What Does Tucker Carlson Actually Want For America?

Tucker Carlson hates the West as currently constituted. He believes that at some point in the past, the West fundamentally betrayed itself. He’s intent on ripping it down.

He’s not the only one. He joins hands with the Left in their hatred for the West. The Left believes that the United States fundamentally went wrong, that there’s something deeply ill at the root of American society. 

Abdul El-Sayed, the Democratic senatorial candidate in Michigan, said, “If you’re black in America, you’ve never actually had access to a real capitalism. You had your labor extracted from you via the most fundamentally unethical, immoral act of placing somebody in slavery. And then we’ve excluded black folk in different ways. We still exclude black folk in different ways from full participation in capitalism via access to capital, via access to good schools, via access to healthcare, via access to all these things.”

New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani appeared with horseshoe Right commentator Theo Von — whose mullet has grown deep into his brain stem. Mamdani explained that when he felt isolated, his solution was to join the Democratic Socialists of America. He said, “And first you would realize that you’re not alone. You’re not nuts. You are actually part of something much bigger than yourself. … And it feels like when people go through life, the further they get away from school, the more isolated they start to become from the world around them. … It didn’t just help me with my anxiety; it also just helped me with my sense of my place in the world, where it was like, okay, I feel this way.”

All these people want America to disintegrate. Why are they so intent on destroying the country? 

To understand the answer to that question, we have to understand another question that Tucker Carlson and people like him keep asking publicly: Where did everything go wrong for America?

The answer to that question for most Americans is simple.

It didn’t. It didn’t all go wrong. America is a pretty fantastic place. It’s the envy of the world. It’s a place of opportunity and unparalleled prosperity. It’s a country that currently presides over the entire global order.

A normal person would say, “Some things have gone wrong, and many things have actually gone right.”

The art of politics — for people who don’t want to destroy the system — consists of keeping what is good and taking away what is bad. We used to call that conservatism. G.K. Chesterton, the conservative theologian, once said, “The truth is that nobody has any business to destroy a social institution until he has really seen it as a historical institution. If he knows how it arose, and what purposes it was supposed to serve, he may really be able to say that they were bad purposes and that they have since become bad purposes, or that they are purposes which are no longer served. But if he simply stares at the thing as a senseless monstrosity that has somehow sprung up in his path, it is he and not the traditionalist who is suffering from an illusion.”

But the revolutionaries at the moment, the Tucker Carlsons, the Abdul El-Sayeds, the Zohran Mamdanis, think that our fathers and grandfathers were idiots who sold their birthright. They say their birthright must be restored by ripping down all the systems. That’s the story told by all the revolutionary movements in America. 

Here’s their basic idea. Something bad happened in the past. Why don’t most Americans believe that there was this terrible moment? Because they were lied to. They were infused with a false consciousness that has hypnotized them into accepting a decayed present and a dead future. 

Thus, the goal of these revolutionaries on all sides is to disabuse Americans of the supposed false consciousness, to awaken them to the reality of this terrible moment by exploding the supposedly false story of our past.

These radical movements want to strip away this supposed veil of illusion, to unmask the satanic conspirators who purposefully and maliciously led us awry and continue to do so today. 

So who are these satanic conspirators who keep saying that things are going fine? Or, more importantly, saying that even if they’re not going fine right now, the institutions are not fundamentally broken, that we just screwed around with them? Who are the bad guys, according to these people? 

The people who are doing well right now. If you’re doing well, you’re an exploiter. If you are doing poorly, you are a victim. 

“The people who have benefited from the selling of our birthright, those are the ones who are in control,” these people argue. “They’ve manipulated us. They must be destroyed.” 

This is the common thread to all the revolutionary movements happening right now in the West: America and the West were betrayed. The people who benefited from that betrayal lied to you about everything. So they and the systems they created must be destroyed. 

The Marxist Left today has turned antisemitic. They argue that the Jews in both America and Israel are the beneficiaries of a racist system, that they are the propagators of all the institutions that continue to foment racism. It should not be a surprise to anybody that Black Lives Matter as a group was on the same side as Hamas on October 7.

I’m using the Marxists as an example, but they are not the only example. A group from the Right, the so-called Catholic integralists, believes there was a historical juncture at which everything went haywire. They argue that the West went wrong with the end of the Holy Roman Empire, that the world was gradually falling under the sway of the universal church and everything was great. 

And then the Protestant Reformation broke everything. 

According to Catholic integralist Adrian Vermeule, who’s a professor at Harvard, what is at stake is far more elevated than power. It is no less than authority. He is basically saying Catholicism ought to win and liberalism ought to lose. 

In this view, Enlightenment progress has to be denigrated. Free markets, the single most obvious material feature of the Enlightenment-era viewpoint of the Anglo-American Protestant world, have to be downplayed or demonized as ineffective and dehumanizing.

Patrick Deneen, another Catholic integralist, laments free markets as inherently unfree and ugly.

It’s not a surprise to find this kind of language emanating predominantly from the advocates for Catholic integralism, because if we recognize that free markets and individual liberty are awesome, that the extraordinary freedom and prosperity of the West are downstream from the Protestant Reformation, we’re going to have to admit that, historically speaking, Catholic universalism wasn’t working all that well.

Instead, it’s important to pretend that free markets, even though they enrich us, are basically robbing us of our spirit and our souls and our true freedom by creating new ones.    

So what is Tucker’s end goal? Is it the same as Nikole Hannah-Jones’ or Adrian Vermeule’s or any other revolutionary who’s seeking to overturn the system?

It’s to demoralize.

They tell Americans that they are all poor and suffering victims of the supposed billionaires and millionaires. The Catholic integralists will tell us we live in a godless, unrooted society, isolated and atomistic, and the reason for that is capitalism. Thus the only cure is to get rid of the liberal principles of the Declaration and the Constitution and return to a sort of new Holy Roman Empire.

Demoralization can work.

And that is why we must fight it.