Tucker Carlson:“We’re Going to Wind Up Like the Romanovs, if We Don’t Slow this Down”
Fox News host’s fears mimic a type of conservatism unseen in decades
Here’s the bottom line: The rich are getting richer, everyone else is getting poorer. That’s not a talking point. It’s true and measurable. Why is it a problem? Because if it continues, we’re going to wind up with an even more volatile society in which everybody hates each other and is consumed by envy. Along the way, capitalism itself will be discredited, and you don’t want that.
Tucker Carlson is certainly not the typical conservative. One can find on his show an uncommon admission of the power of income inequality. Unlike Sean Hannity, an apologist for the quite obviously crumbling “free market” state of the economy, Carlson questions the status quo. Frequently, he argues for anti-trust regulation, protectionist trade policy, and fiscal stimulus to assist the working class. Carlson brings to his audience a viewpoint skeptical of globalism, interventionist foreign policy, trickle down economics and the elite.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that any of these views are anathema to what has been acceptable to the right, or even the corporatist left, in the past 40 years. While I hardly trust Carlson to be genuine or 100% intellectually honest (Fox News has a poor record in both departments), and while I take issue with a great deal of what he says, I am intrigued by the economic perspective he brings to a largely heterodox mainstream media.
Carlson’s ideology, at least since COVID-19 and the recession struck, has increasingly resembled what a conservative may have looked like pre-Reagan. In particular, he has revived the idea that in order to prevent “socialism”, conservatives must punch leftward on economic issues and support the American working class.
Historically, this was a position conservatives took in the wake of the Great Depression (1929) to replace their stance on the practically indefensible laissez faire system that caused the meltdown. The vast poverty inflicted by this crisis left two routes: ignore the working class and risk a violent socialist revolution, like that of Russia; or find a third way and implement Keynesian reforms to preserve capitalism.
Inevitably, Republicans in some numbers decided to go along with FDR and his successor’s reforms. We created, for that time, a bolstered welfare state that educated, fed, employed, and extended labor rights to an ailing population. Republican president Dwight Eisenhower raised the minimum wage and built our vast interstate highway network. Richard Nixon created the EPA and Medicare and instituted wage/price controls. Doing so, they increased the equity of American capitalism and held down income inequality. A large motivation for this was to posture capitalism as a system that could work for everyone, and thus reduce the appeal of socialism.
When it came down to continuing a level of inequality that could foment communist revolution or making concessions to workers, pre-Reagan Republicans chose the latter.
To Carlson and many of his right wing peers, AOC and Bernie Sanders represent the former path. This is hilariously exaggerative to me: AOC and Sanders are not Lenin and Stalin. They’ve neither advocated for nor ever mentioned instituting a Soviet-style command economy. But to conservatives, they may as well be Marxists who will inevitably come for the upper class the same way the Reds executed the Russian Romanov dynasty.
You may have noticed there are an awful lot of socialists around these days. It’s because the people in charge of our economy are discrediting our system. They are giving capitalism a bad name because what they’re participating in is not a free, open market economy. It’s a closed game, run for their benefit and their benefit alone. Long-term, this is a disaster for all of us.
-Tucker Carlson, 12/11/20
Fear of “socialism” on the right seems to have manifested itself so deeply in the past four years that conservatives like Carlson are finally willing to question the orthodox worship of neoliberal economics. Not only question, but actively advocate for breaking up tech monopolies like Amazon, investing in paycheck protection and unemployment, and protecting American industry. As someone on the left who would love to see American families and small businesses thrive from pro-worker policies, I can only applaud this new perspective, even if it is from the right.
Americans on both sides can agree on a few things. There is an emerging technocratic elite monopolizing the business, employment, and overall wealth of America. This elite disproportionately controls our government, silently writing the legislation that governs us all. Democrats and Republicans have made the conscious decision not to act, in the midst of a pandemic, to support small businesses and workers through fiscal stimulus. And unless we address tough questions about our economy that affect the majority of this country, inequality will continue to explode and instability will ensue.
