The Wall Street Journal vs. the populist right

Anyone who thinks Kevin Williamson’s commentary recently in the Wall Street Journal is about what the title signifies would do well to reconsider the notion. Although Williamson’s piece, “Election 2024: You Asked for It, America,” is supposed to be about the “Biden-Trump rematch,” our author has different fish to fry. Like others associated with the Dispatch, Williamson loathes Donald Trump, almost as much as he despises the entire populist right, which he identifies with the former president.

Williamson regrets that the “old media gatekeepers” are losing their power, and those who have rushed in to fill the instructional void are, as he views them, almost subhuman. Our minds, according to this critic, are being poisoned by “QAnon cookery on Facebook [and] conspiracy theories powerful enough to vault the cretinous likes of Marjorie Taylor Greene into Congress.” Williamson also complains about the “fake-ish news subsidized by Viktor Orbán and his happy junta, and whatever kind of poison butterfly Tucker Carlson is going to be when he emerges from the chrysalis of filth that he’s built around himself.”

It seems that “democracy has failed” because, in its present “gross” state, it has produced a matchup that Kevin Williamson finds repellant.

Although for the sake of appearing evenhanded, Williamson sprinkles his anti-populist harangue with unkind references to “Joe Biden, a plagiarist and fabulist,” in the same sentence in which he mildly chastises Biden, he tells us this about Biden’s adversary: In the “dreadful and contemptible 2024 presidential race,” there will be Trump, “a depraved game-show host who tried to stage a coup d’état when he lost his 2020 presidential bid.”

Williamson seems hardly concerned about the raging anti-white black nationalists, woke warriors against gender distinctions, or the LGBT fanatics among Biden’s handlers. He is too busy declaiming against Trump and the working-class right. But this is not surprising. Williamson was already walloping the same whipping boy when I read his notorious piece expressing relief that the white working class in small-town America was in the process of dying out — and that they had it coming, too.

Given his ties to the Dispatch and his already-stated opinions about those he hates, one might wonder why the Wall Street Journal would publish what reads mostly like a rant for MSNBC. Like Williamson, the Journal scorns Trump and MAGA Republicans. Its editors and backers are now driving home that message. Indeed, getting someone from the Dispatch who has never hidden his venomous views to write about Trump and his fans indicates precisely where the Wall Street Journal stands on these matters.

Trump isn’t Williamson’s only target, of course. He also attacks the fairly establishment Republican House Speaker Mike Johnson as a “swamp grotesque from Louisiana” who believes “he is the second coming of Moses,” which presumably is a slur on Johnson’s biblically grounded Christian convictions. As for former Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.), Williamson derides him as a “knee-walking Trump sycophant.” Such lowlifes, we’re led to believe, do not understand what, for Williamson, are “critical national priorities.”

And what are those priorities? Atop them is having “functional political parties,” which means, in effect, not allowing a despised Republican candidate who “will act like some kind of mid-century caudillo” to win next year. Even worse, according to Williamson, with a Trump victory, we “can expect something along the lines of Jan. 6.” Perhaps throwing this would-be caudillo and his MAGA supporters in jail, with those who are already wasting away there because of their putative January 6 connections, is Williamson’s answer to this crisis.

Like the New York Post and Fox News, the Wall Street Journal is a creature of the Murdoch family, and it is far from coincidental that both the Journal and the Post have become noticeably partial toward Nikki Haley. The former South Carolina governor is a favorite in the presidential sweepstakes among some not particularly conservative but pro-intervention plutocrats like the Murdochs. And Williamson’s complaints that we’re not spending enough on military defense lines up with the expressed views of Haley and the Journal’s board.

It seems that “democracy has failed” because, in its present “gross” state, it has produced a matchup that Williamson finds repellant. But he also seems to dislike one candidate vastly more than the other one. Would he be complaining if Trump were not the inevitable Republican nominee? Are we supposed to believe Williamson would have been less disturbed by past presidential contests?

Given Williamson’s tendency to ascribe racist views to anyone on his right, would he have been happy voting in the presidential race of 1844 between two slaveholders, James K. Polk and Henry Clay? What about all those other presidential contests between candidates who would have fallen well short of Williamson’s ideological standards? Most of our 19th-century candidates would have made Marjorie Taylor Greene, Williamson’s special bête noire (next to Trump), look like a raving progressive.

Yes, I know his editorial is mostly fustian and hyperbole. But I’m just speculating on why it was published and possibly solicited.

Allow me to express my profound skepticism that the Wall Street Journal published Williamson’s diatribe because it wishes to encourage a free exchange of ideas. When was the last time that paper published a paleoconservative or any member of the old right? One might have to research ancient history to uncover such an unexpected act. I certainly wouldn’t expect any changes any time soon.