It seems FOX fired Tucker. I’m told he was the most popular guy on TV, which presumably is worth a lot of money in advertising & has some influence on public opinion, perhaps primarily as an indication of elite consensus. There is so far no explanation for the event; liberals are exultant, the event is covered everywhere from the NYT to Instagram, not least since prominent Democratic politicians called for his removal & get to claim yet another victory (right after FOX settled the Dominion lawsuit for upwards of $750M); the conservatives I’m aware of on Twitter are largely claiming he’ll move on to bigger & better things while FOX will continue its decline, partly because its audience is advancing in their Social Security years, partly because its leadership loathes them.
Last weekend, while he was being fired, or just before, Tucker gave a speech to the Heritage gala celebrating their 50th an. You can listen to it below, it is the clearest statement of his WASP-populism, because it is open about political theology. People can only go on with their American lives if they believe certain things about good & evil, about divine demands & prohibitions; those beliefs are not private—they bind the nation & must have political guarantees; since this is no longer the case, a radical political conflict is open, reaching into the things that might be expected to bring people together, such that it’s now a question what a woman or a child is… I recommend listening to his brief speech:
Tucker seems to me the last influential proponent & beneficiary of the populist transformation occasioned by Trump. With some hesitation, I confess that I am not surprised by the many severe institutional defeats incurred by the Republicans & conservatives over the last decade. Tucker himself has said that he knows he’ll be ruined by the oligarchy & that the immediate future is bleak, though he holds out hope for the future, for America & for Christendom. It is perhaps permissible therefore to state a few thoughts about the self-destruction of the right wing broadly understood. Of course, I don’t claim Tucker’s moral authority & so I will not speak from a moral point of view, but from an intellectual point of view. Politics also requires an understanding of the institutions & the beliefs actuating people, not merely a commitment to a cause or a way of life. Populists broke with the party that put forward people like Sen. Romney & accepted meekly all the changes that wiped out American communities—a revolt against decadence & defeat started at that moment. But in breaking with the party elite, the populists failed to return to an America that could educate & inspire, either in thought or in deed. Patriots discovered to their silent shame that they do not understand America, since there was no transformation in institutions & habits following from their conviction that transformation is necessary. Populists could not influence the Trump administration any more than the Obama or Biden administrations. Resignation or outrage flowed forth from this impotence, along with the assurances we all know about the goodness & greatness of America. But there was no way to speak intelligently about the lessons we learn about political health, much less to then speak persuasively about how to deal with our newly-obvious decadence. Tucker quickly became the loudest & most intelligent voice of a criticism of decadence that could do nothing but lay blame. Since he never learned politics, he could not teach it. But it is a great danger to utter ugly truths, since they might overpower you. The populist revolt against elite corruption has failed so far, because it is uneducated about justice, the only thing that will connect personal anger to common, institutional action. Tucker has become a beautiful soul, but helplessly mired in ugliness, & thus more evidence that the elite is the winners—we the losers.
Further, in laying bare the opposition between oligarchy & democracy in America, Tucker couldn’t help but prove by example that the oligarchy is much stronger, since it runs the institutions, including the one that just fired him. Since principled Americans are so obedient to ruthless & contemptible billionaires, his major weapon was shame & popular outrage, but he wielded it boldly & unwisely. In order to be loved by decent Americans, he had to be somewhat gentle & perhaps he simply loves the gentle America on whose behalf he suffers too much to contemplate an alternative. He proved by becoming hated how bad the lackeys of our elites are, but they crippled him & he never even reached the point of attacking directly our elites. But why should oligarchy be strong when the institutions are so corrupt as to end up run by woke HR departments? The answer on everyone’s lips, on everyone’s minds is: Money. I do not believe this is true, but I have noticed what a popular answer it is. I believe people believe it because it makes us all equal, the only difference being this mystery, that some are rich & most are not. Tucker failed to break the magic power of money over the minds of his listeners, to say nothing of the decent people who kept him employed. In America, the rich are free, everyone else is humiliated by their comparative poverty, as much as by their very real fears of losing jobs or not succeeding enough to secure their family’s future. This is no basis for a restoration of the virtues that made America great.
Technology didn’t help him start a Second American Revolution either. Like most Americans, Tucker was a prisoner of the media. He dealt with this much more successfully than most, but the price seems to be accepting that America lives in front of the TV screen, if with the possibility of making the screen as small & mobile as the iPhone. Worse, this had led people to live TV lives—that’s what’s meant by YouTube. Obviously, this is madness led by children & adults who behave like children, which leads decent people to believe that only by denouncing & renouncing social media can any return from FantasyLand to reality begin. Just as obviously, this is not possible in politics & it means sacrificing any connection to successful people, who have no privacy, but are plugged into the internet at all times. Decent opinion thus makes it impossible to lead a revolution in digital technology to restore the very things decent people want—a combination of local community & national accountability by judging character. Yet digital technology is indispensable for both of these purposes. Tucker was more involved in the online right than any other public figure & much of the talent, so far as political rhetoric goes, developing to counter our oligarchy or its lackeys loves Tucker for the chance he gave them & for the promise that he could bring the “mainstream” & “the alternative currents” together, the normal people who pay the TV bills through advertising & the weird people who pay attention to our decadence. Tucker had a few years in which to learn this & to build what is needed to prepare; we’ll soon learn whether he is indeed prepared. For now, people see him fall alone & learn again the lesson that in America everyone is alone & the loneliness is amply catalogued by our technology.
So much for that: It is not unusual to desire to hear one’s eulogy before one dies, to have the beautiful thing without paying the price, & Tucker at least has had this opportunity if he should want it—as soon as word got out that he was fired, people began to express their undying gratitude online. Here is a vision of the future that would live up to the praise Tucker has received. Tucker’s strength as a broadcaster was the fact that he attracted young adults, primarily young men. This is what is called in the media “the key demo,” the people advertisers want to flatter or charm into buying what they’re peddling. Of course, young women are liberal, so there is more focus in Tucker’s audience. Liberal political success since the arrival of Mr. Bill Clinton, the great political talent in our times, had very much to do with identifying “the key demo,” the young, urban, college-educated, upper-middle class with liberal causes. Mr. Obama later only rehearsed that already-popular drama. Tucker is uniquely able to change that & to pull the young men to the opposite political project. He would need to bring together five types of young men, those involved in politics (political staff as well as think tank), in online media, academia, finance, & tech. This is much easier than it sounds, because there are dissidents in all these domains &, in most of them, young men are treated with contempt, while in the others, they can see what’s coming. Tucker has more than popularity & wealth going for him—he has the reputation of saying ugly truths for quite a number of years—to make him attractive to audiences as well as to talent. He could, if he wishes, transform American media from the model of liberal newspapers cultivating their prestige, which is really their obedience to the rich & the gov’t, & TV, which advertises the dumbest fantasies that can still be called moral with any plausibility because they seem popular. He would have to create another model of media which is no longer conservatives parasitizing liberal inventions which they do not clearly understand. That model would emphasize character over celebrity, the memorable over the fantastic—digital media can spread news, but also archive them so they’re not forgotten, & thus holding people accountable is finally possible for us. It would finally permit us to talk not about lackeys, but about the oligarchs of our regime. It would be a model that relates to action & locality, not entertainment. It is a sad commentary on our decadence that not even anger brings old men & young men together; but this can be fixed by a political community. It would also restore the press to its purpose, to help self-gov’t by bridging the gap between representatives & the people. It would be openly partisan & claim its legitimacy by serving the people well, i.e. from its victories.
But perhaps Tucker should go home & become a legend. He’s not young anymore & middle age is much harder on Americans than it used to be. He has a family & friends to worry about & in whose joys to rejoice. The great movement of our time is to abandon society & try to protect one’s own family: The successful do it even more than the desperate. To have achieved incredible fame & made a fortune out of speaking like an American, & then to survive it all—that might be honor enough. After decades in the media, Tucker achieved something better than the respectability he once desired. He is now the spokesman for the broken-hearted patriotism that so long described the working class of America & has now become the hallmark of the middle classes outside of oligarchic enclaves. A noble defeat, a decadence with occasional protestation, seems to be the dominant mood among decent people. Is there any bond between them & the young men of the coming generation?