Tucker Carlson Getting it Right

Writing at The American Conservative, Alan Pell Crawford calls Tucker Carlson a “Grand Inquisitor with a boisterous sense of humor.” And, adds Pell Crawford, despite his mostly mainstream conservative thinking, Carlson challenges traditional thought wherever he sees problems with dogma. He writes:

He remains well within the ideological tent on many red meat controversies of the day, however, particularly on immigration, which he considers a factor in the troubling condition of many rural communities. It isn’t the only factor, certainly, but it particularly animates Carlson these days. When Trump outraged polite society with his crude characterization of Haiti and African countries, Carlson countered that “almost every single person in America” in fact agrees with the president. “An awful lot of immigrants come to this country from other places that aren’t very nice,” he said. “Those places are dangerous. They’re dirty, they’re corrupt, and they’re poor, and that’s the main reason those immigrants are trying to come here, and you would too if you lived there.”

As for the idea that “diversity is our strength,” Carlson lit into Sen. Lindsey Graham for saying that America is “an idea, not defined by its people.” This claim, Carlson said, might surprise the people who already live here, “with their actual families and towns and traditions and history and customs.” It might also come as a surprise that “they’re irrelevant to the success or failure of what they imagined was their country.” If diversity is our strength, it must follow that “the less we have in common somehow the stronger we are. Is that true? We better hope it’s true because we’re betting everything on it.”

In his attitudes toward “diversity,” Carlson considers Graham not much different from his Northwest Washington neighbors. “My neighbors,” he says, “don’t understand why it is not a good idea to keep ‘welcoming’ untold thousands of low-income, poorly educated immigrants whose wage expectations are lower than those of Americans who are already here and are struggling to keep their jobs.” Who is hurt most, he asks, by this competition for jobs? His answer: “Americans who are themselves poorly educated—especially, I might add, African-Americans.” Organized labor, a pillar of the Democratic Party for decades, always seemed to understand this. Bill Clinton—“the last Democrat to recognize this problem and speak to the middle class”—also understood it. “So why can’t my neighbors?”