Seth Wenig/AP Photo
Fox host Tucker Carlson in July 2022
Editor’s note: On Tuesday, we published a story from two of our writers about the firing of Tucker Carlson. We received a lot of correspondence taking issue with it.
I wrote a longer statement expressing my views on the story, which you can read here. What’s pertinent in this moment is that two other members of our staff requested to write a response to the story, and we are running it below. I have learned a lot from this episode and hope to continue our work while drawing upon those lessons. —David Dayen
On Tuesday afternoon, the Prospect posted an article about Tucker Carlson on its home page. Focusing almost solely on Carlson’s opposition to corporate globalism, it missed a very large forest for some very cherry-picked trees. It failed to note the roots of Carlson’s positions, in a broader sense failing to note that opposition to neoliberal orthodoxy is an element of both progressive and fascist politics, and hence, depending on whence it comes, not automatically worthy of celebration. The piece failed to take into account Carlson’s racism, xenophobia, misogyny, disdain for democracy, affinity for autocrats and autocracy, habitual lying, and demands to Fox management that they muzzle or fire reporters who had the chutzpah to acknowledge that Joe Biden had won the 2020 election. It omitted the fact that Carlson had been second only to Donald Trump in building the neofascist right that threatens American democracy.
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The Tucker Carlson who actually impacted American politics is the guy who promoted the “great replacement” theory, through which Democrats supposedly make war on white people by supporting immigration, and conspiracy theories about the deep state. Nothing Carlson offered to viewers was unique to the Republican tradition. Phyllis Schlafly was getting on television to talk about the globalist banker cabal and criticize establishment conservatives long before Tucker’s career began. Rush Limbaugh’s response to the utter failure of the Iraq War, which Tucker initially supported, was to suggest the “deep state” faked evidence of weapons of mass destruction to discredit President Bush. A feigned interest in the working class is nothing new for the GOP, but the left’s propensity to take such at face value is a concerning trend.
There is a distinct kind of credulousness masquerading as sophistication that is popular within some media circles, where the goal seems to be to inspire shock and awe within the center-left. Most of the time, it’s harmless, and sometimes even worthwhile. When it becomes dangerous is when that becomes the standard for political discourse. Tucker Carlson has said many things that challenge liberal orthodoxy, because racist and nationalist populists have a critique of liberalism just as progressive populists do. That doesn’t mean they have anything in common with you.
It reveals a certain disrespect for the opinions of the public to suggest that Carlson’s large audience makes him the working-class whisperer. Carlson’s anti-elitism is highly selective. It doesn’t include Fox News, Rupert Murdoch, or Donald Trump. In fact, Fox stood by him for years, giving him the backing of the Republican Party’s most powerful media organ and putting him, in that sense, firmly within the party establishment. When he’s criticized tech companies, it was only because they’ve occasionally banned white supremacists from their platforms. He’s anti–big business in the sense that Ron DeSantis is anti–big business: deregulating anything that would diminish its profits, but regulating any corporate expressions of social moderation.
Carlson has been second only to Donald Trump in building the neofascist right that threatens American democracy.
The left is generally capable of recognizing when centrists appropriate messages of solidarity and resistance to fit the needs of capital. Why, then, do some miss the fact that it routinely happens on the right?
Distinguishing between left and right populism, between progressive populism and fascism, should be one of the tasks that a left publication routinely undertakes. Both historically and today, fascism is a doctrine that elevates racial solidarity over laissez-faire capitalism. An approach that salutes Carlson for his economics could also engender a salute to Marine Le Pen, who, like the French left, has opposed French President Macron’s circumventing the parliament to raise the retirement age.
In the same vein, a survey of world economics in 1937 might note that only three nations had broken from the laissez-faire orthodoxy that was prolonging the Great Depression: the United States, through Roosevelt’s public-works and employment programs; Sweden, through similar programs as part of its commitment to planned full employment; and Germany, where Hitler’s commitment to building the autobahns and rearming the country for its coming wars significantly reduced the unemployment rate. It is, to put it very mildly, possible to document this semi-convergence of economic policies without hailing (or heiling) Hitler for his break with economic orthodoxy.
What Tuesday’s article failed to do was to report on something so obvious as, say, the reason why Carlson opposes U.S. support for Ukraine. It noted his opposition as something he shares with a portion of the American left; it praised Carlson for his anti-establishment chops. It neglected to note that what led him to this position was his proudly proclaimed affinity for the illiberal, gay-bashing, autocratic policies and practices of Putin and Carlson’s beloved Viktor Orban. (In his college yearbook, Carlson described himself as a member of the “Dan White Society,” which was a nonexistent organization but a way that Carlson could make a not-so-veiled tribute to Harvey Milk’s murderer.)
Carlson’s anti-intervention reasons are not those of the left-wing opponents of U.S. aid to Ukraine, and any discussion of his stance requires a discussion of why he holds them. Historians note the very different set of beliefs that distinguished the pacifists and socialists who opposed our entry into World War II from the pro-German, Nazi fellow traveler Charles Lindbergh. A historian who wrote about that movement and didn’t delve into the wildly dissimilar motivations of its members wouldn’t be much of a historian.
To argue that the media celebrated Carlson’s firing because it couldn’t stand his critique of global corporatism is to miss the fact that many of the journalists who celebrated have been critiquing global corporatism for decades—a critique that has defined the Prospect from its inception to today. That critique, distinguishing left from fascist, was evident yesterday when we posted on our home page Prospect managing editor Ryan Cooper’s weekly podcast, with the headline “Farewell to a Crypto-Nazi Blowhard.” That succinctly sums up who Tucker Carlson really is.
