Conservatives who once derided upscale liberals as latte-sipping losers now burst with contempt for the lower-income followers of Donald J. Trump.  These blue-collar white Republicans, a mainstay of the conservative coalition for decades, are now vilified by their former right-wing allies as a “non-Christian” force “in thrall to a vicious, selfish culture,” corrupted by the same “sense of entitlement” that Democratic minorities were formerly accused of.  Kevin Williamson, a columnist for National Review, initiated the most recent escalation of this particular Republican-against-Republican power struggle. In a March 13 essay, “The Father-Führer,” Williamson portrays Trump’s struggling white supporters as relying on their imaginary victimhood when, in fact, he contends:  They failed themselves. If you spend time in hardscrabble, white upstate New York, or eastern Kentucky, or my own native West Texas, and you take an honest look at the welfare dependency, the drug and alcohol addiction, the family anarchy — which is to say, the whelping of human children with all the respect and wisdom of a stray dog— you will come to an awful realization. It wasn’t Beijing. It wasn’t even Washington, as bad as Washington can be.  Less well-off white voters have only themselves to blame, Williamson continues:  It wasn’t immigrants from Mexico, excessive and problematic as our current immigration levels are. It wasn’t any of that. Nothing happened to them. There wasn’t some awful disaster. There wasn’t a war or a famine or a plague or a foreign occupation. Even the economic changes of the past few decades do very little to explain the dysfunction and negligence — and the incomprehensible malice — of poor white America.  Not satisfied to stop there, Williamson adds:  The truth about these dysfunctional, downscale communities is that they deserve to die. Economically, they are negative assets. Morally, they are indefensible. Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap. Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs.  Finally, determined to blow a hole in the Trump hot air balloon, the columnist hits hard:  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.  Williamson’s bitterness over the refusal of Trump’s supporters to get in line behind a more acceptable candidate is echoed across the right.  David French, also of National Review, writes:  I grew up in Kentucky, live in a rural county in Tennessee, and have seen the challenges of the white working-class first-hand. Simply put, Americans are killing themselves and destroying their families at an alarming rate. No one is making them do it. The economy isn’t putting a bottle in their hand. Immigrants aren’t making them cheat on their wives or snort OxyContin. Obama isn’t walking them into the lawyer’s office to force them to file a bogus disability claim.  In a March 25 post on RedState, Caleb Howe, another frequent conservative commentator, welcomes the prospect of the departure of Trump supporters from the Republican Party:  GOOD NEWS! Buchanan Says If Ted Cruz Wins, An “Awful Lot” of Trump Supporters Will “Just Go Home”  The “new Trump voters,” Howe writes,  aren’t motivated by what makes the Republican Party the Republican Party. They aren’t in this to limit the size and scope of government. They aren’t coming out to Trump rallies because he’s talking about reducing the debt.  If Trump is not nominated and his supporters stay home on Election Day, Howe believes that “there’s really only one response: Bye.”  Glenn Beck joined the chorus of anti-Trump conservatives on March 24, when he told listeners to his radio show that such Republicans were not real Christians:  We’re not living our Christian faith because no Christian, no real Christian — I don’t mean a judgmental Christian, I mean somebody who’s living their faith — no Christian says, “I want that guy, that guy is the guy for me.”  This repudiation of a whole class of voters has become a source of furious debate on the right.  In a prescient Jan. 14 essay, “To Attract Disillusioned Voters, the GOP Must Understand Their Concerns,” Henry Olsen, a senior fellow at the Ethics and Public Policy Center, a conservative think tank, wrote:  America’s self-appointed best and brightest uniformly view the passions unleashed by Trump as the modern-day equivalent of a medieval peasants’ revolt. And, like their medieval forebears, they mean to crush it. That effort is both a fool’s errand for the country and a poisoned chalice for conservatives and Republicans.  In Olsen’s view, disparaging Trump’s lower-income white supporters “will simply intensify the masses’ rage and ensure that their political spokesmen become more intransigent and radical.” Even worse,  keeping blue-collar white Americans out of political power will result in exactly what Washington elites have wanted for years: a series of grand bargains that keep the status quo largely intact and the Democratic party in power.  Only now are major party leaders and contributors beginning to recognize the full depth of this intraparty conflict.  On March 28, my colleague Nick Confessore documented in crushing detail how Republican leaders, donors and strategists disregarded the mounting discontent of white working class Republicans, thus setting the stage for the Trump campaign.  The history, Confessore wrote, is  one of a party elite that abandoned its most faithful voters, blue-collar white Americans, who faced economic pain and uncertainty over the past decade as the party’s donors, lawmakers and lobbyists prospered. From mobile home parks in Florida and factory towns in Michigan, to Virginia’s coal country, where as many as one in five adults live on Social Security disability payments, disenchanted Republican voters lost faith in the agenda of their party’s leaders.  While white voters with a high school degree or less have steadily declined as a share of the electorate — from 82 percent of adults 25 and older in 1940 to 29 percent in 2007 — they have repeatedly played a crucial role in determining the outcome of elections.  In the presidential elections of 1960 and 1964 – both Democratic victories – John Kennedy and Lyndon Baines Johnson each won 55 percent of the votes cast by whites without college degrees, according to the widely-cited 2008 Brookings paper, “The Decline of the White Working Class and the Rise of a Mass Upper Middle Class.”  In the next two elections, 1968 and 1972, in the wake of the civil rights movement, urban riots and a sharp increase in violent crime, white working class support for the Democratic nominees fell by 20 percentage points, to 35 percent, according to the paper’s two authors, Ruy Teixeira and Alan Abramowitz. “The Democrats,” they wrote, “were the party of the white working class no longer.”  These two elections marked the establishment of a conservative majority that produced Republican presidential victories in 1980, 1984 and 1988 — the only exception being 1976 when Watergate briefly stalled the ascendance of the right.  White working class voters were crucial later in the 1994 Republican takeover of the House engineered by Newt Gingrich, now a leading Trump supporter. While non-college whites supported Republican presidential candidates beginning in 1968, many remained loyal to the Democratic Party in Congressional races until the Contract With America was on offer. In 1992, 57 percent of white men without college degrees voted Democrat in congressional elections. In 1994, the percentage shrank by 20 points. Republicans captured the House that year and maintained control in 8 of the next 10 elections.
Is it the furious Trump-supporting white working class or the contemptuous mandarin elite that mocks its former allies? Hard to say.