The man of the people who panics over stock prices
An interesting article in Politico this weekend about recent events in which some left writers and thinkers extolled the virtues of Tucker Carlson because he claims to be a populist, anti-globalist. In my view, even if one were to overlook his blatant racism, misogyny and general adherence to batshit far right nonsense, you really shouldn’t overlook this when you’re taking the position that he’s a populist:
“Please get her fired. It needs to stop immediately, like tonight. It’s measurably hurting the company. The stock price is down. Not a joke.”
That was in response to a reporter acknowledging the results of the 2020 election. His concerns were not about the working people of America.
Or this. After he was fired by MSNBC:
Mr. Carlson eventually snagged a pundit contract at Fox and an unpaid fellowship at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank. But his days as a TV star seemed at an end. With four school-age children, the Carlsons sold their $4 million Washington home, and he had what he later described as a kind of meltdown. “I was living in that world, and I was not succeeding,” he said. “It forced me to think about what I had done wrong, because I had no choice, because I had no money.” ...
His media career had given him adventures and an exciting life, he told a Caller colleague in 2015, but it had been hard to earn the kind of living he aspired to. “I’ve sweated a lot about money, a lot,” he said. “And continue to, probably more than a 45-year-old should.”
At the time, Mr. Carlson was locked in an increasingly bitter inheritance battle. His mother had died a few years earlier in France, apparently without a will, leaving her sons and her second husband, Michael Vaughan, to divide up her estate. Alongside her paintings and jewelry were the dregs of the Miller ranching fortune — a share of mineral rights sprinkled over 68,000 acres of inland Central California and valued at around $37,000.
The orderly disposal of the estate was interrupted in the fall of 2013, according to court records in California, when one of Mr. Vaughan’s daughters from a prior marriage discovered a handwritten will that left everything to him. It also included a one-sentence codicil: “I leave my sons Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson and Buckley Swanson Peck Carlson one dollar each.”
Mr. Carlson and his brother sued, alleging that the will was a forgery; a forensics specialist brought in to examine it stated that it was probably authentic. Mr. Carlson’s uncle asserted that the “discovery” of his sister’s will occurred only after a new well on the family’s California property began pumping out hundreds of barrels of oil. In court filings, the Vaughans now valued the estate’s mineral assets at $2.6 million. The litigation was still going on years later when Mr. Carlson showed up on Mr. Carolla’s podcast to hawk “Ship of Fools,” his Fox-era jeremiad about America’s selfish elites. “She didn’t raise us, she was horrible, and then she dies and causes all these problems,” Mr. Carlson told the host, describing a conversation with his brother. “And he goes, ‘It’s just perfect — she’s a bitch from the grave.’”
Yeah, he’s a real man of the people.
He’s a demagogue who will say anything. His usefulness is limited to how much money he can make which he learned is easy when you’re spouting right wing “populism” which he clearly doesn’t believe in and will abandon the moment it ceases to be profitable. But, of course, this argument isn’t really about Tucker Carlson, it’s about whether or not it’s a good idea to make common cause with fascists if they are also hostile to corporate power or want America to withdraw from involvement in foreign affairs. (They never seem to notice that they rarely want to defund the military but whatever.) It’s an interesting question. The Politico article offers this:
In a way, it’s an argument on the left that goes back to the popular front period of the 1930s, or further (in the Russian civil war, the Bolsheviks argued about making common cause with Islamic fighters from Central Asia, whose embrace of religion was distinctly non-Marxist).
Michael Kazin, the historian of American populism, says there’s a long history of fuzziness about what constitutes left and right, which complicates the question of just who you’ll deem acceptable. Prominent opposition to big business in the Great Depression, he says, also included the likes of the antisemitic radio priest Charles Coughlin and the segregationist Louisiana Gov. Huey Long.
Kazin, whose newest book is a history of the Democratic Party, says he’s sure Carlson is no fellow traveler — and also thinks coming up with a standard for how people like Hawley should be embraced or rejected might also be a little premature given the political realities: “Do you really think that Hawley’s going to support anything Biden wants? There’s a wish to have a broad anti-corporate alliance, but in the end the constituencies are very different.”
David Duhalde, chair for the Democratic Socialists of America Fund, told me that one way to slice it is a function of where you sit. A Senator like Bernie Sanders working with the libertarian Utah Republican Mike Lee to curb presidential war powers? With 100 voters in the Senate, he doesn’t have much choice. A think tanker or essayist trying to be clever? Not so much. “I’m more sympathetic to what the pols are trying to do than to media figures trying to find nuance where there isn’t any,” he says.
And for at least some people closer to the grassroots, the tendency to police against associating with ideological undesirables is a sign of a bigger sickness in elite circles. Amber A’Lee Frost, a writer and longtime fixture of the far-left Chapo Trap House podcast, once wrote about giving a talk about the importance of union organizing before an audience of tech workers. During the question and answer session afterwards, a woman approached the mic to ask what they should do if someone from the alt-right wanted to join their union.
If that happens, Frost replied, it means you’ve won.
“It was kind of a dead silence,” she told me this week, a sign that she’d said something deeply troubling.
Frost, unsurprisingly, was dismissive of both sides of the Carlson contretemps — “right wing populism is largely a cynical brand of lip service from a bunch of professional hucksters” — but says she finds the one tic in the debates about potential left-right overlap disappointingly familiar.
“They’re more invested in who’s on their side than what’s going on,” she said of the people who take umbrage at the idea that left politics might someday lure people with dubious records. “There’s this fear of contamination from the right, which betrays that these people are scared of the general population.”
I guess these people have never heard of the concept of “co-option.” But then there are suckers born every minute.
People are rightly scared of the ideas that are being pumped into the general population by these hucksters and yes, frankly, a large number of my fellow Americans terrify me because they are living in an alternate universe where science is fake and Donald Trump is a truth teller.
Be that as it may, I think the relevant point in that excerpt is this:
“Do you really think that Hawley’s going to support anything Biden wants? There’s a wish to have a broad anti-corporate alliance, but in the end the constituencies are very different.”
This is correct. Republicans are organized by one thing and one thing only: opposition to the Democrats, owning the libs. They even have a rule in the GOP led House, called the Hastert Rule, which says that they won’t bring legislation to the floor unless a majority of the Republicans support it even if they have a majority in the full House to pass it. If some people in the legislature can overcome that to pass agreeable bipartisan legislation, have at it. But people like Hawley are not temperamentally or ideologically positioned to be that sort of legislator — his constituency is a bunch of far right wingnuts. It’s always the Mitt Romneys and Susan Collins’ not the firebrands who fist bump an insurrection who cross the lines in our current politics.
More than that is the fact there are just some people you cannot ally with even if some of their agenda can line up with yours for different reasons. Hitler built the autobahn, Mussolini made the trains run on time, after all. Some things are bigger than your pet issue and empowering fascists is one of them. The poison that the phony, money grubbing, cynical bigot Tucker Carlson spreads is an urgent problem — they’re attempting coups now, largely because of it. People need to focus. This is no drill.