Why is Tucker's brand of racist demagoguery is dangerous? It paints a false reality for those easily led into believing it.
I will not say that Tucker’s brand of demagoguery is not dangerous and I will consider that it is. That is, I must at least be open to considering the possibility that a trend, in this case a trend distributed by a major media company, is dangerous.
But what I want to suggest is that we need to take our eyes off Carlson — just for a minute — and focus our attention on a huge and visible social phenomenon now sweeping through the nation: Woke Social Justicism. Activist postmodernism. Activist critical theory. Postcolonial theory. And of course the various gender-based derivatives of ‘social justice activism’.
All these, acccording to my researches, are branches of Postmodern theory when postmodernism melded with a social justice activism; was reduced to a cluster of *actionable concerns* and spread through social media channels as a sort of ‘hysterical infection’.
Now let me use a phrase that Calamity has used and see how it functions with
a different juxtaposition: “These paint a false reality for those easily led into believing them”.
Someone on this thread brought up ‘Classical Liberalism’. The most wonderful teacher on this topic is Isaiah Berlin and a search on YouTube will bring up his wonderful presentations. But with that said allow me to suggest, just to open the conversation to the possibility, that radical and activist postmodern critical theory is by its very nature, and according to its own declarations,
extremely anti-liberal! (in this classic sense).
It is
radicalism and it openly declares that it must undermine and topple *oppressive structures* and *oppressive relationships*. It does not preach ‘toleration’. It leads people to take vigilante actions such as rioting, pulling down monuments, attacking those it identifies as *enemies*, protesting at talks on universities and disrupting them, and the list goes on. Average people have sat by while watching this hysterical movement wash over the nation. Yes or no?
Anyone can easily see the point I make. This is
radical anti-liberalism plain and simple. Though those who engage this way say they are doing it *for a higher purpose*. But wait a second! Carlson constantly says that he is defending not a radical conservatism, or some sort of activist right-wing fascism, but the political center — that is to say something closer to ‘classical liberalism’. This seems to me to be
a fact.
There is something really quite wrong, quite
ethically wrong, and questionable about these radical forms of activism. They seek out problems, they exacerbate existing problems that should be dealt with through ‘liberal toleration’. They build on differences. They accentuate differences. They are very very hard-headed in their approach. They show tyrannical, dominating characteristics. I think I could go on here and I would not be engaging in unfair rhetoric.
If what I suggest here is true — and to understand my position you’d have to read some of what I have been reading lately: deep criticisms of postmodern/critical theory-based activism — then Tucker Carlson is acting as a classical reactionary: reacting to (if you will allow this turn of phrase) the insanity and also the undermining destructiveness of activist Critical Theory.
And again if this is true, when the Fringe Left — a radically-inclined and activist Left — began marching through culture, as indeed it has and is, it naturally provokes reaction, and that reaction, naturally, will not be ‘liberal’ as classically defined. But reaction rarely is. It is
compensatory.