In TAC, Alan Pell Crawford has a lengthy profile of TC (“Tucker Carlson: The Populist Paladin of Primetime”). I, for one, thank God that TC is at the 8pm slot on FNC. In all likelihood, he is the best we can hope for on mainstream TV. He takes things to the initial reaches of Citizenism (which I deem to be just to the right of Civic Nationalism), which, relatively speaking, is a good thing. The fact that Neocons like Max Boot and Bill Kristol despise him is, alone, worth the price of admission.
The things Carlson loves about his leafy Washington neighborhood—the safety, security, and sense of community—have been “utterly destroyed in these small towns,” he says. “Jobs have vanished. The standard of living has gone down. Even the life expectancy of people in these areas of America is going down. And this is the terrible part: No one in Washington cares. The middle class in this country is collapsing and the people who live where I live—who are part of permanent Washington and make policy—don’t even care.” This isn’t because they lack empathy, says Carlson, but because they are never touched by the problems faced by Americans who live in these towns. “My neighbors,” he says, “never have to deal with the problems caused by the policies they set for the rest of America.”…
As for the idea that “diversity is our strength,” Carlson lit into Sen. Lindsey Graham for saying that America is “an idea, not defined by its people.” This claim, Carlson said, might surprise the people who already live here, “with their actual families and towns and traditions and history and customs.” It might also come as a surprise that “they’re irrelevant to the success or failure of what they imagined was their country.” If diversity is our strength, it must follow that “the less we have in common somehow the stronger we are. Is that true? We better hope it’s true because we’re betting everything on it.”…
He likes his new neighbors—and the nearby dog park. “My neighbors are intelligent and thoughtful people,” he says, most of whom still have Obama stickers on their Priuses. “They think Trump is awful on immigration, and they don’t see how anyone could possibly view the issue any differently. But that’s because there is only one way that the issue touches them in their lives, and that is in terms of their household help. They worry about ‘Margarita who has been with our family for years and the kids love her and we just want to know that she will be protected.’ They aren’t cynical. They really care about the legal status of their household help. I get that. They just don’t see the issue in any larger social context.”
