Kevin Williamson is justifiably annoyed that stupidity and vulgarity is coming out on top in the early GOP primaries.

One lesson… is that the broad Republican electorate is not actually very conservative. For all of the pleasure that these so-called conservatives derive from denouncing socialism on the Euro-weenie model, they turn out to have much more in common with Marine Le Pen than they do with Ronald Reagan, of free-enterprise and amnesty infamy: They like their welfare state just fine, thank you, but they’ll wet themselves in terror if they see a Marlboro billboard in Spanish.

What’s more illuminating, though, is how many of the so-called conservatives in the entertainment wing of the movement — the contrepreneurs — turned out to be mob-rule enthusiasts simply looking for a sufficiently large and stupid mob. Donald Trump is Bill Clinton without the experience in office, and indeed is a considerable financial patron of the Clinton enterprise. He has been on the wrong side of practically every important issue — life, the Second Amendment, national security — and managed to go nearly 70 years, most of which was spent in public life, without uttering a notable sentence about what has become his signature issue: immigration, about which his policies range from the nonsensical to the never-gonna-happen.

For the contrepreneurs and their followers, it’s an exercise in wishful thinking: If not for the illegals, employment and wages would go up, taxes would go down, spending would go down, budgets would be balanced, schools wouldn’t be terrible, etc. Chickens not laying? Cow gone dry? Somewhere, somehow, somebody called Perez is to blame. How do you know? Because some third-rate doggie-vitamin salesman on the radio says so.

When the God of the Old Testament was especially annoyed with His people, he threatened to take away their statesmen: “I will give children to be their princes, and babes shall rule over them.” We Americans don’t have princes, and we don’t need anybody to rule over us. But we do need capable public administrators, including capable presidents.

Read the whole thing.