Donald Trump swept to victory in large part due to improbable victories in traditionally blue states like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. White working class voters were attracted to Trump because he promised to bring jobs back to America. For the first time in years, a candidate came along and told these people that they mattered, and suggested that he was deeply interested in restoring these communities to their former glory.
Not since Ronald Reagan had a presidential candidate spoken to working class voters with such empathy, and aside from George W. Bush, most have failed at the ballot box. All the while, they were being advised by men like the Weekly Standard’s Bill Kristol, building an agenda focused on an expansive foreign policy and low taxes for businesses.
These people don’t want welfare. They want to work. They want their communities to function again. They want their children to have options. That’s obvious to anyone who watched the campaign.
Well, not Bill Kristol. As the Daily Caller reports:
“Look, to be totally honest, if things are so bad as you say with the white working class, don’t you want to get new Americans in?” Kristol told author Charles Murray during an event hosted by the American Enterprise Institute titled “It Came Apart: What’s Next for a Fractured Culture.” Murray recently wrote a book, entitled “Coming Apart,” which focuses on the cultural separation between the wealthiest and most educated white Americans and the poorest and least educated white Americans.
Before delving into his theory about replacing the white working class, Kristol said that he hopes “this thing isn’t being videotaped or ever shown anywhere. Whatever tiny, pathetic future I have is going to totally collapse.”
The event was filmed by AEI, but as of press time is marked “unlisted” on the think tank’s YouTube channel, so that it doesn’t come up in search results.
“You can make a case that America has been great because every — I think John Adams said this — basically if you are in free society, a capitalist society, after two or three generations of hard work everyone becomes kind of decadent, lazy, spoiled — whatever,” Kristol said.
“Then, luckily, you have these waves of people coming in from Italy, Ireland, Russia, and now Mexico, who really want to work hard and really want to succeed and really want their kids to live better lives than them and aren’t sort of clipping coupons or hoping that they can hang on and meanwhile grew up as spoiled kids and so forth. In that respect, I don’t know how this moment is that different from the early 20th century,” he added.
Kristol wouldn’t get the white working class. He was born with a silver spoon in his mouth and raised in Manhattan. He was handed his position of power because his father was Irving Kristol, an intellectual heavyweight. That he would have the chutzpah to refer to anyone as lazy is infuriating.
