The Snoot Party Goes to War

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, December 26, 2021

 

The Democrats love the poor. The Democrats hate the poor.

 

And the poor in West Virginia? They’re at the bottom of the bucket, as Democrats see things.

 

Senator Joe Manchin, the moderate Democrat from West Virginia who is one of the last of that breed, has derailed Joe Biden’s beloved Build Back Better bill, a slop-bucket of progressive wish-fulfillment that would add trillions in new spending to our already-bloated federal budget and pile much more debt upon our already-considerable national heap. Senator Manchin thought it was a bad package, though he supported some of what was in it, and West Virginians thought it was a bad package, though they supported some of what was in it, and so Senator Manchin announced — on Fox News, in an extra “f**k you” to Chuck Schumer et al. — that he would oppose the bill. Because Democrats and Republicans both have rejected the notion of consensus-building and bipartisanship, every Senate Republican opposes the scheme, which means that the Democrats need every Democratic vote to pass the bill in the evenly split Senate.

 

Senator Manchin’s willingness to break with his party makes him, for the moment, the most powerful man in Washington after the maître d’ at le Diplomate. (Somewhere in the Senate, there must be at least one Republican who is smart enough to realize that he could be the most powerful man in Washington, after the maître d’ at le Diplomate, if he were willing to do the same.) It also makes him the man Democrats hate most — at the moment, anyway; Democratic hatred is an urgent and plastic thing.

 

But like the unhappy worker who cannot face off against his overbearing boss and so instead goes home to yell at his wife and kick the dog (as Sigmund Freud once had it), progressives from Hollywood to Washington to whatever abandoned gopher hole Robert Reich calls home have decided to lay into the people of West Virginia. As Isaac Schorr already has reported here, the noted political philosopher Bette Midler and her friends at Occupy Democrats denounced West Virginians as illiterates (the Mountain State has a higher literacy rate than New York, California, or New Jersey), Ilhan Omar suggested that Senator Manchin’s vote is the result of corruption — a serious charge for which she should be made to answer — and Reich offered this indictment: “Let me remind you that a full quarter of West Virginians 65 and older have no natural teeth.” Toothless hillbillies — who doesn’t love a classic? In fact, the share of West Virginians over 65 without any remaining teeth is not far off from the national average; the state’s slightly elevated rate of geriatric toothlessness is almost certainly due to the fact that it has a large population of people over 75 (who have a very high rate of total tooth loss), being the nation’s third-most-elderly state. But facts don’t matter much when you’ve worked up a good head of hate-steam.

 

I know as well as anybody that poor, rural, white America has its problems. But I do not believe for one hot second that Ilhan Omar or Robert Reich knows one damned thing about them, or cares to learn. Why would they? Senator Manchin is about as far to the political left as today’s West Virginia is going to go. Owsley County, Ky., home of the poorest white people in America, is overwhelmingly Republican, and Donald Trump got eight times as many votes as Joe Biden did there in 2020 — Trump did slightly better in San Francisco than Biden did in Owsley County. There’s a little factoid to meditate upon.

 

The most important domestic political development of the 21st century so far is the class-reversal of the Republican and Democratic parties, a trend that began in the 1990s with Bill Clinton and now has reached a state of genuine polarization. Democrats, once the party of poor farmers and working-class “white ethnics,” as we used to call them, have become the party of affluent, educated, metropolitan and suburban professionals — the people who once were critical to the Republican coalition. One notable barometer, the five counties of Southeastern Pennsylvania, for years exemplified a national pattern: Philadelphia was overwhelmingly Democratic, and the four suburban counties around it were overwhelmingly Republican; now, you don’t hit Republican territory until Lancaster County, which is both Amish country and heroin country, with almost 150 overdose deaths in 2020.

 

As far as today’s Democrats are concerned, voting Republican is just one more pathology that afflicts the toothless hillbillies of their imagination. They are perplexed — or at least pretend to be perplexed — by the fact that there are poor and struggling Americans who do not instinctively turn to welfare-statism as the answer to their problems, who are uneager to sacrifice either their values or their liberties in exchange for a government check. Democrats have responded to this by elevating the needs of the relatively well-off to the top of their agenda, which is why they spend so much time talking about the terrible burden of student loans for young lawyers and underemployed Haverford graduates. You won’t hear them offer anything like a serious solution to the public-education crisis in Los Angeles or Milwaukee — those well-paid teachers are a core part of the Democratic base, and semi-literate high-school dropouts do not vote in large numbers.

 

It is likely that Senator Manchin either will become a Republican or will be replaced by one, eventually. At only 74 years of age, he is a spring chicken by the standards of current Democratic leadership: President Biden is 79, Nancy Pelosi is 81 (her hair is 46), and Dianne Feinstein is within spittin’ distance of 90. But he isn’t going to be in the Senate forever. Because the Senate gives equal representation to the less-populous rural states and the densely populated urban states, it is always going to be a problem for Democrats. Strangely, Democrats seem, at the moment, intent on making it a bigger problem for themselves. Further shrinking the universe of possible electoral coalitions may pass for smart in the great echoing expanse of insipidity between Bette Midler’s droopy old ears, but it is a losing strategy.

 

Somewhere, Mitch McConnell is cracking a bloodcurdling smile.