Post-Trump, conservatives not shy about their contempt for the poor

[FSogol]

Conservative organ The National Review published a scathing attack on poor white communities, part of its general disgust at Republican presidential frontrunner Donald Trump's support base. If you ever wanted to understand the enraged contempt in which conservatives hold the poor — especially now many of them are voting for Trump instead of them — here's a fabulous primer!

It is immoral because it perpetuates a lie: that the white working class that finds itself attracted to Trump has been victimized by outside forces. It hasn’t… 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. 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. So the gypsum business in Garbutt ain’t what it used to be. There is more to life in the 21st century than wallboard and cheap sentimentality about how the Man closed the factories down.

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. 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.

Rest of the Boing Boing article at:
http://boingboing.net/2016/03/15/post-trump-conservatives-not.html

[Human101948]

1. It's only a few short steps from there to the gates of Auschwitz...

The poor, the disabled, homosexuals, gypsies and Jews, all considered a burden to society.

[FSogol]

3. Seriously. American Conservatives were always selfish dicks, but this is a true low point.

Not sure how it gets corrected.

[Human101948]

2. And they would be so much better off somewhere miles away?

I doubt it. And how can they afford the U Haul?

[hatrack]

4. Wow . . . just . . . . wow

Vitriol verging on the unhinged, and unleashed (of course) on the great unwashed of National Review's own fucking party.

Sure hope J. Cuthbert Willingham IV (or whoever crapped out this screed) never runs out of bootstraps.

[underpants]

5. Why how DARE THEY?

We've been leading around by the nose since Reagan and now they won't do what we tell them? We're the ones who are supposed to softly blame the black people and they are supposed to get angry and continue voting for us. It's worked so well this whole time!!!

[Eleanors38]

6. Sounds like the FR's version of FLA Man & Darwin Award so often heard here.