How do white men fight?
Dominic Green
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How do white men fight? This question had never occurred to me until Tucker Carlson raised it. Or rather, until the New York Times told me he had raised it in 2021. Or rather, until someone who wished to discredit Carlson leaked a private text message to the New York Times. Which is why we all must now parse Carlson’s text and ponder his motivations rather than parse the deficit and ponder a second Biden term.
On Jan. 7, 2021, Carlson was musing on the previous day’s riot at the Capitol. “A couple of weeks ago,” he wrote, “I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington.” Christmas Day falls exactly two weeks before Jan. 7. Some people like to spend Christmas Day with their families. Others prefer clips of mob violence.
THE END OF TUCKER CARLSON ACCELERATES THE DEATH OF CABLE NEWS
“A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living s*** out of him,” Carlson wrote. “It was three against one, at least.” This seemed “dishonorable obviously.” He added: “It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him.” Then, he wrote, “Somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off. The Antifa creep is a human being. … If I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?”
If you must fight, then a fair fight is honorable. Ganging up on someone is dishonorable. These are generalizations. The notion that dishonorable conduct and mob violence are not “how white men fight” is, however, inescapably a particularist judgment about race and honor. Carlson did not call mob attacks inhumane: equally repugnant to all, regardless of color or culture. Carlson did not say that ganging up on someone is not how Americans fight. He said it’s “not how white men fight.”
This suggests that Carlson believes white men fight more honorably than men of other races. The Japanese might disagree, not least as the recipients of two atom bombs from a segregated U.S. military. So might anyone who follows boxing, a sport in which African American fighters have excelled. Does Carlson believe that when white men fight dishonorably, they lower their dignity more than, say, black men do?
The charitable interpretations are that the New York Times excerpted Carlson’s email from a longer exchange or that he was talking only in cultural terms and referring to the aristocratic tradition of dueling. Perhaps he has been listening to the Hamilton soundtrack as he glides around Boca Grande in his golf cart. And who among us has not paused while watching fight videos and wondered what happened to the noble European tradition of the duel?
Hardly anyone, I suspect. The last American duel of any note was fought in 1859 between Sen. David C. Broderick of California and, also in the blue corner, ex-Chief Justice of the California Supreme Court David S. Terry. The cause of their blue-on-blue action was, inevitably, race, which, in those days, meant slavery. Broderick was an abolitionist, and Terry was pro-slavery. Terry shot Broderick. That was the bad old America. Americans of all races are now free to shoot each other without the traditional preambles.
The Right is showing all kinds of nostalgic longings these days. These include the longing for a fair fight in media that tend to gang up with the Democrats and beat down on Republicans and conservatives. In the streets or at the ballot boxes, losing can breed sourness. Carlson’s leaked texts also show how, as the tribune of the populist Right, he made sure to stay onside with the viewers even when he knew they were wrong. His text reads like notes for one of his monologues: a shocking clip, a provocative response that appeals to popular resentment, and then directing the mob against The Man.
It’s true that the Democrats are the first party to campaign on race since the ’60s. It’s true that they are cynically using the ghost of “white supremacy” to justify a racialized restructuring of the class system. It’s true that their figurehead is President Joe Biden, who ad-libbed in 2007 that Barack Obama was the “first mainstream African American who is articulate and clean and a nice-looking guy”; and who, in 2010, eulogized that old-time racist Sen. Robert Byrd. It’s true that Carlson didn’t say what he said on the Senate floor or in public or in church but privately in his capacity as an entertainer. And it’s true that much of the new racism on the Right is literally reactionary: reacting against the Left’s push to reracialize American society.
All of which changes very little. As Carlson said, if you reduce people to their politics, you are no better than the thugs and clowns of antifa. If you reduce people to their race, you are no better than a racist. That goes for the “anti-racism” of the Left as for the racist nudges and nostalgia of the Right.