)))’s notions that America’s foreign policy should primarily benefit AMERICA as some outrageous and insane idea. Really, I’m convinced that the only time Kevin D. Williamson takes his head out of his own ass is when he wants to be spitroasted by two “Natural Conservatives” he picked up at Home Depot.
The European counterparts to Trump and Buchanan are much more forthright about being welfare statists, the marriage of xenophobic identity politics and an expansive welfare state being more familiar to Germans (and Europeans whose countries were occupied by Germans) than it is to New England fishermen or petroleum engineers in Texas. But the tariffs and trade restrictions that Trump dreams of are simply a very large tax on one group of Americans that would be used to provide economic benefits for other Americans. It is an odd line of thinking: If the government levies a tax on your neighbors in order to fund an earned-income tax credit for your family, then you’re a welfare queen; if the government levies a tax on businesses that is passed on to your neighbors in order to subsidize your earned income through higher prices, then that’s economic nationalism.
I keep hoping that at one point columnists in general will give up on making Hitler comparisons. I think at least the left has started to pick up on the fact that they don’t work. As for the comparison itself, I think it’s pretty easy to draw a distinct difference between the two- leftist welfare is considered to be paid for through income tax, which can only be avoided by not working and not making any money ever. Trump’s “welfare” is theoretically paid for through tarriffs which can be avoided simply by not importing and instead buying American. Leftist welfare is designed so that you don’t have a choice in how you support your fellow countrymen (and the illegals, and Israel) but Trump’s program gives you some degree of choice and agency rather than just sticking a government hand in your pocket.
There’s some generally irrelevant economic stuff after that, so let’s return to the hot topic of conservatism:
Conventional conservatives are generally in favor of free(r) trade and hold mixed views on immigration, which is not entirely an economic matter. And they are perfectly happy (eager, really) to subsidize Buchanan’s hypothetical Irish Catholics who wish to send their children to private schools — just as they are happy to do the same for black families in Philadelphia and the District of Columbia. And that is the sticking point: American conservatives are rooted in classical liberalism, and their political philosophy is universalist: free enterprise and the rule of law for everyone. The jackbootier elements among the Buchanan boys demand the explicit servicing of white interests as such. (Never mind, for the moment, the argument from our progressive friends that conservative universalism is the servicing of white interests as such, inexplicitly.) Whether that leap lands you on so-called economic nationalism or explicit racism, it’s the same leap.
I love the little implication there that black families in Philly and DC are no different than Irish Catholics. As someone who’s grown up in the Philly area and has seen both the black and the Irish side of Philly, I can tell you that yes, potato nigger jokes aside, there’s a huge gap between the two. And ultimately, that’s why mainstream conservatism is fucking horseshit: rather than accept the easily visible reality that some groups of people represent a better investment of both social and financial capitol, they cling to universalist, classically liberal ideals for no rational reason aside from the fact that it makes them feel all warm and fuzzy inside. I mean really, I might be a bit naive at the ripe young age of 22, but I’m pretty sure that someone like Williamson who is twice my age and actually did live in Philadelphia has to be aware that blacks will not actually benefit from free enterprise as so much as they will rule of law. (Law of course, being something closer to what Judge Dredd or Lee Kwan Yew could offer than what we have today.)
There are all sorts of ways to draw the line between Us and Them. Sometimes it’s Us vs. Them Foreigners, and sometimes it’s Us vs. Them Jews, as in Buchanan’s unfortunate memo. Conservatives should continue to appeal to these voters, addressing the better angels of their nature with policy solutions to their problems, which are not imaginary. Confronting the stupidity and snobbery that holds in contempt those Americans who do work that does not require a university degree would be welcome, too, and Marco Rubio was well-advised to do so in his disquisition on welders and philosophers.
One of the more frequent talking points about cuckservatives is that they sound like leftists a lot of the time. And in this paragraph, Kevin D. Williamson sounds so much like Barack Obama that I feel like the two might have spent some quality time together in a Chicago Bathhouse. There’s this idea that if you can appeal to the economic anxieties of the white working class, they’ll magically come out to support you. But in reality, the conversation goes something like this:
GOPe: “Hello working class man, I respect you and think you deserve to be treated better by your own government!”
Working Class White: “Cool, so you’ll take measures to ensure that me and my children won’t become minorities in our own country as our country is consumed by foreign hordes who have nothing but contempt for us and our way of life?”
GOPe: “I was thinking more along the lines of flowery rhetoric and tax breaks.”
Working Class White: “Remove taco and kebab or fuck off.”
GOPe: “Ewwwwww, you’re an evil racist, I can’t wait to tell all my friends at my cocktail party about how stupid and backwards you are! Clearly you need to be more educated and intelligent like I am!”
But it is unlikely that such voters can ever be entirely assimilated into the mainstream of American conservatism, the universalism of which provides them no Them — and they want a Them, badly. Some Republicans might finesse this to an extent, for example through all that risible ritual denunciation of “the establishment,” Ted Cruz and his “Washington cartel,” “Wall Street insiders,” etc. But that is not going to satisfy those who hunger for a fully expressed white identity politics, and we should expect that the occasional lunatic (Ross Perot), true believer (Pat Buchanan) or con artist (Donald Trump) periodically will find ways to tap into that energy. There’s a ceiling on that vote, but the numbers aren’t trivial.
I’m going to steal and modify a quote from a much, MUCH better article by Tucker Carlson: We exist because you failed. Conservatism can spout all the hippy universalist bullshit it wants, but that doesn’t change the fact that identity is real, very real. Hell, it’s been around longer than the Constitution. The left gets that, and taps into that. Because as stupid as their economic policies are and as anti-white as their social policies are, at the very least the American left is operating based on the real world instead of abstract “principles”. (((Bernie Sanders))) built his campaign on class resentment, and is trying to tap into racial resentment as well, but he can’t seem to break Hillary’s death grip on it. Hell, you knew from the start that her campaign was built specifically to oppose everything that was good: it was anti-white, anti-male, anti-normal. And for the first time in ages, Donald Trump is explicitly putting himself out there as a pro-white American. Trump recognizes that the answer to #BlackLivesMatter isn’t #AllLivesMatter but rather #WhiteLivesMatter because guess what? White people are under attack from a hostile coalition of blacks, mestizos, feminists, and muslims, both figuratively and in some cases even literally. To literally deny this as it happens because it goes against your universalist principles isn’t just moronic, it’s outright evil. So yes, the numbers AREN’T trivial, because there’s a very real divide in this country, and “classical liberalism” isn’t going to fucking bridge it.
Your Column Sucks 