The commentary on January
2nd by Fox News host Tucker Carlson was headlined at you tube “Tucker: Leaders show no obligation
to American voters" and it represents a historic
turning-point in American political culture. This, from the Republican Party’s
news-site, Fox, refers to America’s ruling class — the controllers of both Parties — as
“mercenaries,” who care only about themselves, and it specifically attacks both
libertarianism and conservatism (the two ideologies upon which
the post-Abraham-Lincoln Republican Party is based). Carlson’s commentary
says that money rules, and that democracy is only nominal and not real, in
today’s America.
The current
3,747 comments to it at youtube reflect
the revolution that’s occurring now in America’s rapidly changing ideology.
When a viewer there clicks on “Best” (the most-highly-agreed-with) as the
option for displaying the comments, here is the most highly-agreed-with
comment, followed by the most-highly-agreed-with response to it, and then the
most-highly-agreed-with response to that (so, these comments reflect the core
of that particular audience):
Colony
Three
As a
Bernie Sanders supporter, I’m surprised to say that I agree with 80% of what
was said here.
We don’t
exist to serve markets, markets exist to serve us. Well said!
REPLY
Samuel
Adam
Genuinely
curious — what's the 20% you disagree with?
REPLY
Colony
Three
Samuel
Adam, I guess the only two things I disagreed with are that women making more
than men is necessarily a problem. I think the main issue is men and women
working a full time job and not being able to make ends meet. Plus, I think
Tucker should have been more specific when he referenced “socialism”, because
yeah, Venezuela type socialism is terrible. But when most of my peers say
socialism, what they actually mean is social democracy, the type found in
Norway, Germany, Australia, Japan, and Canada.
But
overall, I think Carlson is a great host for Fox News, he doesn’t toe the line
and actually thinks for himself.
I know a
lot of my Republican friends and family feel the same way towards elites and
their control of society that I do. The media likes to portray America as
irreparably divided, but it isn’t the case.
REPLY
Samuel
Adam
@Colony
Three, Very interesting. I think despite my voting for Trump and you for
Bernie, if you made a venn diagram of our positions, we'd overlap quite a bit.
I agree that there isn't anything inherently wrong with a woman making more
than a man, if that is the arrangement between two individuals/partners. As for
socialism, I think where the Republican 'conservative' types fall off is the
state being the judge and jury on moral/ethical matters such as poverty and
inequality. That said, the American culture most definitely needs to get away
from the selfish, hyper-individualist, libertarian stance and go back, perhaps
to a pre-Founding (?) mentality of community and togetherness. I guess one
could call it socialistic. I don't know, ha. Just a thought.
You have
a lot more optimism than me. But I could see a revolution in which those that
came out of the Trumpian populist movement like myself came together with
Bernie folks to recall the good parts of our history, learn from our bad parts,
and ultimately progress to a Reformed America.
Here are highlights (the core 921 words of his
2,694-words) from what Carlson said in his 15-minute monologue-commentary:
The goal for
America is both simpler and more elusive than mere prosperity. It’s happiness.
There are a lot of ingredients in being happy: Dignity. Purpose. Self-control.
Independence. Above all, deep relationships with other people. Those are the
things that you want for your children. They’re what our leaders should want
for us, and would want if they cared.
But our
leaders don’t care. We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term
obligation to the people they rule. They’re day traders. Substitute teachers.
They’re just passing through. They have no skin in this game, and it shows.
They can’t solve our problems. They don’t even bother to understand our
problems.
One of the
biggest lies our leaders tell us is that you can separate economics from
everything else that matters. Economics is a topic for public debate. Family
and faith and culture, meanwhile, those are personal matters. Both parties
believe this.
Members of
our educated upper-middle-classes are now the backbone of the Democratic Party
who usually describe themselves as fiscally responsible and socially moderate.
In other words, functionally libertarian. They don’t care how you live, as long
as the bills are paid and the markets function. Somehow, they don’t see a
connection between people’s personal lives and the health of our economy, or
for that matter, the country’s ability to pay its bills. As far as they’re
concerned, these are two totally separate categories.
Social
conservatives, meanwhile, come to the debate from the opposite perspective, and
yet reach a strikingly similar conclusion. The real problem, you’ll hear them
say, is that the American family is collapsing. Nothing can be fixed before we
fix that. Yet, like the libertarians they claim to oppose, many social
conservatives also consider markets sacrosanct. The idea that families are
being crushed by market forces seems never to occur to them. They refuse to
consider it. Questioning markets feels like apostasy.
Both sides
miss the obvious point: Culture and economics are inseparably intertwined.
Certain economic systems allow families to thrive. Thriving families make
market economies possible. You can’t separate the two. It used to be possible
to deny this. Not anymore. The evidence is now overwhelming. How do we know?
Consider the inner cities. …
Because
virtually the same thing has happened decades later to an entirely different
population. In many ways, rural America now looks a lot like Detroit.
This is
striking because rural Americans wouldn’t seem to have much in common with
anyone from the inner city. These groups have different cultures, different
traditions and political beliefs. Usually they have different skin colors.
Rural people are white conservatives, mostly. …
Here’s a big
part of the answer: male wages declined. Manufacturing, a male-dominated
industry, all but disappeared over the course of a generation. All that remained
in many places were the schools and the hospitals, both traditional employers
of women. In many places, women suddenly made more than men.
Now, before
you applaud this as a victory for feminism, consider the effects. Study after
study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want
to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don’t. Over big
populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births,
and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow — more drug and alcohol
abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next
generation.
This isn’t
speculation. This is not propaganda from the evangelicals. It’s social science.
We know it’s true. Rich people know it best of all. That’s why they get married
before they have kids. That model works. But increasingly, marriage is a luxury
only the affluent in America can afford.
And yet, and
here’s the bewildering and infuriating part, those very same affluent married
people, the ones making virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing
pretty much nothing to help the people below them get and stay married. Rich
people are happy to fight malaria in Congo. But working to raise men’s wages in
Dayton or Detroit? That’s crazy.
This is
negligence on a massive scale. Both parties ignore the crisis in marriage. Our
mindless cultural leaders act like it’s still 1961, and [like] the
biggest problem American families face is that sexism is preventing millions of
housewives from becoming investment bankers or Facebook executives.
For our
ruling class, more investment banking is always the answer. They teach us it’s
more virtuous to devote your life to some soulless corporation than it is to
raise your own kids.
Sheryl
Sandberg of Facebook wrote an entire book about this. Sandberg explained that
our first duty is to shareholders, above our own children. No surprise there.
Sandberg herself is one of America’s biggest shareholders. Propaganda like this
has made her rich.
We are ruled
by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.
They’re day traders. Substitute teachers. They’re just passing through. They
have no skin in this game, and it shows.
What’s
remarkable is how the rest of us responded to it. We didn’t question why
Sandberg was saying this. We didn’t laugh in her face at the pure absurdity of
it. Our corporate media celebrated Sandberg as the leader of a liberation
movement. Her book became a bestseller: "Lean In." As if putting a
corporation first is empowerment. It is not. It is bondage. Republicans should
say so.
They should
also speak out against the ugliest parts of our financial system. Not all
commerce is good.
At the
website of Fox News itself, the comments are virtually all from Republicans,
and they’re not nearly as happy with what Carlson said, as is the case at the
youtube site; their comments are more focused on the strictly
intra-Republican-Party feud, than on the nation’s welfare. Carlson’s central
point was missed. The Fox News web-page that presents both the video and the
transcript of the segment is titled “Tucker Carlson: Mitt Romney
supports the status quo. But for everyone else, it's infuriating."
The (currently)
3,359 reader-comments there lead off with, as the three “Best”:
MotoJoe
Russia
didn't make me vote for Trump.
People
like Mitt Romney and Hillary Clinton did.
time4achangenowLeader3
Jan
Best
article by Tucker that I have read by him. The "swamp" is the problem
and Mutt just adds to it. Romney, where the tail does wag the dog.
UngaBungaLeader3
Jan
Isn't
this twice now that Romney has stabbed Trump in the back? That combined with
him not being able to seal the deal with beating Obama, doesn't sound like a
good Republican Senator to me.
However,
Carlson was attacking both conservatism and libertarianism — both the pure
traditionalists (who accept everything from their religion) and the pure
libertarians (who accept everything from the religion-of-the-markets — i.e.,
from the capitalist faith).
Carlson there cited “social science” findings as his authorities. To hear or read his
commentary, as a Republican, and yet not to
recognize that your ideology has here been demolished, is so obtuse that only
the dead-head Republicans can be exposed to the commentary and remain unmoved
in their existing ideology — be that either conservative or libertarian, or
some mix of the two.
And yet,
overwhelmingly, Republicans did not take
it to be personally insulting to themselves. Only few of the comments took
personal offense.
On America’s
political left, most of what Carlson said in his commentary would be supported.
This includes even support by many Blacks, Hispanics, and other minority
groups, who long have supported the Democratic Party. On January 18th, Bill van Auken at the
World Socialist Web Site, headlined “US-born anchor for Iranian TV jailed without charges” and
he wrote, regarding that anchor, who is an American Black: “Marzieh Hashemi, an
anchor and reporter for Press TV, the English-language station of Iran’s
state-run broadcasting system, was arrested Sunday at St. Louis Lambert
International Airport, transported to a Washington detention facility in
manacles and chains and has been held ever since without charges or any public
explanation from either the US Justice Department or the Federal Bureau of
Investigation (FBI). Hashemi was in the United States to visit her family,
including a brother suffering from cancer, and was working on a documentary
film on Black Lives Matter.” Four days later, Daniel Haiphong bannered at the
American Herald Tribune site, “Marzieh Hashemi and the War on
Independent Journalism”, and he opened:
The era of Trump has
confirmed the existence of what some on the Black left such as Ajamu Baraka and Anthony Monteiro have
called a crisis of legitimacy. A crisis of legitimacy haunts the ruling circle
in all realms of the US empire. It extends to the capitalist economy, which has
become a drag on human progress due to its impoverishment of half of the world’s population.
The US military is currently mired in a forever war on the planet that is
costlier and less effective in preventing the rise of large competitors such as
China and Russia from expanding their global influence. Perhaps nowhere is the
crisis of legitimacy clearer than in the war on independent journalism being
waged by the ruling elites in the US and Europe.
That’s also
similar to what Tucker Carlson was saying. He, too, was criticizing the ruling
elites in the US and Europe, and for the same reasons. He, too, was saying that
in America, there is a crisis of legitimacy.
Consequently, did Tucker Carlson, in his January
2nd commentary, open the way, finally, toward a New America emerging — a
compassionate country, which blames no masses (such as ‘the failures’, or ‘the
poor’, or ‘the Hispanics’, or ‘the Blacks’ — or any foreign country — not
Russia, and not Iran, and not China, not any at all) for America’s decline, but which
instead blames America’s billionaires — the people who actually control
America — for the serious problems in America?
If so, he just might have delivered there the
platform for a new third American political party, which could end and replace
the Republican Party, just as Abraham Lincoln and the Republicans ended and
replaced the then-existing Whig Party, from which they had sprung. In
that case, a new third political Party replaced one of the two existing
political Parties. It could happen again.
Is Tucker Carlson now running for President?