Economic populism on the Right

[lpetrich]

Tucker Carlson has sparked the most interesting debate in conservative politics - Vox

“All I’m saying is don’t act like the way things are is somehow ordained by God.”

Last Wednesday, the conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson started a fire on the right after airing a prolonged monologue on his show that was, in essence, an indictment of American capitalism.

America’s “ruling class,” Carlson says, are the “mercenaries” behind the failures of the middle class — including sinking marriage rates — and “the ugliest parts of our financial system.” He went on: “Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”

He concluded with a demand for “a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”

Not surprisingly, he got a lot of criticism from several of his fellow conservatives, criticism that often repeated the usual conservative line that poverty is all the fault of its sufferers.

And that was my biggest question about Carlson’s monologue, and the flurry of responses to it, and support for it: When other groups (say, black Americans) have pointed to systemic inequities within the economic system that have resulted in poverty and family dysfunction, the response from many on the right has been, shall we say, less than enthusiastic.

Yet white working-class poverty receives, from Carlson and others, far more sympathy. And conservatives are far more likely to identify with a criticism of “elites” when they believe those elites are responsible for the expansion of trans rights or creeping secularism than the wealthy and powerful people who are investing in private prisons or an expansion of the militarization of police. Carlson’s network, Fox News, and Carlson himself have frequently blasted leftist critics of market capitalism and efforts to fight inequality.

...
Carlson said that growing up in Washington, DC, and spending time in rural Maine, he didn’t realize until recently that the same poverty and decay he observed in the Washington of the 1980s was also taking place in rural (and majority-white) Maine. “I was thinking, ‘Wait a second ... maybe when the jobs go away the culture changes,’” he told me, “And the reason I didn’t think of it before was because I was so blinded by this libertarian economic propaganda that I couldn’t get past my own assumptions about economics.” (For the record, libertarians have critiqued Carlson’s monologue as well.)

So it's only when they are bitten that they get concerned.

Parallel to this, culture critics on the Right have long grumbled about the news media and the entertainment industry. Since those villains are almost entirely capitalist, a logical conclusion would be that their continuing success with their content is a massive market failure.

In Conservatives against Capitalism? I noted some anti-capitalist conservatives. I also noted that conservatism has some features that get in the way of criticizing capitalism, and that the Right has had much less success in taming capitalism than the Left has.

 

[Worldtraveller]

Another validation of the an Onion article. See: Party of Leopards Eating Faces.

 

[Cheerful Charlie]

I guess few of these right winged talking heads remember the Gilded Age and Teddy Roosevelt's battle with the trusts and monopolies. It isn't like we haven't been here before. The America of panics, boom and bust economics, the Great Depression and why all of this matters.

 

[PyramidHead]

Tucker Carlson has sparked the most interesting debate in conservative politics - Vox

“All I’m saying is don’t act like the way things are is somehow ordained by God.”

Last Wednesday, the conservative talk show host Tucker Carlson started a fire on the right after airing a prolonged monologue on his show that was, in essence, an indictment of American capitalism.

America’s “ruling class,” Carlson says, are the “mercenaries” behind the failures of the middle class — including sinking marriage rates — and “the ugliest parts of our financial system.” He went on: “Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.”

He concluded with a demand for “a fair country. A decent country. A cohesive country. A country whose leaders don’t accelerate the forces of change purely for their own profit and amusement.”

Not surprisingly, he got a lot of criticism from several of his fellow conservatives, criticism that often repeated the usual conservative line that poverty is all the fault of its sufferers.

And that was my biggest question about Carlson’s monologue, and the flurry of responses to it, and support for it: When other groups (say, black Americans) have pointed to systemic inequities within the economic system that have resulted in poverty and family dysfunction, the response from many on the right has been, shall we say, less than enthusiastic.

Yet white working-class poverty receives, from Carlson and others, far more sympathy. And conservatives are far more likely to identify with a criticism of “elites” when they believe those elites are responsible for the expansion of trans rights or creeping secularism than the wealthy and powerful people who are investing in private prisons or an expansion of the militarization of police. Carlson’s network, Fox News, and Carlson himself have frequently blasted leftist critics of market capitalism and efforts to fight inequality.

...
Carlson said that growing up in Washington, DC, and spending time in rural Maine, he didn’t realize until recently that the same poverty and decay he observed in the Washington of the 1980s was also taking place in rural (and majority-white) Maine. “I was thinking, ‘Wait a second ... maybe when the jobs go away the culture changes,’” he told me, “And the reason I didn’t think of it before was because I was so blinded by this libertarian economic propaganda that I couldn’t get past my own assumptions about economics.” (For the record, libertarians have critiqued Carlson’s monologue as well.)

So it's only when they are bitten that they get concerned.

Parallel to this, culture critics on the Right have long grumbled about the news media and the entertainment industry. Since those villains are almost entirely capitalist, a logical conclusion would be that their continuing success with their content is a massive market failure.

In Conservatives against Capitalism? I noted some anti-capitalist conservatives. I also noted that conservatism has some features that get in the way of criticizing capitalism, and that the Right has had much less success in taming capitalism than the Left has.

Carlson isn't against capitalism for any noble reason, but because its current manifestation seems to be eroding the racial and gender pecking order that benefits him. As I read somewhere, his problem isn't that there is an underclass, it's that his kind of people are now in it.