‘Big White Ghetto” is, incidentally, what I thought the first time I met Kevin Williamson, in his baggy jeans and black T-shirt, chain wallet, wireframe beard, and shaved-bald pate.
It’s also the title of Williamson’s new book, and you should go read it.
This was in Philadelphia, that first meeting, at a multiday retreat for young journalists (I was young, he was a journalist), and over the course of a lecture and a lunch I came away with a fine first impression of the man.
The second time I met Williamson was at the old offices of National Review on Lexington Avenue — as I recall, he was wearing a track-suit jacket with a decidedly Balkan energy — when he came by my desk to greet me on the first day of the job for which he’d arranged my interview. So you should take this debt I owe into consideration in what follows.
But the fact is, there aren’t many writers alive, or alive in my lifetime, with Williamson’s eclectic fashion sense, or whom befits the “first time I met him” treatment. Christopher Hitchens was the granddaddy of them, and for a good year after he died anyone who was anyone in our little world had to relate, in print or over hors d’oeuvres, how they once personally witnessed him write 10,000 words on Gibbon’s Decline and Fall for the London Review in the space of three hours of delirium tremens between his last Johnnie Black of the evening and his first of the morning.
I never saw Kevin do that. I saw him eat chicken parmigiana at a strip mall in Tampa outside the 2012 RNC and sing “Wagon Wheel” over acoustic guitar at an apartment in Brooklyn. Neither anecdote has the same polish as the Hitchens apocrypha, but if there is any justice they’ll one day have the same currency in all the right circles. Williamson is that good a thinker and writer, and infamously so much a threat to the mediocrity of the conventional wisdom that it prompted unprecedented wailing and teeth-gnashing when The Atlantic briefly tried to lift him out of the not so big but often white ghetto that is conservative opinion journalism. To hell with them, though, we’re lucky to have him.
The action in Big White Ghetto unfolds in the selfsame region, which Williamson defines as the “vast moribund matrix of Wonder Bread–hued Appalachian towns and villages stretching from northern Mississippi to southern New York, a slowly dissipating nebula of poverty and misery with its heart in eastern Kentucky.” We meet its corner boys and townies and conspiracy nuts, its homeless moms and role-playing seditionists and crank addicts, its hookers and hucksters and hooligans and harpies. Mostly they’re up to no good.
On display in each vignette is a dying style, a blend of sociology and shoe leather that marks Kevin indelibly as someone who used to spend time writing and editing newspapers — honest-to-god newspapers that covered cities and towns and had police blotters and classified ads, and were not, as one of its own writers recently said about the New York Times, a “juicy collection of great narratives.”
The material is drawn from a decade-plus of essays that originally appeared in this magazine’s pages and on its website, but like all good writing with something to say about the human condition, it rarely feels dated. (An exception: Kevin’s description of Rudy Giuliani as “a thrice-married recreationally cross-dressing pro-choice big-city liberal” now reads as unduly conciliatory.) Nine articles date from after the 2016 presidential election, though only a couple of them deal substantially with the man who won it. It can nevertheless be understood as a requiem for that election, and much of what followed (up to and including the late national disgrace at the Capitol during the certification of the electoral votes — more on that presently). It also has a thematic kinship with, if a more bruising manner than, its widely ballyhooed forebearer Hillbilly Elegy — a title Kevin might have used if it hadn’t already been taken.
And Kevin knows from hillbillies, as he makes clear in parceled-out bits of autobiography that are candid and poignant without being confessional or maudlin. I’ll put it to you this way: Sometime in my years sharing a corridor with him, a bunch of us at NR took a faddy Internet quiz that was supposed to tell us how far out of touch we were with working Americans, with questions like “Have you ever been on a factory floor?” and “What does 4H stand for?” I scored some respectable number that betokened my not having a trust fund or a favorite stallion, and I lorded it over some of my bow-tied, Ivy League colleagues. One of them suggested, “We should have Kevin take it.” My heart sank.
Ten years ago, you probably could have looked at Williamson’s work and called him a libertarian without doing too much rhetorical violence. But that’s not all that’s going on in Big White Ghetto. Kevin is a capitalist in the same way Newton was a physicist, from which it doesn’t follow that either of them thinks any given instance of profit or of gravitation is desirable or commendable. And in places, he even indulges a sort of “there oughta be a law” head-shaking that is vague and noncommittal enough to keep him from being tied down to any top-down social engineering sure to be doomed for all the familiar reasons. As when he notes in a chapter on the geographic and metaphysical blight of Atlantic City that gambling-addiction rates are higher for people who live near a casino: “If cancer rates were double in the 50 miles surrounding a bubblegum factory, you can bet that the bubblegum factory would get the full Erin Brockovich treatment.”
His survey of the ravages of the opioid epidemic, which includes both dates-and-numbers trends and impressionistic portraits of individual victims, is affecting. It is also predictive, in that it comes from stuff he wrote largely before the legal Götterdämmerung of Purdue and the other pharma companies, which, some would have it, marketed narcotics as if they were herbal teas. Williamson holds orthodox libertarian positions on the drug war — he’s against it — though he has no shortage of scorn for the capitalists and reckless physicians who fed the prescription-pill gray markets. In the end, he’s as pessimistic about the subject as he is about anything else in the book. “It isn’t clear that there really is a solution to the opiate epidemic,” he writes, a pitch-black proposition but not an unreasonable one, given a world in which there are substances that hack your brain so that you’d sell your mother for more, and an innovation juggernaut designed to make them ever more effective.
The most personal chapter is a brief sketch with the loaded-for-bear title “I Am Cancer,” a sermon on the spiritual hazards of being responsible for the irresponsible, in which Williamson relates a day he spent in court “evicting my mother’s fourth husband’s fifth wife from a modest house . . . in which she resided rent-free for a decade or so.”
“I am the bad thing that is just happening to you today,” he says in imagined dialogue with the woman’s daughter, who doesn’t understand why Kevin, owner of the house she squats in, is the face of “the unforeseeable event that has been hanging over [her] by a single hair of a horse’s tail for a decade, the inevitable end of a terrible lamentation.”
There is, to be sure, a thick and bluish vein of this kind of moral brutalism in the book (“The more you know about that world, the less sympathetic you’ll be to it”) whose ruthless logic Williamson’s far-flung critics have focused on to the exclusion of all else. Primarily, though, there is the kind of fatalism that can come only from someone who actually believes in individual human agency but who has, over years of close observation, realized how little of it is put to productive use. “The teacher in me cannot help but notice that when it comes time to explain the facts of the case, the people in this courtroom rarely appear as the subjects in their own sentences.”
It’s not all woe. Chapters on the high-tech oil-and-natural-gas renaissance and soybean farming tell stories of successes driven by a cocktail of ingenuity, opportunism, and the inability to know when you’re licked that has brought America out of doldrums past. A chapter on pornography’s Nevadan center of gravity, all textured vinyl and Cialis and failure, while expectedly judgy, is also by turns pleasantly trashy and endearingly naïve (at least to this child of the unregulated, turn-of-the-millennium Internet). As if Williamson were a Mennonite encountering commodity sex for the first time. In the margins of a passage mentioning an “A-list porn star,” I scribbled, “Arguable!”
If there is a criticism of the chapters Williamson spends on the White Ghetto’s explicitly political project — which includes not just Richard Spencer and the alt-right but, in photonegative form, Antifa and the Bernie Bros — it’s that it should be in its own book. As it stands, it’s about a quarter of the book he did write, though I suspect even as a fragment it will stand up well against the libraries of ink that have been and will be written on the subject.
Here’s a pocket-sized reductio of the cheap populism Kevin ID’ed as cancerous quicker and better than just about anyone:
The president isn’t our father, and the nation isn’t a family. The belief that the nation is a family that ought to be governed by a father-analogue is what separates nationalism from conservatism, which in the Anglo-American context is deeply rooted in the classical-liberal philosophy of the American founding. . . . Nationalism is not only a sentimental veneer for political movements that are generally corrupt and authoritarian — nationalism is also a lament for the idealized family that never existed, the loss of which is nonetheless felt acutely.
Later, in what could be the mission statement of the book: “The opposite message — that life is hard and unfair, that what is not necessarily your fault may yet be your problem, that you must act and bear responsibility for your actions — is what conservatism used to offer, before it became a white-minstrel show.”
The white-minstrel show — Antifa on the one side, MAGA insurrectionists on the other — is in Williamson’s estimation a product of ordinary angst. I don’t want to shortchange his thoughtful elaboration on the subject, but it does seem to boil down for him to youths, some blue-collared, many with useless baccalaureates, sublimating anomie into smashed car windows and the odd bit of arson. “It appeals to the adolescent appetite for transgression, the épater les bourgeois ethic of radical youth movements around the world.”
At least, that’s how it started. But even though Big White Ghetto predates the riot-filled summer of 2020 and January’s terror at the U.S. Capitol, it seems viscerally to foretell it all. It seems to say on every page, in the refrain Kevin debuted the day after the decisive 2016 Indiana GOP primary: “Remember, you asked for this.”
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