Tucker May Go, Populism Stays

By Michael Brendan Dougherty

Wednesday, April 26, 2023

 

Phil Klein is right that Tucker Carlson had an ambition unusual for most Fox Prime Time hosts; he wanted to move the Right in a certain direction, not just reflect it. And he’s right that losing the Fox 8 p.m. slot makes that harder to do.

 

And on The Editors podcast, Noah Rothman made the point that in some ways Tucker Carlson was mainstreaming stuff from the fringes to the center, which is a thing that happens a lot in politics. Conservatism itself went from the fringe to the center of American politics in most tellings.

 

But I think people are getting way ahead of themselves in thinking that once Tucker Carlson goes away, populism in the GOP goes away with him. Anyone who thinks this is operating from what I like to think of as the Establishment’s conspiracy theory. What is that? It’s the belief that there is a great mass of Americans who are just suggestible bigots (an oxymoron), people who are dumb but easily led (another contradiction), people who are prone to eruptive and destructive political action once they are exposed to an opportunist, demagogue, or pied piper.

 

The reason that people on the political right have started to distrust the military is not that Tucker Carlson manipulates them with misleading clips of General Milley. People on the political right have started to distrust the military because they’ve experienced the last 20 years of American foreign policy. One of the reasons military recruitment is so poor right now is that military families are, in frightening numbers, warning their sons and daughters away from the military.

 

The same fallacy existed in the 1990s, the idea that once a reinstated fairness doctrine or a lawsuit or something would shut up Rush Limbaugh, then conservatism would go away with him. It wasn’t true then, and it’s certainly not now.

 

There’s no surer sign of the rot in American institutions than that their leaders think they can restore wide public trust in their working just by getting rid of or silencing their populist critics.