Peggy Noonan, conservative Wall Street Journal columnist and former Reagan speechwriter, wrote in her latest op-ed that the 2016 cycle has revealed that many right-leaning writers are suffering from their own version of elitism.
On the “shattering” of the Republican Party, Noonan said she’s “offended” by conservative journalists who have contributed to it.
“Lately conservative thinkers and journalists have taken to making clear their disdain for the white working class,” she wrote. “I had actually not known they looked down on them. I deeply resented it and it pained me. If you’re a writer lucky enough to have thoughts and be paid to express them and there are Americans on the ground struggling, suffering — some of them making mistakes, some unlucky — you don’t owe them your airy, well-put contempt, you owe them your loyalty. They too have given a portion of their love to this great project, and they are in trouble.”
Others in the media have made similar observations about a rift within the GOP, spotlighted in part by the rise of Donald Trump, whose campaign for the party’s presidential nomination is fueled to a high degree by blue-collar voters.
In early April, former GOP congressman Joe Scarborough wrote in the Washington Post that “[I]n 2016, conservative commentators are sounding as cocooned from their own political party as any liberal writing social commentary for the New Yorker or providing political analysis for ABC News.”
Conservative writers who have scoffed at both Trump and his supporters include National Review’s Kevin Williamson, who said in March that working class communities “deserve to die.”
“Forget all your cheap theatrical Bruce Springsteen crap,” he wrote. “Forget your sanctimony about struggling Rust Belt factory towns and your conspiracy theories about the wily Orientals stealing our jobs. … 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.”
