The Attack on Tucker (2): The Sources of his Support

Tucker Carlson's appeal rests on respect for his audience, an audience the left intelligentsia despises. (1,700 words, 8 minutes).

In part 1 of “The Attack on Tucker Carlson,” I refuted claims that Tucker Carlson lies made by Professor Timothy Caulfield in the state-supported cocktail party magazine The Walrus (link here). Caulfield is an excellent proxy for elite opinion, and his view of Tucker’s immense popular appeal comes down to what Marxists call false consciousness: in their oppression, the people are misled by charlatans. This view is radically wrong, deeply patronizing, and implicitly authoritarian.

The rest of this article leaves the Regius Professor of Misinformation behind, and examines the roots of Tucker’s immense popular following (so many call him Tucker that it feels artificial to call him by other than his Christian name). How does this preternaturally youthful man, with his chinos and blazer and his high-pitched laugh, almost ostentatiously unprepossessing, fill hockey arenas?

The answer lies partly in Tucker’s talent for the English language. He is an excellent writer. But above all the answer lies in the fact that he gives voice to authentic popular feelings about rapid and radical change pushed from above. The mainstream media has been captured by the elite left and refuses to speak for, or even to address, the populace it despises. This leaves half the population to Tucker, who does great things with his opportunity.

I observed in a recent article that, “Tucker Carlson is said to be an extremist, but until about half an hour ago most of his views were pretty mainstream.”¹ So the much-

repeated idea that Tucker is “far-right” will not do. It is at best a statement about the limited range of acceptable dinner-party opinion, the accusation unintentionally emphasizing the fact that elite opinion has moved so far to the left that once-normal views now appear far-right.

It is the content of those once-normal views, now execrated as “far-right”, that explains the loyalty and the enthusiasm of Tucker’s audience. Below is a transcript of Tucker speaking to Jordan Peterson and Conrad Black in Edmonton last week. These remarks were extemporaneous, and all the more impressive for it. I have not seen them quoted elsewhere. They summarize the meaning of “Make America Great Again,” among its supporters. As Tucker makes clear, he knows Trump closely and knows and shares Trump’s views. A link to the video is here (transcription mine, starting at 02:40):

Trump is not a radical, at all, and Trump’s vision for America — this is an informed assessment of Trump — Trump's vision for America is like Studio 54, 1978 [laughter]. I'm serious, Trump really loved the America he grew up in, he really loved it, and he means it, loved the people who lived there, he loved its traditions, weird little customs, its idiosyncrasies, and that's kind of what he wants, he doesn't want a brave new future of new things, he wants to return not to antebellum America, but to like 1980 America.

And it's kind of hard to argue why that's bad.  And that's not a revolutinary agenda, nor is it a counter-revolutionary agenda.  It's a return to normalcy, and the phrase "Make America Great Again" means return it to a period not so long ago, when everyone was enfranschised, and everyone had rights, but everyone was roughly, not everyone but most people, were sort of united in a sense of common purpose and culture, they were Americans, and they knew what that meant.  We don't have that anymore.  And that's Trump's vision.  You may not think that's possible, you may not think that's even virtuous, to want that, but if you think that's a grotesque hellscape he's describing, you're the freak, not him!

Tucker’s style is important: the words are direct, the grammar clear, the cadence regular, accumulating meaning and resonance with each added clause. The one idiosyncratic word points very appropriately to unusual and affecting things, and the word is defined, unobtrusively, before it is used. Humour (“Trump’s vision for America is like Studio 54 [in] 1978”) deals deftly with the fact that in 1978 Trump’s world was that of Studio 54, and not of Peoria. The transition to “traditions, weird little customs”, communicates affection for a world Tucker’s listeners know and value, the world of Peoria in 1980, a world many of them (us) remember fondly.

An allusive glance forward to a brave new dystopia and another back to a racist past frame the America that we treasure: normal people with real jobs, with white picket fences and barbeques, people who loved their country. America in 1980 was a pretty solid place, and some of us at any rate recall it like yesterday. Open spaces, opportunity, good fun, and fast cars at the Dairy Queen on a hot summer night: Normalcy.

The idea of normalcy is key to Tucker’s description of Trump’s appeal, and commands recognition from Tucker’s followers and Trump’s voters. Normalcy was not that long ago, and in that time when it was morning in America, everyone was enfranchised and everyone (necessary concessions aside) shared a common sense of nation and culture. Two points stand out: everyone counted politically and everyone shared a sense of cultural unity. That sense of belonging has been damaged by a series of rapid and radical cultural changes that no one was ever asked about and none of us ever voted for.

In the last decade, the bureaucratic state and its minions in the Biden administration have decided that the United States is a problematic nation with a shameful history, that there are many sexes and a spectrum of genders, that radical racial theories should be taught in the schools, that border security is racist, that crime is not an important problem, that a President the bureaucrats didn’t like should be smeared as a Russian agent, that those who protested Biden’s election should be jailed, and that anyone who dissents is a semi-Facsist MAGA extremist who shouldn’t count. Tucker does not need to recite the litany because his listeners are well aware of it.

The America of white picket fences and Buicks and barbecues, the America loved by MAGA and by Tucker, was for the left — the freaks as Tucker calls them— a patriarchal hellscape, and probably racist too, and the freaks are doing their considerable best to destroy it. Tucker can see that and describes what he sees with clarity, humour, and with an ingenuous, uncontrived charm, his very normality a stylistic reproof to the freaks.

The freaks believe in a para-Marxist eschaton, an ideal future of perfect equity, and without dissatisfaction. The old Marxist slogan, “to each according to his needs, from each according to his abilities” will need updating to replace gendered pronouns, but the promise of an ideal society without conflict and without inequality remains. You will own nothing, consume little, and be happy, or maybe just have enough fentanyl to get along. The freaks are very angry with anymore more ambitious.

The two visions are radically opposed. One is an impossible utopia the pursuit of which leads directly to an over-administered hell; the other existed not so long ago and was actually pretty good. In pursuit of its perverted eschaton, the left has used its recently acquired state power to effect radical cultural change, producing immediate evils in pursuit of a vision alike impossible and repulsive.

The social roots of the two visions could not be more different, as popular patriotism faces ongoing and multidimensional attacks from an elite intelligentsia. Left and right are terms comprehensible enough, but upper and lower capture the power imbalance better: The elite left despises the popular right. We are under attack from above, and Tucker sees that.

The view of the populace taken by the left is patronizing in its essence, and authoritarian in its consequences: if the people are too stupid to know their own interests, or too distracted by anger and resentment, then why let them make their own choices? Why let them vote at all? Why not just fix the election for their own good, or import more malleable voters, if the state already knows that citizens are idiots?

In the seventeenth century, Sir Robert Filmer saw the people as children in need of government by their wise father, the King. Locke took the opposite view that each would know best his own interests, and pointed his Two Treatises of Government squarely at Filmer. Today’s elites have replaced the king with an enlightened bureaucracy staffed (not coincidentally) by themselves, but their disdain for the citizenry remains, as do the authoritarian implications of their disdain. But they are less honest than Filmer, who at least did not have to pretend to respect the people that he and his King patronized.

The left cannot avoid this accusation of false consciousness with its authoritarian implications: to recognize that the American or the Albertan people may know their own interests better than the leftist elite would entail an abandonment of valued parts of the elite’s para-Marxist ideology. The abandonment of the idea that America (and Canada too) was in essence a patriarchal hellscape would entail the abandonment of the elite’s eschatology, and with that, the freaks would lose their purpose and the justification of their power. Much easier to call Tucker a racist, and they control enough newspapers to convince themselves that they must be right.

Unlike his critics, Tucker does respect the people he addresses, and he loves the country they love, the America he speaks of with unfeigned affection, the America the bureaucratic left is so aggressively destroying. Unlike his critics, Tucker knows that people don’t like being bossed around, especially by moralistic fussbudgets who transparently despise them, fussbudgets who too much enjoy their power, the same freaks who so regularly get so much so wrong, who not quite unintentionally destroy everything they touch.

Most people know who respects them and who does not, and have common sense enough to remember where they have been, and to see where they are being taken. Tucker articulates with great skill what we already know, and that is why Tucker attracts the loyalty of his audience, and the anger of the freaks.

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