It’s a testament to the power of Tucker Carlson that his departure from Fox News made front pages in the UK, even though precious few Brits have heard of him. The reason? He’s the smartest advocate of conservative populism in America.
It’s his polish that makes so many liberals despise him. To them, he is the semi-acceptable face of Trumpism, a mouthpiece for hate and white privilege, masked in intelligent prose.
Drawing the biggest news audience on cable, he was accused of peddling conspiracy theories about vaccines, the 2020 election and a “great replacement”, by which the government is importing immigrants to replace conservative voters.
Tucker, in the eyes of his critics, is fascism in a bow tie. There’s a hint, in that distaste, of class betrayal – that he’s letting his own side down.
“I have always lived around people who are wielding authority,” he once explained, “around the ruling class.” Born in 1969 (he looks thirty, but he’s actually 53), his father was formerly head of Voice of America and The Corporation for Public Broadcasting. His step-mum was heir to a frozen dinner fortune.
Young Tucker applied to join the CIA, was rejected and followed the family into journalism. Television spotted him fast. He was punchy, telegenic, reliably pro-Republican and easily brandable with his Byronic hair and trademark bow-tie.
His first major reversal of fortune came in 2004, when he was co-hosting Crossfire on CNN: Tucker got into an on-air row with comedian Jon Stewart that encapsulates why liberals found this upstart so grating. Crossfire was fake news panto, said Stewart; Carlson, just acting a part.
“How old are you?” he asked Tucker.
“35.”
“And you wear a bow tie? Look, I’m not suggesting you aren’t a smart guy, because those things are not easy to tie. But the thing is, you’re doing theater.”
There’s certainly an element of performance to his punditry. When an interlocutor is saying something “profound”, Carlson narrows his eyes like a dog contemplating algebra. When they say something stupid, he laughs like he’s on helium.
Crossfire was cancelled soon after the Stewart debacle. Carlson said goodbye to the bow tie. He moved to MSNBC but the new show faded in the ratings; American TV news likes to think that it sets the agenda but the reality is that it only tries to articulate it, and the election of Obama seemed to herald a new era of political sobriety. So, Carlson set up Daily Caller, a website that would break serious news stories.
Employees enjoyed unlimited junk food, a ping pong table and a keg of beer. Over time, it leaned more towards rollicking Right-wing fare.
For the cultural terrain was shifting yet again, and Carlson with it. Come 2013, when he landed a junior gig on Fox, the Tea Party was ascendant and Trump was gearing up for a presidential run – and Tucker was rethinking some of his earlier, boilerplate Republicanism.
He turned against the Iraq War. In fact, he said he was “ashamed” to have endorsed it, compelling him to re-examine how the country came to be led into such a mistake. “For too long,” he told an interviewer, “I participated in the culture where anyone who thinks outside… pre-prescribed lanes is crazy”, written off by journalists as a conspiracy theorist.
The media “is part of the means of control”, shaping the narrative that endorses leaders like George W Bush or Hillary Clinton, whatever their meagre talents, making it difficult to conceive of a radical alternative.
In short, Tucker’s career took off at Fox at the moment that he became a fierce critic of what conservatives call “the mainstream media” – or, as he described some journalists, “cringing animals who are not worthy of respect”. Another simple reason why so many liberal journalists hate him is that he spent so much time on camera taking the mick out of them. To rub salt into the wound, audiences loved it.
Critics argued that if you rage against civil rights protests or medicine, you’ll attract a loyal following of a few million extremists. Yet Carlson’s iconoclasm also saw him give airtime to civil liberties campaigners, such as Glenn Greenwald, liberal muckrakers like Matt Taibbi and even Left-wing causes such as the fight to allow unions at Amazon.
Tucker Carlson is what Donald Trump was thought to be but didn’t deliver, a thinker who pushes nationalism to its logical conclusion, dumping the traditional Republican fealty to big business in favour of a populist alliance that aims to bring jobs and soldiers back from overseas – even opposing US involvement in Ukraine. No wonder there are those who fantasise about him running for president.
Of course, he now lacks his prime-time slot; lost, it is speculated, as a consequence of the Dominion lawsuit against Fox. Carlson was accused of handing the mic over to election-theft conspiracy theorists, but his private messages reveal that he had come to hate Trump. More evidence, say the haters, that he’s a manipulative showman.
For the fans, however, it’s a sign that he’s clever, that he knows Trump can only take the conservative movement so far. Whatever Carlson does next, it’ll be eagerly studied.
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