It might sound odd to claim that a TV host losing his program is seismic news for American politics, but with Tucker Carlson’s exit from Fox News, that claim is justified.
Like the rest of his Fox colleagues, Carlson’s main job was winning eyeballs to the network — and he was very successful at that.
But he was also engaged in a different and more ambitious project from, say, Sean Hannity. Rather than just cheerleading for Trump or the Republican Party or the Fox News company line, Carlson was articulating an ideology.
Some call it conservative populism, or national conservatism, while critics say it’s akin to white nationalism. It’s an ideology that panders to many Americans’ bigoted and xenophobic impulses, their resentments and their grievances. It welcomes in voices denounced by others as racist, and delights in mocking “woke” liberals. It promotes conspiracy theories. It admires foreign leaders denounced by others as authoritarians. It denounces “elites,” the traditional establishments of both parties, and the long-held commitments of US foreign policy.
Much of that, of course, resembles Donald Trump’s challenge to the GOP establishment, and that’s no accident. Early in Trump’s presidency, the New York Times’s Nick Confessore has written, Carlson searched for a way to stand out among the Trump critics or cheerleaders of cable news. He zeroed in on the reasons Trump won such loyalty — the passions and topics that stirred his base — and then tried to detach all that from the man himself, to create a “Trumpism without Trump.”
Carlson was trying to depose the Republican Party’s old elites — at least those who wouldn’t get with the program — and anoint new ones. He wanted to create new litmus tests for what it meant to be a conservative — as seen in his efforts to make Ron DeSantis disavow support for Ukraine, or his raking Ted Cruz over the coals for calling January 6 a “violent terrorist attack.”…
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