Tucker Carlson Given Lesson in Surrenderism

Last week, Tucker Carlson gave a monologue that has neocons and libertarians astir. The transcript is here and worth reading in its entirety, but here are a couple juicy snippets.

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.

That sounds perfectly in line with our mindset. The second paragraph would fit right in with this blog's recent post, Civilization for Rent.

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.

To equate libertarians with yuppie liberals requires a certain mindset. Social indifference is benign compared to the left's malignant radicalism, but that's hardly praise. Tucker perceives this. And he shares the same fundamental question we have about conservatives: what exactly have they conserved? It's not clear if he shares a dark enlightenment answer to that question - that liberal democracy is orchestrated so that even when conservatives win, they lose - but Tucker strikes me as the kind of guy who conceals his power level.

He continues on, weaving around a few topics, to make the ultimate point that the leadership of this country - with Republicans as much to blame as anyone - have prioritized economics to the detriment of families and other metrics of societal health.

David French

The National Review has already made a couple rebuttals. We'll consider just the one from David French, since he is a "Senior Fellow" of the organization. His piece carries the bold title of The Right Should Reject Tucker Carlson’s Victimhood Populism, but the more conciliatory subtitle, Carlson accurately identifies certain maladies, but they are maladies that public policy can’t cure. As you can see - if you read Carlon's piece - this whole rebuttal is one big strawman, because Carlson was not appealing to "victimhood populism", he's bemoaning a prioritization of economies to the human condition. In effect, he is stating that materialism is destroying the country and the political leadership has only encouraged it. [See how well this intertwines with the science pieces we've been doing? The same theme permeates through many domains.] Tucker is also not criticizing or advocating for any particular public policy. French, being basically a liberal, can only see any argument as an appeal to what the federal government should or should not be doing.

But he also says false things. He says that manufacturing “all but disappeared over the course of a generation.” It hasn’t. He says, “increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the affluent in America can afford.” Yet a healthy, faithful marriage is often the gateway to affluence. Affluence is not a prerequisite for marriage.

That terse "it hasn't" response might qualify as the stupidest rebuttal in the history of all stupid rebuttals. Here is a screen grab of his own provided link.

See it? It's the third bullet point of article overview, which states that, relative to GDP, manufacturing in the US is well less than half what it was a couple generations ago. Tucker's point is made: manufacturing has gotten slaughtered. But French - the relentless Never Trumper - claims a victory because manufacturing has improved in the past 12 months under the leadership of a man vaulted to the presidency by a wave of "populist victimhood." That is French's leadoff move: a link the proves his opponent's point and makes his political nemesis look golden.

Then, in the same paragraph, he takes on Tucker's claim that marriage is becoming unaffordable to America's poor, with a dogmatic "Affluence is not a prerequisite for marriage." This guy is so square you could frame a house with him. He can only see through the lens of public policy. It doesn't even occur to him what is known by anyone not totally shut off from the general public: couples with children avoid marriage because they'll lose their government benefits. My mother is a nurse and sees it all day long. Does David French not know a single nurse? If so, he might realize that, in the real world, marriage can impose a hefty financial burden. I find it hilarious but also maddening that, in his retort to Tucker's claim that political leadership is completely out of touch with the American family, he blunders into revealing he has no idea what lower class American families face, almost immediately.

He casts American boys as a generation of burnouts, yet the best evidence shows that marijuana use is only on a slight uptick and is still way down from its highs in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (Some evidence even suggests its use has stabilized in recent years.)

Of course the insufferable geek can find some stat which seems to render Tucker's claim as technically incorrect. (Just like technically there is not a fee for marriage.) To do so he has to fly in the face of what everyone outside of cloudland knows to be true: that drugs are ravaging Americans. Meth and opioid addictions are rampant, almost everywhere. His stats do not address that everyone sees it happening, knows people who have died, have seen families ruined. (Well, French himself probably hasn't.) Tucker's point about marijuana wasn't that it by itself is the worst of the drug epidemic, but that it is still a part of the problem and our political leaders are now willing to embrace it so long as money can be made.

But the reality is that responsibilities are reciprocal. Yes, we need public officials to do their best to create and sustain a government most conducive to human flourishing, but the primary responsibility for creating a life of virtue and purpose rests with families and individuals. In fact, it is still true that your choices are far more important to your success than any government program or the actions of any nefarious banker or any malicious feminist.

Again, we see the libertarian mindset in clear view. There are two things: individuals, and the government. All other components of society (the important parts, basically) are ignored. The claim that your own choices are more important than the social environment is so easily countered by example that it indicates French doesn't bother reading his rebuttals, or even take effort to pre-empt them. Your choices are more important than the actions of any nefarious bankers? Not if your retirement was tied up in Enron, or WorldComm, or Bernie Madoff, or you lost your home or investments because of the 2008 mortgage scandal. Than any government program or malicious feminist? Not if a bridge gets dropped on the family sedan. The whole point of that post was that a company's embrace of feminism doesn't just cause risk to that company, and especially not if the company is only kept competitive by government programs, which is exactly what happened in that scenario.

French proceeds with a few paragraphs where he basically agrees with Tucker on this and that. And then he gets to the heart of populism.

The fundamental problem with our current populist moment isn’t that it fails to identify cultural or political maladies. Carlson and populists on the left have accurately identified a host of American problems. Our declining life expectancy alone should be a blaring wakeup call that despite our prosperity, something is seriously amiss in American life and American culture.

Then we agree?? Kinda?

The problem with populism — and indeed with much of American politics — is that it focuses on the political at the expense of the personal. As I’ve argued many times, there are wounds that public policy can’t heal. But populism too often pretends otherwise. It tells a fundamentally false story about Americans as victims of a heartless elite and their “worship” of market economics rather than the true story of America as a flawed society that still grants its citizens access to tremendous opportunity.

Again, he can't think of this in terms as anything but individualism. French believes he is enlightened because he advocates for self-responsibility - a worthy stance in this society - but goes on as if society and culture institutions other than the government don't exist. Tucker's whole point is that the economic health of a country is downstream from the health of its families. He's not engaging in populism...he's raising a warning. French misses this entirely. People who lift themselves up by their bootstraps can do great, so what's the problem? Well, there's a big problem. He engages in the Fundamental Fallacy, to assume we can change society however we want (or, in this case, don't want) and the outcomes - a prosperous society that offers great opportunity to individuals - will remain, unchanged. The reality is that individual success is more associated with our society than our own attributes, French is just too disconnected from his society, and too assured of his own merit-based success (which is evidently not deserved, based on his writing) to notice.

Ben Shapiro

Also responding is our good friend Ben Shapiro, who can usually be depended on to make the libertarian case against the conservative position. I'll just cherry-pick of few of his comments.

But Carlson seems to attribute America’s troubles not to government interventionism, but to government non-interventionism.

No, as with French, Shapiro is clouded by the inability to see issues outside the scope of policy advocacy. Carlson didn't call for government interventionism. He didn't call for anything. He's making the point that materialism is destroying the country and our political leaders have all been only too eager to help. The problem with the people responding to Tucker is that they're so one-dimensional that they misinterpret his monologue as advocacy rather than a vague and meandering rant.

Carlson seems to suggest that our system itself is to blame for individual shortcomings, and that collective restructuring of free institutions will alleviate and cure those shortcomings. This is simply not reflective of conservatism, or of founding ideology.

Here Shaprio sums up nicely why Shapiro no longer gets a pass on this blog, and many others opposed him well before that. I use to lay off Shapiro because I believed he contributed to a "left-to-right" pipeline. That is, he would deprogram liberals a bit, and as they started questioning things they'd inevitably start moving further right. But here we see just how flawed his mindset is, and why he is more likely to mislead people towards a self-negating form of conservatism. Conservatism means not restructuring free institutions? Is he mad? The main reason we're in such a mess is that the neo-communists have proceeded in their "march through the institutions" nearly uninhibited. What is reflective of conservatism, apparently, is to cede the institutions to radical progressives. Can you see why Shapiro is the left's new favorite conservative? This is why, when Newsweek runs five anti-Trump opinion pieces, the sixth is some banality by Ben Shapiro. It's the conservatism they want you to see. Surrenderism, basically.

The goal for America wasn't happiness. It was the pursuit of happiness -- the framework of freedom that allows us to pursue happiness. I do want dignity and purpose and self-control and independence for my children – so, presumably, do you. But I don’t find dignity, purpose, self-control and independence for my children in policy generated by political leadership. I teach my children that they have been given innate dignity by God, that their purpose lies in acting in accordance with virtue, that self-control is both a quality of character and productive mode of entrepreneurship, and that independence must be cultivated so that we can act with dignity and purpose in the world. At no point would I suggest that my child’s sense of purpose or dignity ought to come from government intervention, or that lack of purpose or dignity can be attributed to free trade with Mexico.

An agreeable stance, although I do take note that Shapiro - a lawyer - has not seen his job shipped down to Mexico nor watched any of his children overdose on Fentanyl. Also, he says nothing of Carlson's major point that political leadership has steered a course of material wealth at the expense of other outcomes. He prattles on as if Carlson implored the government to intervene to make people happier, which is not the case.

But according to Carlson, both parties have embraced the idea of free trade and limited regulation as a solution to problems of the soul – and thus both parties have come up empty.

No, he didn't reference those at all. And if he did, I'm sure he'd opine that the supposed free trade hasn't been very free and the limited regulation not very limited.

The Democratic Party, Carlson says, is “functionally libertarian” - a perfectly incredible contention given the fact that the current new wave in the Democratic Party has called for [socialism].

Looks like some ruffled feathers, eh? And no, he didn't say that either. He said, to quote: 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. Carlson is talking about the upper crust rearguard of the party, not the "current new wave" of SJWs. Shapiro is functionally lying. He's a lawyer, he can parse English. He knows an apple isn't an orange, but pretends it is anyway. (The essence of a strawman argument.)

Throughout the article, Shapiro agrees with Carlson seven different times - by my count - and contests a number of points, but never challenges the general premise that the people making the big decisions in this country are blindly prioritizing consumerism to the detriment of the core health of the country. Both French and Shapiro assume Carlson is engaging in some sort of policy advocacy. He is not. He is making a more systemic critique. He probably agrees with them that this isn't something to be fixed by policy changes, but not for the same reason. For them, because they are hyper-individualists who can't offer a social solution, and for him because he engages the non-linear viewpoint of a reactionary. My guess is that he understands the cyclical nature of society and is seeing us as too far along at this point. He's not engaging in policy advocacy or calling for government interventionism. He's issuing a warning, which many cannot even comprehend.