Tucker Carlson demise on Fox may lead to a new direction in the media. My own view of Tucker Carlson was mixed, while I viewed him as a unique voice that represented forgotten America, and his view was more of a populist view versus a conservative view. Fox big mistake was first letting him go but the second was the unceremonious way they let him go. The sudden way that Tucker was released showed the classness of Fox and equally as bad, a complete disrespect for their audience.
Tucker represent a wave of conservatism and the American public that is often ignored even by conservatism. Fox represent a more traditional conservative that came out of the sixties and become prevalent in the 1980’s. It should be pointed out that Reaganonomics worked for over two decades to raise the middle class from early 1980’s going into the 21st century. In the 1970’s, stagflation produce economic stagnation and many middle class found themselves in tax bracket reserved for the wealth a generation earlier. Supply side tax cuts benefited the Middle Class and engineered a 25 year economic growth that extended into 21st century.
This century has been different as America has changed, the rise of China and movement of businesses moving their factories overseas including China and massive illegal immigration that had immigrants competing with many Americans on the lower income strata for jobs. For many Americans, income not only was stagnant but overall wealth decline as many saw their housing prices dropped and many more left the investor class as Americans investors dropped from 63 percent in 2007 to 53 percent. Millions of Americans lost opportunities to expand their overall wealth and saw instead their wealth decrease to go with stagnant income. Carlson noted to John Hinderaker, “I always thought that the dividing line between liberal and conservative was economic. And that conservatives were champions of the free market and liberals were very suspicious of it. That really was the dividing line for a long time. There were other demarcations, but that was the main one. And the free-market argument won. It did, thanks to a lot of things, but liberals during the Clinton years joined in celebrating market capitalism…I am still for the free market, but the middle class is dying, and that’s not one man’s opinion. That’s a fact rooted in data. It’s shrinking in size. The life expectancy of blue-collar America is declining. That’s never happened. So, you have to ask, what did we get wrong? What assumptions did we have that turned out to be untrue? Free trade brings prosperity? Yeah, but not to everybody.”
He added,” Oh, it’s over. Capitalism lost because the people in charge didn’t pay any attention to the effects at all, and so with the average millennial it is far less likely that his parents are married or own a home, he owns his own car, or they own two cars. We’ve saddled people with overwhelming levels of debt—student loan debt primarily, but other kinds, too—that we’ve basically crushed an entire generation of kids. And they’re really angry.” He represent a thought by many who view that the system is rigged and has failed them. Even on the right, there are many like Carlson who don’t believe that market economy works for them. Carlson made the point I have made in my books, that for many including on the right, the movement left is moving economics. In my report “From Trump to Le Pen, Where Does Populism Ends Up?” I observed, “France is where the future of the populist movement may lie if Trump fails to move his agenda and improve the lot of American workers. Marine Le Pen is not a traditional American conservative or even a believer in free market. Many of Le Pen’s views mirror the hard-core left, embodied by Jean-Luc Melenchon, including her promise to maintain the 35-hour work week and lower the retirement age to 60. (The two combined actually collected 42% of the vote in first round voting in the 2017 French Presidential election showing political strength.)” Carlson added, “When people don’t get married and don’t buy homes and aren’t rooted in the society long term, they’re volatile and scary, and their politics tend to be crazy. It’s really bad. You don’t want to ever let that happen. We let it happen. We didn’t pay any attention at all. All of that money was transferred to the Baby Boomers, and they’re about to feel the effects of that because economic populism is the future. I don’t want it. I’m just telling you. I’d bet my house on it. Bernie Sanders is going to seem moderate compared to the next guy.”
On the left, Robert Kennedy Jr. opposition to the Covid vaccines mandates and the overall lost of freedom by various mandates including closing schools and businesses mirrored much on the right and his recent statement opposing central banking digital currency and remarking that one can be in favor of legal immigration and still oppose illegal immigration are uniting points for merging of the right and forces on the left.
Conservative are left with the task of combining an agenda that benefits the Middle Class and allow the poor to move up the economic ladder while defending free market economy. We are dealing with a culture war that is far larger than culture wars in the past. It is not just about abortion but also parents finding their daughters competing with transgender women (men) in sports and called bigots if they want their daughters to compete with only other women. It is about defending those basic principles that bring success like showing up to work on time, the do best you can in school and wait tuntil you are married before having children. These were values that wasn’t even debatable but advocating hem now marks you as supporting “White privilege.” We are living in a land where the cultural norm will be mediocrity as opposed to meritocracy.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds described the suicide of expertise: “It was the experts — characterized in terms of their self-image by David Halberstam in The Best and the Brightest — who brought us the twin debacles of the Vietnam War, which we lost, and the War On Poverty, where we spent trillions and certainly didn’t win. In both cases, confidential assertions by highly credential authorities foundered upon reality, at a dramatic cost in blood and treasure. Mostly other people’s blood and treasured, and these are not isolated failures.”
Over the past decade, we have seen the Great Recession, due to a housing bubble engineered by existing laws and promoted by the best and brightest on Wall Street. Trump inherited a foreign policy debacle in the Middle East engineered by Obama’s experts, who produced a policy that led to hundreds of thousands of deaths, a million refugees headed for Europe, the rise of ISIS, and the upending of previous relations between the U.S. and the State of Israel. Nor can we forget the toppling of Moammar Gadhafi, which led to Libya becoming yet another sanctuary for Islamic terrorists and another places where refugees fled the Middle East for Europe. A year after the toppling of Gadhafi, attack on two United States facilities resulted in the death of Ambassador Christopher Stevens and three others.
Glenn Harlan Reynolds concluded, “If experts want to reclaim a position of authority, they need to make a few changes. First, they should make sure they know what they’re talking about, and they shouldn’t talk about things where their knowledge isn’t solid. Second, they should be appropriately modest in their claims of authority. And third, they should check their egos. It doesn’t matter what your SAT scores were, voters are under no obligation to listen to you unless they find what you say persuasive.” Modesty is not a trait that this generation of the Leadership class has demonstrated. The elites have done well while the ordinary folks in fly over country have seen their incomes plummet and their ability to make a fortune shrivel. The expert class who guided America from the 1940 to the 1960’s won a world war, designed a bipartisan policy of containment that prevented World War III and a victory over the Soviet Empire presided over by two members of that generation, Ronald Reagan, and George H.W. Bush. The Greatest Generation discovered vaccines for polio, antibiotics that saved lives, and sent a man to the moon. Jet planes and space flights were dreams that became reality and it was that generation that began to redress the wrongs done to our Black citizens. The present generation of experts may have given us computers, and the computing power in our hands is greater that what took Apollo flights to the Moon. While planes have become faster, the time to get from point A to B is longer and while cars may have advantages over the cars of the 1950’s, the average person in 1950 would have little trouble recognizing or driving what we drive today. There are no flying cars, and we are replacing reliable nuclear power with less reliable energy derived from wind and solar power. The electric car is a century-old technology that is hardly a major advance in automotive history. And again, where are the flying cars?
Tucker Carlson has shown the failure of the political class and on a daily basis, he pointed out their failures. Carlson is a voice that details the struggle of the forgotten American and idiocy that the Leadership class has imposed on them. Carlson chronicles the reality America is indeed standing on the Abyss.
The Donelson Files 