Interesting points. Williamson probably growing up in Amarillo didn't know from aristocracy, but I saw right away that he was getting at that, understood it:

Not long ago, to be a conservative on Manhattan’s Upper East Side was the most ordinary thing in the world. Now that address would be a source of suspicion. God help you if you should ever attend a cocktail party in Georgetown, the favorite dumb trope of conservative talk-radio hosts. We’ve gone from William F. Buckley Jr. to the gentlemen from Duck Dynasty. Why?
 

Conservative upper East Side and Georgetown in Buckley's time were still filled with the descendants of the Social Register of the Gilded Age. Not enough get that those were Buckley's crowd, the intellectual shabby aristo scene, were not too showy with money if they still had it. The kind of noblesse oblige people (say, Rockefeller) that Duck Dynasty would make roll over in their graves, and probably wouldn't be too happy to have them kiss their rings, either.

I looked into Williamson because this is the second pretty phenomenal essay on the culture front that I've noticed by him. He basically appears to be a libertarian that was already strongly anti-Trump in 2015;  but this explains it all, the complex cultural understanding and even the Minstrel theme: also the theater critic for The New Criterion. Hilton Kramer, original editor of same had the same kind of Buckley/Williamson attitude. The meant to maintain and support a high American culture while highly respecting the roots DeToqueville saw. But not so rooty, as it were, to the point of Duck Dynasty. Or Trump. A Trump on Park Avenue? The horror! Would much rather have a honest truck driver, or a Black Panther.