Tucker Carlson finds populism. Can he set America ablaze?

Larry Kummer, Editor

7 years ago

Summary: Last week on Fox, Tucker Carlson said things unmentionable on our major media. This was different than his (& Fox’s) standard conservative rhetoric. It was populism, a spark of which might set America’s politics ablaze.

ID 133550595 © Brita Seifert | Dreamstime.

I have grown despondent about the ability of America to reform. The 1% is ascendant. Our Left and Right fringes have gone bonkers. The Left-Right spectrum no longer reflects our real divisions, instead serving to divide us into futile fragments. But our greatest foes are our apathy and passivity. Even our growing peril has not aroused us to effective political action – just louder food-fights.

But change is coming in places I do not watch, on the virtual “street” where mass movements are born. But Dalrock (who I recommend for your reading list) does. He spotted a burst of real populism in the mass media, the first I have seen in decades. It is a rabble-rousing rant like those Samuel Adams gave on the streets of Boston in 1770 (my style aspires to be more like that of John Adams). Listen to the full rant. He hits all the buttons needed to create a mass populist movement.

Tucker Carlson: our America’s first famous populist?

See the video and transcript at Fox. I urge you to watch or read it. Carlson had already been punished for violating liberal pieties: twenty corporations have pulled their advertisements. But advocating populism is seriously transgressive. The reaction was swift. Now, as always, the great and wise condemn any signs of populism.The Feminists at HuffPo were indignant. Some of the conservatives at National Review leapt to defend the 1%. Dalrock gave an apt summary.

“Last week Tucker Carlson broke a carefully guarded conservative taboo and called out our elites for their role in destroying american families. Much of the reaction has been a predictable demand to stop holding our elites accountable and get back to blaming the working class, especially white working class men, for not being elite.”

For example, Jim Gergaghty gave the usual right-wing nostrums as rebuttal. But my favorite is this by David Bahnsen.

“Tucker fully knows that he has not accurately portrayed the entire story of what ‘private equity’ means in the American economy, or what a corporation is supposed to mean in a dynamic economy.”

Bahnsen throws chaff into our eyes, assuming we don’t know the deeds of private equity funds (our age’s “robber barons“, as seen here, here, plus a thousand other articles) and lawless corporations (our “malefactors of great wealth“). It is an ancient and effective tactic. It deserves no respect at this late date.

“‘Nay, Éomer, you do not fully understand the mind of Master Wormtongue,’ said Gandalf, turning his piercing glance upon him. ‘He is bold and cunning. Even now he plays a game with peril and wins a throw. Hours of my precious time he has wasted already. ‘Down snake!’ he said suddenly in a terrible voice. ‘Down on your belly!” {From Tolkien’s The Two Towers.}

But not all conservatives followed the proper narrative, as Dalrock says, “blaming the masses for the results their own policies had created.” Brad Wilcox wrote at The Atlantic about What Tucker Carlson Gets Right:

“Just as Carlson suggested in his monologue, conservatives need to think more seriously about the role that contemporary capitalism, public policy, and culture have played in eroding the strength and stability of working-class family life. Americans share a collective responsibility for solving some of our most pressing social problems – and elites need to come to acknowledge their personal responsibility for bridging the class divide that has emerged on so many fronts.”

Dalrock explains why this defection from the narrative is significant, at least as a beginning.

“Wilcox is one of the elites shaping national policy on marriage. In the past he has been (mostly) reliable in blaming men and arguing that what we need is not to discard the new legal and social model of marriage that works only for the elites, but for the working class to become elite so the new model will work for them too. For Wilcox to end up even halfheartedly on the wrong side of the wedge Carlson is driving between conservative elites is very dangerous for the status quo.”

Our elites, in both their left and right flavors, know that populism might spread like wildfires do in America’s West. A century of fire suppression has allowed a massive accumulation of tinder, so a spark can ignite an inferno. Fifty years of pressure on America’s workers has built up incredible social pressure. Populism is a potential spark that can vent this pressure outside the channels that keep the public divided and weak. Our elites will do whatever they can to suppress it. They try to discredit it with labels – “racist”, “ignorant”, “sexist.” They associate it with dark aspects of our past. They give us faux populists like Trump to discredit populists.

There is an obvious analogy in history. In 1789 the Estates General convened in France to address injustices that threatened to capsize the State. France’s elites offered the commoners almost nothing to alleviate the pressure. This tactic did not end well for France. Let’s hope our elites are wiser.

Dalrock has done some brilliant analysis of Carlson’s rant and the responses to it. I will post about this tomorrow. The reaction to Carlson’s rant might be the most important political event of 2019. More important than the government shutdown. Than the debates about the wall, and the hundreds of food-fights that occupy our headlines.

Conclusions

“Hegel says somewhere that all great historic facts and personages occur twice, so to speak. He forgot to add: ‘Once as tragedy, and again as farce.’”
— Opening line to Karl Marx’s The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte (1869).

Will this create another peasants’ protest movement, like Occupy, the Tea Party, and the Yellow Vests? Or will this spark start a serious populist movement? If it does, will it do better than France’s great popular revolt (or will Marx be right, again)? Might it unite with progressives to form an alliance, like the New Deal’s, capable of reining in the 1%? Americans will make the answer.

“Nothing is written.”
— Lawrence of Arabia, in the film.

About Dalrock

He is a married man living with his wife and two kids in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. He is very interested in how the post feminist world impacts himself and his family, and uses his blog to explore these issues. See his website. Especially these posts ….