4/12/21
Some in the Republican Party hope that it can eventually maintain the Trump coalition without the toxic excesses of Donald Trump’s disordered personality. Already, a variety of talented and calculating figures — Sens. Josh Hawley (Mo.) and Tom Cotton (Ark.) come to mind — are trying to model populism minus the psychopathy. They are clearly imagining a day when a working-class and fundamentalist cultural revolt can be channeled into constructive public purposes. As one Republican congressional staffer has said: “Trump has changed the party forever, but that doesn’t mean he will control the party forever.” It is a rational instinct. It also strikes me as a nearly impossible task. And Tucker Carlson illustrates why. Every mention of the Fox News host, of course, plays into his career advancement strategy. He is the prime example of a professional troll. The Anti-Defamation League has demanded Carlson’s firing for his unapologetic embrace of “replacement theory.” Here is how Carlson defined this idea in the process of defending it last week: “The Democratic Party is trying to replace the current electorate of the voters now casting ballots with new people, more obedient voters from the Third World.” There is a reason, of course, that “everyone” wants to make a racial issue out of this. Because it is a putrescent pile of racist myths and cliches.
This is what modern, poll-tested, shrink-wrapped, mass-marketed racism looks like. Carlson is providing his audience with sophisticated rationales for their worst, most prejudicial instincts. And the brilliance of Carlson’s business model is to reinterpret moral criticism of his bigotry as an attack by elites on his viewers. Public outrage is thus recycled into fuel for MAGA victimhood. And so the Fox News machine runs on and on. In Carlson’s version of the MAGA worldview, politics is played for the highest of stakes. “Western civilization” is under attack from liberalism. Each day, Carlson gives a pure, accurate depiction of Trumpism. This viewpoint is not focused on the working-class economic dislocation caused by globalization, or even the moral panic resulting from rapidly changing cultural norms. It is an argument in favor of cultural purity, of social hygiene. Trumpism is an argument that Western society, and American society in particular, is being infected by dirty outsiders who are destroying the country’s very nature. Such a belief is difficult to reform around the edges. It can only be embraced or rejected. In the end, there can be no form of Trumpism with its hating heart removed.
