Remember me
It’s almost impossible for anyone or anything to consistently break into a news cycle dominated by Donald Trump’s manic impulses. And Tucker Carlson’s capacity to be on so many people’s minds day after day says something, not just about Carlson, but about Trump. Last weekend, Carlson went viral in a podcast exchange with the editor-in-chief of the Economist, Zanny Minton Beddoes, when Beddoes seemed tongue-tied in response to Carlson’s deflection of her question about whether he supported Israel’s “right to exist”. The clip is striking, and, by comparison, Trump is a bore outliving his charisma. He retains, obviously, the capacity to do harm on the highest level. But what was original and riveting about him, despite its repulsiveness, is now predictable and wearying. This absence is where Tucker Carlson is establishing his own presentness.
Carlson is another American beast, perhaps slouching toward the Bethlehem of some type of national annunciation. As Trump’s once-novel outrages pale, Carlson’s push past boundaries even Trump hasn’t burst. Trump seems bedevilled by Putin; Carlson pays Putin a visit and sits down with him for a marathon conversation. Trump implies that the left was responsible for the assassination of Charlie Kirk; Carlson has onto his podcast Joe Kent, recently resigned director of Trump’s National Counterterrorism Center, who raises the possibility that it was Israel that had Kirk killed. Polls might have Vance and Rubio way ahead of Carlson in a hypothetical race for the Republican presidential nomination in 2028. But everyone, it seems, is talking about Carlson. More than they talk about Vance or Rubio.
Statements about so much attention being focused on Carlson, however, need to be qualified. Trump Barnumed his way up through American society by learning how to master the attention of the media. Carlson is the media. He lives and breathes the media environment, where he has been working and thriving his entire adult life. His journalistic talents have two different effects. One is the type of person he has developed into being. The other is the perception of the type of person he is.
For ten years, ever since Trump crashed onto the political scene, liberals have been wringing their hands over his vulgarity, his distractedness, his lack of intelligence, his apparent stupidity with regard to the subtleties of moral, social, intellectual and cultural life. They should have been grateful instead. While it seems that Trump has never read a complete newspaper article, let alone a book, Vance, Rubio and Carlson have written eight books between them – one, four and three respectively. They are neither knuckle-dragging troglodytes nor deal-making reactionaries, but the sort of thoughtful, reflective people liberals have a hard time conceiving exist on the right. Of the three, Carlson is far and away the most intellectually nimble and literary. It is the liberals who have always had a corner on intellect and culture. With Carlson, the proportions have shifted. He is of their type.
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He is also of their trade. It was comical to watch the rising vitriol toward Vance on the left as he ascended toward power. It was as if the liberal media, having bent over backwards, as they always do, to appear virtuously even-handed, and praised Vance’s mediocre memoir to the skies, felt betrayed. Yet Carlson is no mere memoirist. He is a prince of the media, having cut his teeth at prestigious liberal bastions like CNN, PBS and MSNBC before tacking right and establishing himself at Fox for nearly 15 years, in the process making the passage from Democrat to Republican. Because of his success in the liberal media’s very own habitat – he shits, you might say, where they eat – it is hard to take his measure through the liberal media’s characterisations of him alone. In their dismissals of his ultimate political significance, they might be being petty, or not; in their warnings about his political influence, they might be exaggerating his perniciousness, or not.
One thing is for sure: Carlson knows the tricks of the trade. And then some. His blend of truth and lies, the indispensable skill of the demagogue, puts Trump and co. to shame. His conversation with Beddoes was like watching a dialogue between civilisation and its impending extinction. There is his winking, edgy anti-Zionism for one thing. Though he is courting a growing anti-Semitism on the right, galvanised by a strengthening Catholic extremism, Carlson does not seem to have the virulence of Catholic anti-Semitism. He is more like a sommelier sniffing his way through varieties of aversion to Jews. He declared to Beddoes, clearly enough, “I don’t hate Jews!” yet then, out of both sides of his mouth, said “I don’t want Israel to be destroyed or have to use nuclear weapons,” somehow negating his opposition to Israel’s destruction in the first part of the sentence by possibly raising the necessity of Israel’s destruction should it go nuclear on its enemies (all in a second).
In response to Beddoes asking him if Israel has a right to exist, Carlson replied: “What does that mean a right to exist… does it have a right to exist, is that what you’re asking… what does that mean… are you asking if it has a right to exist or do I want it to exist…?” That’s not argument; it’s graffiti painted onto an argument. He then claimed that the very phrase “right to exist” was invented by Israel to justify itself. In fact Thomas Paine and Ernest Renan both used the phrase to describe the legitimacy of a justly governed nation. Lenin used the synonymous “right to self-determination”. The term is self-evident.
So is “Zionist.” But when the nonplussed Beddoes, responding to Carlson’s declaration that he was “not a Zionist”, said, “so you’re in no sense a Zionist”, Carlson replied, “I don’t even know what that means.” That is like a judge asking a defendant if they are guilty or not guilty and the defendant replying, “I am a hamburger.” You either adjourn the court or shut down society. Even as AI is trying to simulate a human intelligence, Carlson is establishing a new sort of norm in which intelligence is merely a prank that power plays on the naïve. A canny hybrid of everything, Carlson ended his vandalism of the stunned Beddoes on the new note of reactionary woke, rousingly proclaiming that what he believes in is “universal standards that are universally applicable”, a meaningless simulacrum of meaning.
Trump is too mentally compromised, too self-destructively impulsive, too megalomaniacal to continue as the slouching beast. He will wreak monumental havoc, but he is too played out for the apocalypse. The question more and more people are asking is whether Carlson – with his supple intellect, his nimble prevaricating, his deftness at playing a championship game of doubles out of both sides of his mouth – whether this slick master of the medium as the message is America’s final nemesis. There is widespread speculation that he will indeed run for president in 2028, with Marjorie Taylor Greene, another postmodern confection, saying she will support him if he does.
Carlson certainly has charisma, which in Weber’s definition is characterised by “scorn for traditional or rational everyday economic activity”, the charismatic leader preferring to earn an income instead by “gifts, foundations, bribery, and honoraria… or… by looting or violent or (formally peaceful) extortion”. Trump has that. But Carlson goes beyond Trump. He is lazy. According to a portrait of him by Michael Wolff, who has known Carlson for a long time, Carlson was incapable of meeting deadlines as a print journalist. He drifted into television because, as he “happily” told Wolff, “you just have to show up”. In this sense, Carlson possesses a quality of Weber’s charisma, that Trump, fixated obsessively on deal-making and real-estate development as a profession, lacks: “repudiating any kind of involvement in everyday life… [charisma] can merely ‘register’ irregular, casual employment”.
Being lazy seems to be what gets Carlson out of bed in the morning. The son of an itinerant journalist, abandoned by his mother when he was very young, the intellectually itinerant Carlson has abandoned one conviction after another. Starting off as a liberal, moving on to being a country-club conservative cosplaying at being outraged by Trump, and now shifting effortlessly between opposing Trump and fawning all over him, Carlson has made the indolent layabout’s commitment, as it were, to “irregular, casual employment”, a vocation. He believes everything, and he believes nothing. He drifts from opportunity to opportunity, and because America is the land of opportunity, Carlson’s opportunism imparts to him an almost sacred aura of principle and authenticity. On the surface, he seems to be the standard Maga isolationist, economic populist, right-wing figure. But even here, his mind seems to seek out the comfortable supinity of flashy entertaining novelty. Trump seized Maduro, Carlson hinted, at the behest of LGBTQ people who wanted to legalise gay marriage in Venezuela. He doesn’t think. He snores loudly in words.
But even as he broadcasts his beliefs, you can’t help but notice one of those little signifiers that history occasionally drops so that you can follow its trail back to sense. Carlson wears loafers with no socks, as he was doing in that Economist interview. Even the quintessential Wasps, George Bush père and fils, never did that. And in some odd way, Carlson’s lazy impersonations of hatred have an air of Episcopalian balance about them. He is the reassertion of Wasp dominance in American political life, a sort of William F Buckley in reverse, the Wasp playing the Catholic just as Buckley was a Catholic performing a Wasp. Where Buckley assimilated and mastered the fevered postwar intellectual atmosphere, Carlson has mastered the anti-intellectualism of our post-literate moment. Where Buckley had his idiosyncratic pencil – a Wildean come-hither if ever there was one – Carlson has his high-pitched whinny of a laugh – his own come-hither to all the beer-belching nihilistic bros who tune him in. And it could well be, hatred being the unacknowledged intimacy it is, that these outwardly homophobic Groypers cannot tear their eyes from his naked ankles.
Carlson’s performance of a cardiganed gravitas of hate is culturally dangerous, that’s for sure. But it seems unlikely that he will leap from the sparkle of culture to the fire of politics. For one thing, you have to do more than just “show up”. For another, you have stick to it. And you do have to wear socks, else people might think that, at any moment, you might go back to bed and wake up a different sort of beast.
[Further reading: Tucker Carlson vs Donald Trump]
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