THE DILEMMA OF TUCKER CARLSON: PROLOGUE
The start of an open-ended, ongoing series focusing on the most enigmatic personality in cable news...
There has been much discussion as to whether the Trump administration, including Donald Trump himself, could reasonably have been equated with fascism. Some of the alleged similarities between the ex-President and traditional European fascism were more plausible than others. Some parts of the debate were insightful; many were uninformed. But one genuinely striking parallel between Trump and actual fascism, almost totally overlooked, is how Trump, like the Italian and German fascists before him, when campaigning for power, made rhetorical appeals that ranged across the political spectrum.
It’s old news by now that Trump said many ignorant, vulgar things on the campaign trail - and while in office, and since leaving office etc. But these were not the most interesting remarks that he made. In stark contrast to what had up until that point been unshakable conservative Republican orthodoxy, Trump criticized trade deals like NAFTA, promised to protect Social Security and Medicare (one could literally watch the color drain out of Paul Ryan’s face), and blasted both Ted Cruz and Hillary Clinton for being controlled by Goldman Sachs.[i] He even gestured toward what were undeniably left-wing critiques of the capitalist system itself, such as when he acknowledged that the system was broken because political candidates were controlled by their wealthy donors.[ii]
Perhaps the most notable instance of Trump blatantly going against Republican shibboleths was when he talked about foreign policy. During one primary debate he shouted at Jeb Bush that his brother, former president George W. Bush, sent the country to war in Iraq based on lies.[iii] This was notable because even today, 20 years later, it remains virtually impossible to publicly refer to the Iraq War as a crime, which it was. You are required to call it a “mistake,” a “strategic blunder,” or, as Barack Obama did during his initial run for the presidency, a “dumb war.”[iv] Trump first called it a “mistake” several times, but then went further, saying, “I wanna tell you, they lied. They said there were weapons of mass destruction; there were none, and they knew there were none! There were no weapons of mass destruction.” Trump said this to a great deal of hissing and booing from the debate audience, but kept going; when Jeb Bush tried to defend his brother on the absurd grounds that he built “a security apparatus to keep us safe,” Trump quickly retorted, “The world trade center came down during your brothers’ reign, remember that. That’s not ‘keeping us safe.’”
On another occasion, when one of the Iraq War’s loudest supporters, Bill O’Reilly, challenged Trump about his occasional praise for Vladimir Putin on the grounds that Putin was “a killer,” Trump bluntly (and correctly) replied, “There are a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?” A visibly stunned O’Reilly attempted to get him to walk the statement back, resulting in the following exchange:
O’Reilly “I don’t know of any government leaders who are killers…”
Trump: Well, take a look at what we’ve done too. We’ve made a lot of mistakes. I’ve been against the war in Iraq from the beginning.[v]
O’Reilly: Yeah, mistakes are different than –
Trump: We make a lot of mistakes, ok, but a lot of people were killed, so, a lot of killers around, believe me.[vi]
O’Reilly immediately changed the subject.
Those people who developed their political consciousness after Trump’s candidacy may not appreciate just how unusual all this sounded at the time. As far back as the Truman administration, and especially since 9/11, it was a simple fact of life that the Republican Party were free-market fanatics and interventionist hawks. Their rhetoric involved fetishizing small business owners (while quietly catering to massive corporate behemoths), worshipping the American flag, and tripping over each other to see who could praise the military the loudest, while accusing the Democrats of being insufficiently enthusiastic about these things.
During the Bush administration alone, the GOP: cut taxes on the wealthy, attempted to privatize social security, illegally invaded Afghanistan, illegally invaded Iraq, set up a global regime of kidnapping and torture, eviscerated civil liberties via legislation like the Patriot Act, and further expanded the national security state with the creation of the Department of Homeland Security, including the notorious ICE. That the Democrats were complicit in much of this does not change the fact that the GOP was the driving force.
When the party fell out of power during the Obama presidency, they spent eight years loudly complaining that Obama – in reality a vicious mass murderer who launched an illegal campaign of assassination by drone, massively expanded the frequency of special operations raids, escalated the war in Afghanistan, mercilessly bombed Libya, greenlit the Saudi destruction of Yemen, and ruthlessly cracked down on journalists who exposed government criminality – was actually an antimilitary, soft-on-terrorism, closeted socialist.[vii] Complaining that Obama was insufficiently bellicose was an alarming gauge of Republican ideological commitments.
So for a major Republican presidential candidate like Trump to come along and critique money in politics, promise to protect Medicare and Social Security, and condemn nation building in the Middle East, was nothing short of breathtaking, not to mention confusing. I recall watching some of these moments on live television, wondering aloud to myself what was going on. I could imagine someone like Dennis Kucinich making these critiques, but a xenophobic, misogynistic, right-wing buffoon like Trump? What was going on?
But then I remembered my history, which provided a crucial lens for understanding what was happening. In The Anatomy of Fascism, Robert O. Paxton described how Fascists often employed fierce anti-capitalist rhetoric as they campaigned against the established political system. Once in power, of course, they destroyed the socialist left while keeping capitalist structures of power largely unharmed. But their oratory was sufficient to create “a seismic emotional shift in which the Left was no longer the only recourse for the angry.”[viii] This sounded a lot like what was happening with the 2016 campaigns. While Bernie Sanders had campaigned from the standpoint of the long-marginalized tradition of left-wing populism, a figure on the right appeared to be doing something similar.
This rhetorical trick employed by fascists has resulted in more than a few people getting confused. For instance, conservative commentators like Jonah Goldberg and Peter Hitchens[ix] have naively alleged that fascism – understood by every serious historian to be a phenomenon of the right – was actually a left-liberal ideology. One can only reach this conclusion by spending too much time looking at what fascists said they were going to do, while ignoring what they actually did once they took power.[x]
Because I knew this history, I never bought in to the idea that Trump was going to pursue policies that ran counter to wealthy interests.[xi] Trump was not, as one columnist suggested, “Donald the Dove.”[xii] On foreign policy issues other than Iraq – namely Israel and Iran – he was simply a Dick Cheney clone, only less competent. Nor was he much of an outlier when it came to traditional Republican fiscal policies, in that he slashed taxes on the wealthy while increasing the military budget. But during his 2016 campaign, Trump was a genius when it came to reading the electorate (unlike Hillary Clinton), and he knew that being perceived as an economic populist and an isolationist would increase his electability. He understood that decades of trade deals which had gutted the working and middle class were not popular in former union strongholds. He knew that Republicans had erred in the past by talking about destroying Social Security and Medicare, which poll highly even among registered Republican voters.[xiii] And he recognized that Americans were tiring of endless wars in the Middle East, the initial propaganda-fueled rush of mindless jingoism having finally given way to war-weariness.
Other Republican candidates, to say nothing of the party leadership and its wealthy donors, were not pleased to hear some of Trump’s rhetoric. Whereas progressives were rightfully alarmed at Trump’s moronic views on climate change, his bigoted comments about immigrants, and his misogynistic behavior, the capitalist class was alarmed that Trump occasionally said things that ventured into the realm of truth, i.e., that NATO no longer had any purpose and that money controlled the political system.[xiv] The wealthy would have preferred any of the other 16 candidates over Trump, given that they shared the proper class outlook while refrained from making those occasionally true-ish outbursts that Trump was becoming known for.
But those candidates did not seem, to voters of a certain persuasion, as “genuine” as Trump did. “Little Marco” Rubio and “Lyin” Ted Cruz could not shake the establishment taint that Trump had slimed them with. And once Trump had the nomination, he used the same tactics to dispatch his Democratic opponent Hillary Clinton (the DNC having conveniently guaranteed that he would not have to go up against the far more formidable Sanders).
Trump’s posturing created an opening for the reactionary right wing in general, one that few saw coming. With the Democratic Party having consciously decided to cast off its labor union ties in favor of going after more corporate donors traditionally associated with the Republicans,[xv] and given the decline of the antiwar movement caused by the 2008 recession and the election of Barack Obama, the political right could do something which would have been unimaginable just a few years before: re-brand itself as a pro-worker, anti-war party representing ordinary people pissed off at “the establishment.”[xvi] If any Republican, let alone a Democrat, had made some of the statements Trump made about wars or trade or Russia even a few years previously, he or she would have been denounced as a communist. But now the GOP saw an opportunity to fill a rhetorical vacuum, and a new strategy for manipulating voters began to take shape.
Since the collapse of the New Deal Consensus in the 1970s and the resultant rightward shift of the US political system, the Republican Party has had a big problem: convincing anyone to vote for their policies, which its own strategists frankly acknowledged were not popular with anyone outside the wealthy elite. These included the gutting of environmental regulations, slashing taxes for the wealthy, repealing popular social programs, and destroying unions. Since virtually no one amongst the working class was in favor of any of this, it became necessary to disguise this agenda as much as possible. Enter the culture war. Focusing on issues like abortion, homosexual marriage, guns, the teaching of evolution, scapegoating vulnerable groups like undocumented immigrants and especially blacks, soon became the GOP playbook.
Essentially, the post-Ford Republican Party became totally devoted to unlimited subservience to the dictates of corporate power, using heaping doses of reactionary rhetoric on cultural issues to conceal this from their voters. Meanwhile, the Democratic Party slid to the right as well to occupy the newly available ideological real estate. As a result, no one was talking about the interests of workers, let alone implementing pro-worker policies. Trump’s unusual candidacy was brilliant in that it recognized that the Republicans could take advantage of this situation by selling themselves as “pro-worker” or “anti-interventionist” while still planning to pursue the same old policies that defined past eras of Republican rule. Trump’s 2016 campaign was the first major step in this new direction, but other Republicans soon realized the utility of this rhetoric and came to follow his lead, as did nonelected figures in the conservative movement.[xvii]
By far the best example of this trend is Tucker Carlson, whose rise from pompous, bowtie-wearing snob to transparently fraudulent “man of the people” is a testament to both the weakness of the antiwar, prolabor left as well as the effectiveness of appearing to tell the truth in a media environment where trust has given way to cynicism and despair. And whereas Trump has at times waivered in sustaining his pseudo pro-worker image, Carlson has been much more effective in portraying himself as an enemy of the “elites.” He has in many ways taken Trump’s strategy and elevated it to an art form.
Carlson has engendered an audience following beyond that of most other cable news hosts, commanding near-total devotion from his viewers. Many liberal and even a few progressive observers seem to find Carlson’s rise perplexing, although as we will see, they shouldn’t. And many conservative viewers seem to have been taken in by something that, to everyone else, appears to be an obvious con job – that is, they believe that Carlson is who he says he is, a fiery, truth-telling populist who challenges corporate and government corruption as much as he does “woke” left lunacy. As we will explore, Carlson likely adopted this demeanor out of political expedience more than any deeply-felt personal convictions.
All cable news hosts are to some extent performing an act, but Carlson has taken this to new heights, and his viewers seem uniquely unable to shake off the illusion. In part this is because they don’t know much about Carlson. What would they think if they were to find out that their champion against wokeness, the Deep State, and the corporate elite has received praise from Al Sharpton, and has in turn written “semi-sympathetically”[xviii] about him? Are they aware that Carlson has sketchy connections to the CIA, and at one point even tried to join the agency? Have they heard that Carlson has tried to get workers fired for telling the truth, in order to protect the stock price of a massive corporation (his own)?
One could go on about the many ways Carlson’s own viewers have been taken in by his act, but there’s limited value in that, given that it’s transparently obvious to anyone not trapped within the Fox News Bubble. What is not transparently obvious to many on the left, however, is why so many people are willing to unhesitatingly believe Carlson but unwilling to even consider listening to someone like Rachel Maddow. In order to understand this, mainstream liberals and even many progressives would have to take a long, hard look in the mirror, as one of the primary causes of the rise of people like Carlson (and Trump) has been the abandonment of important principles by people who identify as being on the liberal left. Unfortunately, self-reflection is not in vogue right now among the MSNBC crowd.
In the hopes that there are any Fox News types with open minds, or a few intellectually curious left-wing folks who are willing to admit error, going forward I will offer a series of essays on Carlson’s career trajectory up to the present, including his background, his calculated re-branding, his impact on the left, and what it all means. Stay tuned.
[i] Of course, Trump supporters tend not to know that once in office, Trump himself appointed many Goldman executives to senior positions in his administration. See, for example, this report from The Hill: https://thehill.com/homenews/administration/324027-trump-names-another-goldman-sachs-exec-to-senior-administration-role/
[ii] Kia Makarechi, “Donald Trump Says He’s Proof that the ‘System Is Broken,’” Vanity Fair, 6 August 2015. https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2015/08/trump-clinton-wedding-debate
[iii] “Donald Trump attacks George W. Bush on 9/11, Iraq,” CBS News.
.
[iv] It is even acceptable to insist that the war was, on balance, a good idea. On the 20th anniversary of the US invasion, people like John Bolton and Bret Stephens actually did this.
[v] Trump’s claims to have been against the Iraq War “from the beginning” are exaggerations, though he has been critical of Bush II and the war in the past.
[vi] The interview was with Fox Sports before Super Bowl LI, and can be viewed here:
[vii] One of the biggest frustrations for the left during the Obama years was that conservatives attacked him with a series of wild, often racist ideas that became increasingly divorced from reality, while liberals worshipped at his altar. Thus anyone who wanted make an informed criticism of Obama found themselves likely to be misunderstood at best or mistaken for a racist at worst.
[viii] Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism.
[ix] Goldberg once wrote a whole book based on this fallacy (Liberal Fascism: The Secret History of the American Left, From Mussolini to the Politics of Meaning). More recently, Hitchens has been attempting to resurrect this absurd canard: Peter Hitchens, “End this crude smear against conservatives - Hitler’s Nazis were in fact left-wing racists... Gary Lineker knows as much about politics as I know about football,” Daily Mail, 11 March 2023. https://www.dailymail.co.uk/debate/article-11848611/PETER-HITCHENS-End-crude-smear-against-conservatives.html.
[x] For an entertaining and informative primer on why the idea that Nazis were socialists is historically illiterate, see Nathan J. Robinson, “Putting The ‘Nazis Were Socialist’ Nonsense To Rest,” Current Affairs, 24 January 2020. https://www.currentaffairs.org/2020/01/putting-the-nazis-were-socialist-nonsense-to-rest/.
[xi] Unfortunately, plenty of other people did fall for this, resulting in some bizarre arguments that Trump was anti war or anti imperialist. These arguments are still at work today, though examining what’s wrong with them will have to wait for another essay.
[xii] Maureen Dowd, “Donald the Dove, Hillary the Hawk,” New York Times, 30 April 2016.
[xiii] Even among Tea Party supporters, there was virtually zero support for privatizing the program. See Jane Mayer, Dark Money: The Hidden History of the Billionaires Behind the Rise of the Radical Right, p. 352.
[xiv] On Trump’s views of NATO, Columbia Journalism Review’s Jeff Gerth recently explained, “As Trump began to nail down the GOP nomination in 2016, he spoke critically about NATO. He focused mostly on America’s disproportionate share of the financial burden, though he occasionally called the alliance “obsolete” in an era of counterterrorism and voiced his hope to “get along” with Putin, prompting some concerns inside the national-security world.” Gerth, Jeff, Columbia Journalism Review, “The Press Versus the President, Part One” 30 January 2023. These “national security concerns” were the source of most of the hatred of Trump that came from the powerful. As Matt Taibbi put it in 2018, “Trump is a madman, a far-right extremist and an embarrassment, but that’s not why most people in Washington hate him. It’s his foreign-policy attitudes, particularly toward NATO, that have always most offended DC burghers.” Matt Taibbi, Rolling Stone, “We Know How Trump’s War Game Ends,” 21 December 2018.
[xv] For a detailed treatment of this history, see Thomas Frank, Listen, Liberal: Or, Whatever Happened to the Party of the People?
[xvi] Susan Davis, “Top Republicans Work To Rebrand GOP As Party Of Working Class,” NPR, 13 April 2021.
[xvii] Examples include antilabor hacks like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz gesturing toward supporting the Amazon union drive (on account of it being perceived as “anti-woke”) and striking rail workers, respectively, as well as virtually the entire Republican establishment vocally condemning corporate America on the grounds that it has become too PC.
[xviii] Kelefa Sanneh, “Tucker Carlson’s Fighting Words,” New Yorker, 3 April 2017.