Following Fox News star Tucker Carlson’s firing last month, most on the left were celebrating. Not the high-profile progressive politics and policy journal The American Prospect though. An article there mystifyingly praised Carlson as someone who “punctured the lazy pieties of the media class.” That’s a funny way to describe someone whose vicious racism and misogyny are well-documented.
So why would a left-wing publication apologize for a lying right-wing bigot who uses his platform to terrorize critics on the left? The answer is anti-establishment branding. Carlson presents himself as a foe of “elites” and of those in power. But he’s not the only one benefitting from this misplaced iconoclast romanticism.
Some people on the left (and not just on the left) love anti-establishment branding.
Some people on the left (and not just on the left) love anti-establishment branding whether it’s deployed by Carlson, or by self-help author and current presidential candidate Marianne Williamson, or by her fellow Democratic candidate Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., a conspiracy theorist and anti-vaxxer. (We could even include billionaire blusterer Elon Musk on that list.)
Railing against the squares or against the ruling class sounds cool and edgy. And people who are committed to change, or at least very frustrated with the status quo, like many on the left, can mistake cool and edgy for actual liberatory politics.
The dynamic is quite clear in the article on Carlson in the Prospect. “Carlson’s insistent distrust of his powerful guests acts as a solvent to authority, frequently making larger-than-life figures of the political establishment defend arguments they otherwise treat as self-evident,” authors Lee Harris and Luke Goldstein gushed.
The thing is though that when Carlson attacks “elites,” he’s not talking about those in power. For instance, one of Carlson’s favorite targets is billionaire Democratic donor George Soros. Conspiracy theories about Soros…
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