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PaperclipPerfector  11mo ago (text post)   27235 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of December 11, 2023

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The most important thing to understand is that while Tucker is a charismatic individual and a good writer and presenter, he has no real ideology. A decade ago he was literally a standard neocon with occasional libertarian sympathies. His ‘conversion’ to some kind of nativism is driven by his audience and his support for Trump is phoney, as various Fox leaks have made clear. Ann Coulter is much more of a ‘true believer’ than Carlson ever was, which is saying a lot.

I don’t think so. He attacked Trump in the few situations where Trump was bellicose and that was interesting since most people on the right and left praises Trump for it. Tucker also has fervently said he was wrong about Iraq, something you don’t see a lot. I do think he was a neocon but had a road to Damascus moment so to speak.

A decade ago he was literally a standard neocon with occasional libertarian sympathies.

Not really - he turned against the Iraq war pretty quickly after he visited the country and saw what was actually going on:

Outside of the heavily fortified—and relatively safe—U.S.-controlled "Green Zone" that surrounds Saddam's former main palaces in Baghdad, you can spend days without hearing English or seeing an American flag. Almost nowhere is there the faintest whiff of American cultural influence. People light up in elevators and carry Kalashnikovs to the dinner table. Gunfire and explosions are background noise. It is a place with almost no Western-style rules. It's not a bit like Denver.

You'd think it would be. According to the Pentagon, there are more than a 100,000 U.S. troops stationed in Iraq. The country seems to have swallowed them. We drove from the Kuwaiti border to downtown Baghdad and back again and didn't see one on the way—more than 700 miles on major roads without catching a glimpse of a single American in uniform.

If the goal is to control the country, there are not enough American forces in Iraq. If the goal is to rebuild it, there could never be enough. The U.S. military simply doesn't have the manpower. As it is, the Pentagon could not fight even a small war without the considerable help of civilian contractors. In Bosnia during the peacekeeping mission, there was at times one contractor for every soldier. That was nearly a decade ago. The military has grown smaller since and even more dependent on contractors. On the battlefield, contractors cook soldiers' food, deliver their mail, provide their housing, and take care of their equipment. (DynCorp maintains virtually all U.S. military aircraft in the Middle East.) In Iraq, they are sometimes nearly indistinguishable from soldiers.

It wasn't until I was flat on my back that the strangest part of the night sunk in: No one outside our immediate compound had seemed to notice the firefight. The gunfire had gone on for 15 minutes. The noise had been tremendous and unmistakable. Yet nobody—not U.S. soldiers, not cops from the Iraqi police station 150 yards away, not representatives of the famously benevolent "international community," whoever they might be—had come by to ask what happened, who did it, or if anyone was hurt. There were no authorities to call. No one cared. We were totally alone.

Not as alone as the rest of the people in the neighborhood, however. We were on a residential street. Iraqi families lived on both sides of us. What did they think? Hundreds of rounds had been fired—hundreds of needle-tipped, copper-jacketed missiles whipping through the neighborhood at half a mile a second. What happened to them all? Where did the bullets go? Into parked cars and generators and water tanks. Into people's living rooms and kitchens and bedrooms, and sometimes into human flesh.

It must have been terrifying to live nearby, or to live anywhere in Baghdad. You couldn't blame the coalition forces exactly. They weren't doing most of the shooting. But they didn't seem to be doing much about it, either. On the street where I was staying, they weren't doing anything. And how could they? All the foreign troops in Iraq hadn't been able to keep the country's main airport safe enough to use. A single block in Baghdad wasn't going to get their attention. By necessity, it was left to civilian contractors, or whoever else had the time, energy, and firearms to police their own tiny sections of Iraq.

He was a quite good magazine journalist for a while. Of course his piece about getting invited to go on a peacemaking trip to Liberia with Al Sharpton, Cornel West, and a bunch of other African-American clergy, is the best.

Tucker is definitely a nativist true believer, he got kicked out of a comfy job at Fox because he went beyond the reservation. I'm sure people explained to him what was and wasn't tolerable beforehand informally, yet he still went beyond the tolerance of his bosses.

Just because Tucker hates Trump doesn't mean that he'd go out of his way to antagonize Trump's supporters. It's called being tactful and diplomatic. Trump did very little for their agenda, he didn't drain the swamp, he didn't extract the US from overseas wars, he didn't fight back against DEI, he was 'monitoring the situation' and passing tax cuts. But Tucker remained silent on this and used/uses Trump to advance his own position rather than creating divisions. This is the sort of quality that real political adepts have and what people like Hanania lack.

Same could be said of pretty much all people. People's views shift over time. Many of us on this board, for example, used to be bog standard liberals.

It's true that politicians and leaders will naturally be influenced by the people who follow them. Of course they are. It doesn't mean they have nothing of value to contribute or are mere grifters.

What irks about Tucker isn’t the ideological transition. It’s that the leaked Fox stuff (which he doesn’t deny) makes clear that he despises Trump and considers him both an idiot and bad for conservatism. From the OP’s link:

We are very, very close to being able to ignore Trump most nights," he wrote in a text sent on 4 January 2021. "I truly can't wait." "I hate him passionately," he added. Mr Carlson, the top-rated host on the conservative network, also appeared to denigrate the Trump presidency in these private messages, despite lauding his achievements on air. "That's the last four years. We're all pretending we've got a lot to show for it, because admitting what a disaster it's been is too tough to digest. But come on. There isn't really an upside to Trump."

Carlson isn’t even saying that Trump is a sad reality that the right has to accept. He’s saying there’s literally no upside to his presidency at all.

This isn’t a ‘liberal’ view, plenty of rightists agree with Carlson. But he’s too cowardly to come out and say it and to be honest with his audience. And that is indeed dishonorable.

It has nothing to do with cowardice. Pragmatism is a real thing. We all sacrifice a little of our true beliefs every day. Let’s say he really does hate Trump and shifted some beliefs for his audience.

  1. He tries to be a hero. Every word out of his mouth is the absolute truth. He loses his audience and influence. He hurts conservative causes. Biden wins the next election.

  2. He tilts his message more pro-Trump. His audience loves it. He pumps up more people to vote. Trump wins the next election. He personally makes millions of dollars.

2 is obviously the better play for his personal beliefs. If you want to be intellectually honest then go enter a seminary. If you want to get things done in the real world your going to have allies you don’t love especially in coalition politics.

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