Heart of Cats

Cheney’s endorsement of Kamala reminded me of the role that “Never Trumpers” play in our political system. They form a “normative boundary” on the right-side of the political system which enables the Left to tar anybody outside of that boundary as “extremist” or “far-right.” Think of Dick Cheney, Mitt Romney, and the rest as the Great Wall of the Establishment Right, beyond which rage the marauding hordes of Trumpist populism and MAGA who will never get invited inside for fellowships or Bethesda wine tastings

That role of “right-wing” normative boundary setter is filled on the media side by sites such as The Dispatch and National Review which market themselves to the political ecosystem as the “respectable” Right. So it was with interest
that I saw Kevin Williamson’s piece The Exotic Cat-Eaters of Springfield, Ohio at The Dispatch. Given the title, that it’s Williamson who is a founding member of the Never-Trumper brigade, and is being published The Dispatch you can reasonably guess where this is going.

Williamson is part of the larger National Review ecosystem that has lashed itself to the mast of “Never Trump” and like Penelope of ancient myth faithfully wait for the spirit of Reagan and Buckley to return. There’s nothing wrong with that, I was a big fan of both in the day, but there’s nothing heroic or even virtuous about keeping a candle lit for ideological purity and trying to LARP Buckley’s purge of the John Birchers when the other side wants you dead.

Then again, better dead than rude.

Williamson sees his role in the political ecosystem as the heroic free-thnking man from the heartland of America, in this case Texas. There’s a lot to commend his earlier writings and he’s paid a professional price for his stances; he was ousted from The Atlantic for his public views on abortion. Now he is on what can only be described as a jihad, a maniacal obsession to rescue the soul of America from what he sees as the grifting sewer that is Trump and MAGA. In that, he’s found a home at The Dispatch.

If Teddy Roosevelt lionized the man in the arena, Williamson thinks he belongs there with him, charging up his literary San Juan Hill with 6.7-liter diesel truck as his steed and armed with deadly metaphors and bon mots.

His Springfield piece reads as an American version of Heart of Darkness where instead of taking a boat up the Congo River our hero ventures up the country highway through Appalachia and onward toward Springfield in his “big 6.7L diesel.”

As he drives toward Springfield, he observes the contrasting scenes of the landscape. The wonderful natural beauty interspersed with “the inescapable herpetic rash of Dollar General stores and the strip-joint billboards sprinkled like pox.” You get the feeling that this would be a better place if not for people in it. This is his sympathetic side and he’s just warming up because when arrives in Springfield he finds the Haitian newcomers are just another demonized group of hard-working immigrants pursuing the American dream, modern-day equivalent of the Irish and those groups that came before them.

The locals complaining about them? Bunch of “marginally employed white people on the dole” xenophobes. See? He’s the truth teller who got it all figured out within a day or two of arrival. Everybody is playing the part assigned, rather than using induction and seeing where the evidence takes him he applies ideology as a reductionist lens to explain Springfield to the larger world. Well maybe “large” isn’t the right word, it is the readership of The Dispatch after all.

Then he writes:

“You can send little J.D. to Yale to make him polished, you can send him to Silicon Valley to make him rich, and you can send him to the Senate to make him powerful, but you cannot stop him from being what it is he apparently wants to be: Cleetus the Gap-Toothed Twitter Troll.”


So that’s really the whole purpose of his trip to Springfield. The locals, the Haitians, the American Dream… they were just bit players to support his predetermined narrative of bashing J.D. Vance. You wonder why he burned all that diesel to drive there when he could just have researched his hit piece with a Zoom call. You don’t need to do any research or investigation, just talk to the right people to get the quotes you’re looking for to write the piece you wanted in the first place. That’s Journalism 101

Nothing about the effects on the local community of suddenly increasing the population by a third through dropping thousands of people from a 3rd World country that came here on a dodgy Biden TPS program. Nothing about how daily life has changed for the people who lived there or their complains to the elected officials who betrayed them. Nothing about the effects of mass 3rd World immigration on America as seen through the eyes of one American town. America doesn’t belong to the people who live here as much as it does to Williamson’s vision of it.

That’s how you get more Trump.

For Williamson, Vance isn’t just wrong about Haitians and cats or the virtues of Springfield. He’s wrong because for him, Vance betrayed his upbringing because for Williamson, Vance came from a place where “…. the biggest business was organized crime and where politics vacillated between demagoguery and banditry, beautiful in some parts, hideous in others, and
poisonously backward – you know: Haiti, but with white people.”

There it is and Williamson has quite willingly lent his years of credibility as a conservative writer and his down-home, truth-telling persona to same project Dick Cheney has; that is to define the right-wing side of the civilizational boundary and cast MAGA, Vance, Trump, and all of those “marginally employed white people on the dole” xenophobes in Springfield outside of it. There’s no place in Cheney and Williamson’s America for any of them, except to be the target of The Two Minute Hate.