The Institutions Demand Conformity, again
The Institutions Demand Conformity, again
Institutionalized power wants to cancel Tucker; this tells us something about entrenched hegemonic power
A vignette of power, replayed on Twitter/X a thousand times a day: the establishment tries to draw a line around acceptable opinion, and to anathematise dissent. The practice speaks of the social position of wokeness, but also of its fragility.
Today, prominent University of Alberta professor and Trudeau Foundation Fellow Timothy Caulfield posts an op-ed in the Calgary Herald by Concordia University journalism professor and longtime mainstream journalist Matthew Hays, reproving Alberta Premier Danielle Smith for planning to speak with Tucker Carlson.
Their positions are entirely predictable. Caulfield: Carlson trades in “lies, hate, and rage.” Hays: Carlson discusses the “far-right conspiracy theory” of the great replacement, and is guilty of much else too. Hays/Caulfield’s word “unifying” is the voice of hegemonic power: debate is over, and all good people will unify around the approved ideology.
Anyone who listens to Carlson regularly will hear no hate and no lies: mockery rather than rage is his stock in trade, and he is really good at it. When he does make a mistake, as a man who speaks to the camera every night inevitably will, he is quick to apologize. As for the supposed conspiracy theory, mass immigration is a policy, not a theory, as Vivek Ramaswamy has rightly said. That link includes a video of Joe Biden enthusing about “an unrelenting stream of immigration, non-stop, non-stop,” reducing white people to “an absolute minority… absolute minority”1; this conspiracy hides in plain sight.
My point here is not to re-litigate the left’s endless attacks on Tucker Carlson. It is rather to emphasize the institutional and cultural position of Carlson’s enemies (it is not too strong a word), versus that of his friends. His enemies operate from sites of entrenched, long-term institutional power. His friends resist from outside.
Caulfield is a university professor, Trudeau Foundation Fellow, a Canada Research Chair, a recipient of the Order of Canada, and a frequent mainstream media presence.2 Hays is well published in (to take only the first four papers from his Condordia bio) The Globe and Mail, The New York Times, The Washington Post, and The Guardian, among many others, and a fixture at film festivals and cultural events.3
Carlson’s friends and admirers are populists, more popular in bingo halls than faculty clubs. Power is attempting to marginalize and silence an oppositional voice. Power speaks from a permanent and secure position within major institutions, many of them taxpayer-funded. Premier Smith also speaks from a taxpayer-funded platform, but she had to get there the hard way, by being elected, and her position is anything but permanent. And while Carlson used to speak from within a major (though not taxpayer-funded) institution, he was fired under the relentless pressure of ideological enforcers, for departing too often from orthodoxy.
This leads to a second major difference between the voices of power and those of dissent: Hay’s editorial in the Calgary Herald calls for Smith to snub Carlson.4 Caulfield obviously agrees. Someone has even started a petition to get Carlson banned from Canada. I can think of no case where popular or conservative voices have tried to shut down a leftwing or establishment voice. Those who can, cancel. The tactic itself speaks of power, and also of the intolerance bred by power.
My third and final point concerns the nature and direction of change: the left’s positions on such issues as mass immigration and gender ideology, not to mention cancel-culture and censorship, are new or newly extreme, while most of Tucker Carlson’s positions would have been considered “pretty normal not much more than half an hour ago,” and that linked article goes down a list of five such normal positions.
Getting back to lies and rage, Hays concludes by asserting that Carlson “has lost much of his audience.” Against about 3.4 million viewers of his old Fox show, Carlson now has 11.1 million Twitter followers, and 267 million views of his Trump interview. Viewership varies widely across his episodes, but even accounting for the difference between Twitter viewers (who don’t necessarily watch the whole video) and TV viewership, that’s a howler this established journalist was too angry to avoid.5
We live in a world of rapid leftward change, driven from above. Conformity is demanded and enforced using the techniques available to institutional power. We need do no more than watch the conniptions aroused by Tucker Carlson to see that.
Caulfield’s Trudeau Foundation fellowship: https://www.trudeaufoundation.ca/member/timothy-caulfield; his Order of Canada: https://www.westernstandard.news/news/former-trudeau-fellow-receives-order-of-canada/article_9eb0b882-87b3-11ed-a01a-5741e8759d1c.html.
Dude, you're on fire. I know of Hays and Caulfield, I'd even bet I have met at least one of them at some point. they look very familiar to me. They write such crap, filled with inaccuracies. All your points and critiques of their commentary are solid.