The end of Tucker Carlson accelerates the death of cable news
Dominic Green
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The age of cable television is dead. The bang was Tucker Carlson’s firing by Fox News. Stand by for the whimpering — and not just from Don Lemon. Carlson was more than the biggest draw on cable. He was cable’s Walter Cronkite, the last and only anchor capable of influencing national politics and presidential decision-making.
In 2005, Carlson was the token bow-tied Bushie on CNN’s Crossfire, a libertarian conservative who supported the Iraq War. By 2017, Tucker Carlson Tonight was on Fox, and Carlson was hosting the Right’s dissidents and insurgents: the skeptics of empire and enemies of Wall Street, the pacifists, the protectionists, and the plain crazy. This is the story of the unraveling of American conservatism, writ large and lurid.
TUCKER CARLSON LEAVING FOX NEWS: NETWORK ANNOUNCES PARTING OF WAYS WITH HOST
Along the way, Carlson went from following the action to creating it. Tucker’s issues (border security, immigration, outsourcing, foreign wars, the swamp) were Trump’s issues. Trump had 63 million votes in 2016, and Tucker had 3 million viewers a night, but “politics is downstream from culture.” Like Trump, Carlson reshaped the Republican agenda by attacking the party. Senators and members of Congress quaked when his bookers called.
In early 2020, Carlson’s nocturnal perorations were said to have dissuaded Trump from going to war with Iran. A few weeks later, he rushed to Mar-a-Lago and convinced Trump to take COVID-19 seriously. This was more than what Walter Cronkite managed when he declared in 1968 that the Vietnam War was “mired in stalemate.” Despite the mythology of the “Cronkite Moment,” President Lyndon B. Johnson never saw Cronkite’s broadcast. At most, Cronkite confirmed what Johnson already knew from the polls.
After 2017, Carlson filled the vacuum left by William F. Buckley, Jr. He was the crux that held together the conservative coalition on the horizontal axis and the Republican base and party on the vertical axis. It is not surprising that when the Trump-Tucker synergy collapsed after the Jan. 6 riot, the Right fell into civil war. The surprise is that Carlson managed to hold together a broken coalition and a warring base and party by reviving a dying medium.
Carlson made an expensive mistake in backing Trump’s claims of a stolen election. The emails that came out in Dominion Voting Systems’s libel case show how Carlson believed that Trump’s lawyer Sidney Powell was “lying,” thought that claims of voter fraud were “really crazy,” and feared that Rudy Giuliani’s circus was “terrible stuff damaging everybody.” Yet Carlson also recognized that “our viewers are good people and they believe it.” His pandering to the “good people” cost Fox a $787.5 million settlement. It seems to have cost Carlson his job, too.
A tribune of the people can speak truth to any power except the power of the mob. In ancient Rome, the Gracchi brothers, the sons of an old republican family, were the first of the “populares,” the populists. Their antagonism of Rome’s senatorial oligarchy hastened the fall of the republic into civil war. Carlson, “the last of the WASPs,” accelerated the breakup of the conservative movement and the Republican Party’s fall from patrician managerialism into populism and paranoia.
Why did he do it? Cicero suggests Tiberius Gracchus supported the citizens because he desired to recover his dignitas. Tiberius had negotiated a humiliating treaty after a military defeat in Spain. Carlson renegotiated terms with the Republicans after the humiliation of the Iraq War.
Like Carlson, the Gracchi were a class act. Tiberius Gracchus complained about electoral fraud and seized the Capitoline Hill on election day. Gaius Gracchus rallied Rome’s red-state masses, the rural plebs. The effect of their agitations was, however, to transfer power from an established elite, the old families and the senators, to a rising elite, the “equites” or knights — in this case, the techno-futurists such as Elon Musk and Peter Thiel.
We speak of “politics,” but there are really two kinds of politics: the management of state and society and the election of the managers. As the two processes decouple, the center ground of the Western democracies is fracturing. When he wasn’t clowning for clicks, Carlson showed how elected managers now served the donors and the unelected bureaucrats, not the voters.
Cable news had its Lazarus nights with the Trump and Tucker Show, and now it can resume dying. Carlson will rise again, probably as a solo act in digital media. But the message changes when the medium changes. The partisan cable format was shouty but consensual. Both sides had their channels, and each got to shout on the other’s. Fox and CNN were heirs to the old terrestrial stations. Their debates were debased parodies of the format born in the JFK-Nixon debates of 1960. As in the Roman arena, everyone agreed on the rules of engagement.
The end of cable means the closing of the arena. The Trump-Tucker moment was the last time everybody was offended or delighted by the same show. The center ground will now be consumed by the digital inferno. Tucker the arsonist was the last firewall.