A FRIEND ON FACEBOOK REALLY LIKED this Kevin Williamson essay on Trump and nationalism, but I was unimpressed. Okay, it has one truly brilliant line:

The Capitol dome is a great dome, but I know who’s in there.

But it rambles on and on and misses the obvious source of Trump’s nationalism talk and why it resonates. For 50-plus years, the academic and political classes have been telling people that America isn’t great, and often that it’s uniquely evil, and that anyone who thinks otherwise is a loser. This is pushback against that attitude. It’s working-class defiance in the face of the political/academic elite. Remember: In America, culture war is generally just a disguise for class war.

You can’t understand what’s going on in America today without understanding that and Williamson doesn’t seem to understand that. Which is weird, because in 2015 he wrote this: “Questions about patriotism and love of country are, according to our self-appointed referees, out of bounds, déclassé, boob bait for bubbas, etc. Those are questions that we are not allowed to ask in polite society. Why? Because polite society does not want to hear the answers. Does Barack Obama like America? The people around him certainly seem to have their reservations.” Strange that he should miss the point now, when he correctly identified our political class as a bunch of Holden Caulfields then.

Related: “Listening to Trump’s pitch, I felt it was so upbeat, so admiring and praising of people who usually hear that they’re washed up and pathetic.” These days, even from Kevin Williamson.