Mike Grillo has a piece at Ordinary Times today looking at the Tucker phenomenon. He gives a brief overview of the impressive way Carlson started his career:
My first experience with Tucker Carlson came about in 1995, when he was a staff writer at the now-defunct Weekly Standard magazine. Carlson, Jonah Goldberg, Rich Lowry, Ramesh Ponnuru, and others were, like me, Generation X conservatives who brought a freshness to political commentary and debate seen through the eyes of people under the age of 30.
Carlson wrote for a wide variety of publications including New York Magazine, The New Republic, Slate, The Wall Street Journal, and more. He wrote an essay for Esquire detailing his trip to Liberia with Al Sharpton that later received a nomination at the National Magazine Awards.
Grillo leaps over the decades to look at what Carlson has become:
Fast forward to 2023, and that Tucker Carlson is gone. People often change their political views. It is not unnatural. I know people who were far more conservative than I was at 25 who are now card-carrying Democrats and vice versa. It happens. Tucker admitted his views had changed, going from a Reagan-like conservative to a much more nationalist conservative in the vein of Josh Hawley and JD Vance (who underwent the same metamorphism as Carlson, but in a scant 3-4 years). There is nothing wrong with that at all.
I don't know that I'd agree that "there is nothing wrong with that at all." I suppose that in a people-will-do-what-they-will kind of context, one can't be overly disappointed to see these transformations, but there's the matter of some of us standing for something we've stood for since we formulated our overarching worldviews. In that sense, Carlson, Vance, Hawley, and some people I'm going to mention soon took decidedly wrong turns.
Grillo's next conclusion seems to be a bit too easy to reach, it seems to me:
However, Carlson fell victim to what so many people did in the Trump era — he became a slave to ratings as many digital publications became slaves to website traffic (see The Federalist). In doing so, Carlson became what he decried in his 2003 book, Politicians, Partisans, and Parasites. In the book, he described how he had respect for ideologues, but couldn’t stand partisans. Why? Because the latter adhered to whatever position was most beneficial to themselves personally, and not what they believed.
But then again, I suppose I must consider Rupert Murdoch's oh-hell-yes-we-were-motivated-by-ratings Dominion Voting Systems deposition.
Grillo also mentions The Federalist in that paragraph, ascribing opportunism as the motive. A 2017 piece by Matt Lewis at The Daily Beast fleshes the devolution out more throughly, mentioning that, at that point, one could still find some actually interesting writing there:
The Federalist isn’t monolithic, and there are still articles about topics like “localism,” hot takes about women’ leggings, and essays on, say, G.K. Chesterton, but the website’s anti-anti-Trump emphasis (the things that get buzz) concerned almost everyone I spoke to.
But concern among staff writers was growing (BTW, so much water has gone over the dam in the intervening years, I'd forgotten that Tom Nichols used to write for The Federalist):
At least one writer at The Federalist is concerned about the site’s general direction. Tom Nichols, a senior contributor at The Federalist, professor at the Naval War College, and author of The Death of Expertise, told me “I think some of it goes too far. I don't like the drumbeat of terms like ‘fake news,’ and I particularly didn't like the attacks on Comey, which really do come across, at least to me, as looking like just so much water-carrying for Trump.”
Lewis, and some people he quotes, are reluctant to pin the anti-anti-Trump movement on any specific hard-and-fast-motive:
There are organic and benign explanations about how an evolution like this takes place, along with less noble theories being bandied about. “The anti-anti-Trump position is a safe one,” says Mediaite columnist and conservative talk show host John Ziegler, “because you're giving the Trump cult what they want while you're also trying to pretend you're standing on some sort of principle.”
“The shift is unmistakable, but is it designed to appease funders or advertisers, or simply the organic outcome of changing times and writers' evolving positions,” asked writer and Rochester, N.Y. radio host Evan Dawson. “When you see smart people who you've respected for a long time going down a strange road, it's easy to allow yourself to ascribe nefarious motives… is it about money? Is it something we're not seeing? But I don't necessarily want to fall victim to that. I just don't understand it, and it's disappointing.”
I'm going to do something here that requires me to proceed carefully: ascribing in good faith some reasonable motives to conservatives who have become Trumpists over the past eight years.
Perhaps the figure who best articulates how frustration boiled over into zeal for an unforeseen way of moving forward is Kurt Schlichter. I won't be quoting directly, so loathsome and spiritually grotesque do I find him. But he has repeatedly made a point over the years that bears paying heed to. The conservative movement - its magazines, think tanks and elected politicians - had not really moved the needle, despite a few legislative gains. Schlichter would mock the cruises and conferences as the time-wasters of effete dweebs who had no fire in the belly.
Harsh, yes, and expressed with too broad a brush, I'd say. He's spot on when it comes to, say, Bill Kristol, who has been reduced to exhorting people to vote Democrat, but he goes after some people who are unmistakably noble and doing important work, such as David French.
But it's true that the arc of American life has not bent toward something favorable to conservatives over the last 50 years, and the conservative movement has not mounted an effective countervailing force.
And then comes this loudmouth, sharp-elbowed New York developer, brand hustler and all-around character who, while having a track record making clear he doesn't have any core principles, has learned enough of the righty lexicon to generate excitement among the frustrated. Many folks saw it as a game-changer.
One element of the conservative movement that evolved differently from the above mentioned think-tank-and-magazine milieu was broadcast punditry - talk radio and Fox News.
Rush Limbaugh, of course, basically pioneered the modern talk-radio model. When he appeared on the scene in the late 1980s, pretty much every kind of conservatism found it an exciting development. But some hindsight has made clear that, from the outset, he dealt in provocative-as-hell-and-proud-of-it bombast. Exhilarating for a time, but not the kind of long-term arrow in the quiver that was going to get the conservative vision over the progressive hurdle.
It's worth noting that neither Limbaugh nor the next talk-radio superstar, Sean Hannity, finished college. A college degree, of course, doesn't instantly confer depth cred to someone - and can even work in the opposite direction. But they established a prototype, the figure who may not be steeped in highbrow theory but knows in his gut that the country is on the wrong track.
Fox News lived up to its fair-and-balanced tagline pretty well for a number of years, but retrospect shows us that there were problems of a moral nature from the start. Founder Roger Ailes was shown to be a sexually exploitative boss, telling Andrea Tantaros to turn around in his office so he could see her jiggle, and telling Julie Roginsky "We'd both get in so much trouble if I took you out for a drink." He'd been kicked out of the organization in disgrace shortly before he died, but he'd set in motion a pattern that made possible the crash-and-burn stints at the network of Eric Bolling, Ed Henry, Kimberly Guilfoyle and other horndogs. As time went on, the opinion side of Fox became more concentrated on facilitating political wins. The matter of what makes for a noble human being, once a core concern of the responsible Right, fell off the radar.
I think that basically what happened to Tucker Carlson is that he became a big star at Fox News. It became quite intoxicating, after having tossed the base a few chunks of red meat, to have that base deify him. Once the pleasure center in his brain had gotten a taste of that, he was off and running.
How about those on the more elevated level, those of whom we can truly say that they are intellectuals? Here I'm speaking of Roger Kimball, Bill Bennett, Victor Davis Hanson, to name a few.
I think they basically let the above-mentioned frustration become the exclusive driver of the work they've done since the Very Stable Genius strode onto the scene. Frustration, something all of us experience momentarily, is unproductive when it takes one's viewpoint over completely.
Now, I'm done with the ascribing-in-good-faith-some-reasonable-motives-to-conservatives-who-have -become-Trumpists portion of this post.
What's inexcusable, for all Trumpist and Neo-Trumpist types, from the radio barkers to the intellectuals to the performance clowns in elected office, is the perpetuation of lies that their stance has forced them into. They expend much of their energy trying to persuade us that the 2020 election was rigged, that January 6 was no big deal, and, most harmfully, that Donald Trump had redeeming qualities.
Truth, like the above-mentioned matter of what makes a noble human being, is a core value of actual conservatism.
These people are something other than conservatives, and their phoniness and nastiness just may be making it easier to make that case.
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