What, exactly, did Tucker Carlson stand for? While he was mostly identified with the right, he was not any normal sort of American conservative and he sometimes advocated for left-wing causes. Ross Douthat:
The master key to understanding Tucker Carlson’s programming wasn’t ideology; it was suspicion. He had been the reliable sort of cable-news pundit, once upon a time — the cheerful partisan, the “Crossfire” Republican, the talking points purveyor (even if he purveyed them with a little more irony than most).
Then something changed — after the Iraq war, after Jon Stewart helped kill “Crossfire,” he gradually became disillusioned, radicalized. You could see it before his Fox News gig came along, in the way he wrote about Donald Trump in 2016, and then you could see it in the way he ran his show. . .
Carlson wasn’t like the right-wing personalities who surrendered to Trumpism reluctantly because that’s where their listeners wanted them to go. He was a Trumpist only insofar as Trump went where he himself was heading anyway — toward a rejection of everything the Western political establishment stood for, an extreme open-mindedness toward everything that it ruled out of bounds.
Which is why his show was the farthest right on cable news but also sometimes the farthest left. You could assemble a set of Carlson clips — encompassing everything from his frequent interviews with Glenn Greenwald to his successful opposition to a U.S. conflict with Iran in 2019 and 2020 — that made him seem like a George W. Bush-era antiwar activist given a prime-time show on Fox by some mischievous genie. You could assemble a similar array in which he sounded left-wing notes on economics.
These forays were not in tension with his willingness to entertain the far right’s “Great Replacement” paranoia about immigration or fixate on a possible F.B.I. role in instigating the Jan. 6 riot. They were all part of the same hermeneutic: For any idea with an establishment imprimatur, absolute suspicion; for any outsider or skeptic, sympathy and trust.
When somebody asked him about his greatest regret, Carlson said
… for too long, I participated in the culture where anyone who thinks outside these pre-prescribed lanes is crazy, is a “conspiracy theorist.” And I just really regret that. I’m ashamed that I did that. And partly, it was age and the world I grew up in. So when you look at me and say, “Yeah, of course [the media] is part of the means of control.” That’s obvious to you because you’re 28, but I just didn’t see it at all — at all. And I’m ashamed of that.
This suspicion is indeed become one of the great themes in American politics, cutting across left-right divides, religion, class, age, all the other ways of dividing the electorate.
It more and more seems to me that the combination of the War on Terror and the 2008 financial crisis poisoned Americans' trust in all their institutions in a way that we will be living with for a long time.
I know I'm very guilty of being overly verbose, but even I think they could have just said "He became a paranoid delusional conspiracy theorist" and said most of what is worth saying about it.
ReplyDeleteThe man is a classic case of someone poorly educated and not terribly bright who blindly believed in an orthodoxy he was fed by cynical people with their own agenda, and then when his faith in that was shaken down, he swung to the complete opposite end of the spectrum and became a delusional paranoiac who will believe anything and everything so long as it adversarial and in opposition to what he used to believe.
This is a man who lacks the capacity to think critically for themselves, entrusted someone else to do it for him, predictably got exploited in so doing, and then found replacement thought-surrogates to cling to instead, who are exploiting him even more, but with the caveat that they are better at stringing him along, and they have the benefit of being able to pin more or less everything that might raise suspicions on the original exploiters.
There's no cure for these kinds of people. The only solution is to stamp out the exploitation before dimwitted people like this get radicalized in the name of greed and powermongering.
...but that wouldn't be profitable for the shareholders, so fat chance...
I don't have a much knowledge of how to characterize Carlson personally, but, in terms of suspicion of government and anger at the establishment, I think the roots go far, far back. One could trace a genealogy back to colonial Appalachia (and back to north British roots, according to D. H. Fisher), the Civil War, the failed agrarian populism of the late nineteenth century, the cultural changes of the 1920s, post-WWII international engagement and the loss of China (oddly but definitely twin resentments that reflect this spirit's real difficulty conceiving of foreign policy at all), on into all the history of 1965 to 1972 covered in Rick Perlstein's Nixonland, the Turner Diaries and other paranoia literature of that era, and on and on. It's worth remembering Roger Ailes developed his ideas for right-wing media in the late 60s, and also worth recalling the way the movie Network anticipated so much about both Fox and its stars. The militia thing is very old as well, and, in its current form, dates to the 90s.
ReplyDeleteThe special thing the War on Terror contributed was a realization that the Republican Party as then constituted could launch a failed foreign intervention pumped up by false optimism just as the Democrats could.
Carlson isn't just a phenomenon of our age, he reflects something that's been deeply and genuinely part of us from the beginning.
It is worth emphasizing that these ongoing, connected phenomena do not, in their most important aspects, represent a cleavage between the population as such and the government as such. What's really at work are divides within the population itself. Distrust of "the government" is often a way of softening or misdirecting attention (one's own as well as others') from one's actual distrust of a large section of one's fellow citizens.
ReplyDeleteDespite the ideological complexity of Carlson's pronouncements, one must always recognize that he represented the taste or leanings only of a segment of the population, even if that segment was tens of millions. Tens of millions of others loathed him. As Perlstein shows, that divide is real, and, deep roots aside, its contemporary form has been the decisive factor shaping American politics since at least 1965; it is not just an artifact of media technology or manipulation from one quarter or another, nor of only recent policy decisions.
@John: I was arguing for a much more specific ideological/cultural, white-right-populist sort of continuity. There's a real tradition and a power to keep itself going that transcend a routine waxing and waning. Even if it usually loses, it's a force in American life, not merely a style, in Hofstadter's unfortunate wording.
ReplyDeleteMy memory also is that the paranoid populism that became MAGA, and that Carlson battened on, really got into its current wax, if you will, only after Obama was elected. It was already there in the Palin wing of the party, but the big moment was the rise of the Tea Party in early 2009. There's something about that time, with Obama's continuation of the war on terror (even if he rejected the Iraq part of it, until ISIS); his corporate-friendly, non-class-war response to the economic crisis (importantly, in both message and substance); his sophisticated personal style and the enthusiasm for him among people perceived as the cultural elite; and of course his race, that brings the right-populist bits all together in a very powerful way. It's striking that Bush II, Dick Cheney, Rumsfeld, etc., have never shone brightly in the MAGA hate-firmament, not like Obama and Hillary Clinton. Contrast the way a lot of old sixties leftists still can't get over their rage at LBJ and McNamara.