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Conservative Populism: Tucker Carlson vs. David French
Tucker Carlson has recently done an exposition on populism that has gone viral. It is biting and rangy, covering a bunch of topics related to populism but from a conservative perspective. This has drawn fire from some on the Right that view populism as an evil thing that good folks on the Right should avoid. David French has a response in National Review where he blasts Carlson and populism in general.
What is populism and does it fit with conservative values? I think it does when taken in good measure. I think Carlson and French are both too extreme.
In Tucker’s monologue, he does make a few assertions that are not evident (e.g., women won’t marry men that make less money than themselves), but, in general, he addresses a lot of valid points where some groups of Americans have struggled over the last generation. He correctly notes the global rise in populism from Trump in the US, to Brexit, to Poland, to Brazil. He also notes that elitist thought-leaders promote some conservative values (free markets) over other conservative values (rule-of-law, strong families). He complains about Libertarian laissez-faire attitudes. However, the best example of Tucker’s mindset is from an interview he did with Ben Shapiro where he said he would outlaw robots to save jobs. This is the exact thinking of the Luddites who famously smashed looms to prevent productivity improvements that would them some jobs.
On the other extreme is David French. He is so set on destroying the idea of populism, that after complementing Carlson, he concocts a series of fallacious arguments to blast Carlson and populism. Here is one example from French:
(By the way, it’s strange to hear populists of either party talk — as Tucker does — of elites thinking of market capitalism as a “religion.” Both parties in this nation have embraced a truly massive social safety net. Social Security, Medicaid, and Medicare dwarf other categories of federal spending. Total federal outlays — not counting state and local expenditures — represent roughly 20 percent of gross domestic product.)
This is a false dichotomy whereby it is impossible to have both a social safety net and a misdirected industrial policy that causes undue harm to certain groups of Americans. It also falsely equates the value of a meaningful job with a handout, which no true conservative should do. When people argue against their own proclaimed principles it means that they have higher priorities, like maintaining the elitist purity of their circle and cleansing it of the working-class taint of populism. French’s attitude is one of “let them eat cake.”
Populism is simply government policy/culture that is beneficial to the common citizen. As Lincoln said, “a government of the people, by the people, and for the people.” Conservatism is the preference for principles and systems that are time-tested to promote prosperous ordered liberty. What does conservative populism look like?
- Societal leaders publicly promoting the formula for prosperity: learn a trade, marry a life-mate, then have kids. As Adam Carolla wisely said, “[Successful people] should preach what the practice.” Instead, we have Hollywood and politicians saying “let your freak flag fly” and “don’t judge.” But the time-tested principle is to judge and promote education and family formation.
- Politicians should fight violations of law relating to international markets that affect American workers. Free trade has benefits in a Ricardo-way, but it also has costs. If another nation is breaking the law (moral code) of abusing workers/environment or massive theft of intellectual property, then the trade must be stopped. If free trade causes undue destruction of human capital by product dumping, then trade should be curtailed. Rule-of-law and preservation of capital are conservative principles.
- Politicians should avoid war for profiteering, which benefits the Beltway crowd at the expense of life and treasure of the common citizen. The Bush 43/Obama 44 wars have cost trillions in debt and thousands of lives and have provided no improvement to urban Detroit or rural Kentucky. Even accepting the special role of US hegemony, the time-tested principle is to minimize involvement in wars. Madison warned of the dangers of a standing army.
There are many other issues where conservative populism can be applied (immigration, global warming, healthcare, criminal justice,…). The point is that conservative principles are not only compatible with populism, but they demand a certain measure of it. The difference between medicine and poison is the dosage.
Published in Economics
When I used the word “they” I wasn’t referring to all rich people, only the ones who did the things I described. I think that is clear to anyone who reads the comment. Some conservatives feel free to criticize some of the poor with impunity, but they are hypersensitive about any criticism of any wealthy person. I am very aware that there are wonderful rich people out there: there are also despicable rich people out there, who are hurting the country. That isn’t Marxism, that is just the truth.
I don’t care whether you are rich or poor: if your main loyalty is not to America, and if you want to be a citizen of the world, then you should not be living in America. Go be a citizen of the world form Uganda. I seriously doubt that would be better received in other places than they are here, but who knows?
It isn’t that money trumps all, but that the individual trumps the collective. The “common good” vision you have for the state is Rousseauian and the basis of virtually every tyranny of the past 200 years. I will stick with Locke. The govt exists to protect individual rights not subordinate them to anyone’s notion of the common good.
@dong
I’m really curious about Tucker’s wanting to ban or limit robots…haven’t been able to find the passage. I’d be grateful if you’d point me at it.
Who are these conservatives who determine whether criticism is justified on the basis of wealth? I have heard conservatives regularly criticize fabulously wealthy people (Tom Steyer, Michael Bloomberg, George Soros, even Donald Trump) when that criticism is justified. What should be avoided is the generalizations you engage in.
Dividing the country into us vs them is destructive.
None of us want communism.
But most of us recognize that man is not an island.
We can simultaneously be responsible for our own actions (rather than be punished collectively) and recognize how our actions influence the complex web of human relations around us.
I don’t want government involved on this. I do want some people to be ashamed of their arguments that assume the individual so sacrosanct that it imagines away all the ties he has to his fellow human beings.
– 1 Timothy 5:8
As a nationalist, I see that as an extension of this verse.
All of the cars BMW is assembling in the United States stays in the United States or Canada. They are not re-importing them back to Germany. The same for Honda, which builds its popular CR-V line in Ontario for North America but builds the European version in Japan. Manufacturing closer to your point of sale is one thing, building the totality of your product with cheap labor supplied by a Communist country is another.
Can anyone imagine Reagan (or any other politician, for that matter) going to Moscow and striking a deal to move our manufacturing base to the Soviet Union in exchange for cheap labor? Yet, we’ve done exactly that with China.
Futhermore, the Council on Foreign Relations latest estimate is that the Communist Party holds $1.5 Trillion in US Treasury assets. Their long term strategy is for the Yuan to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency. But in the short term consider this: China holds 12% of US public debt. We pay out more than $616M per day in interest payments. (CBO estimate for FY2011) That means we pay the Communist Party in China $74.4M per day. The budget for the People’s Liberation Army is $146B (the admitted 2016 number.) That means that you and I are picking up the tab for just shy of 19% of the PLA’s yearly budget.
Can you imagine us paying 20% of the Soviet Union’s military budget? Plus providing them with massive amounts of our technological IP? We were bright enough not to do it with the Soviets but choose to do it with the Communists in China. Why?
In the words of the Elizabethan writer John Harrington:
Lenin supposedly predicted the Capitalists would sell the rope to hang themselves. While there’s no evidence he said or wrote such a thing, whoever did come up with it seems to have been pretty much on the mark. It just happens to be a Chinese rope instead of a Russian one.
This whole conversation is about government involvement, Carlson is advocating government action to solve peoples problems and French is arguing it is not the government’s role.
The government and the Fed are interfering with people’s ability to be prosperous and take care of themselves. It was less noticeable before robots and globalized trade and probably because we rode a better demographic bubble.
Again, it’s not the government’s job to create the problems in the first place. But they did.
You are simply wrong about this. US made X series are exported around the world.
Perhaps we should limit our spending to lower our debt but we chose the one Republican candidate that proudly boasted entitlements were off limits.
David Stockman has a good plan. I forget all of the details. You can see it in his latest book or I think he elaborates at Tom Woods and Contra Krugman around September 2016. It involves wiping out the FICA tax.
They should be off limits until we start dealing with corporate welfare. But that should is like saying night should follow day. Entitlements are off limits until we start dealing with corporate welfare, no matter what anyone says.
Not back into Germany. Why bring a US built BMW into Germany and pay a 10% tariff? BMW sells its X-1 series in Germany and they are built there. X-3 and above are built in South Carolina and exported around the world.
Europeans don’t have the same taste in SUVs that we do because their governments drive the cost of gasoline sky high.
So this statement, “All of the cars BMW is assembling in the United States stays in the United States or Canada” is incorrect.
Define corporate welfare.
Corporate welfare like ethanol subsidies? Eminent domain? The Jones Act? Steel tariffs? Bailouts for farmers?
Those few examples of corporate welfare/subsidies have been championed by the President, and as evil as they are, they are a pittance compared to old aged welfare/entitlements when looking at the federal deficit.
Nope. Not going to do that here. I want you to feel defensive about it. And unsure.
Nope. Not going to do that here. I want you to feel defensive about it.
Yup, a pittance. If you want to do anything about entitlements, go after that pittance. If not, then not.
Or as they used to say about personal finance, “Mind the pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves.”
It is a strange new world we are living in when those who question whether it is wise to enrich tyrannical governments are accused of harboring ideas which are the basis of tyranny. It is a strange new world we are living in when some consider executives who are licking the boots of communist dictators to be champions of freedom.
If 99% of Americans believe that an idea will promote the common good, government does exist partly to ensure that their idea can be enacted. That doesn’t mean it is a good idea: the majority can be wrong, but individuals can be wrong too. America is far more protective of individual rights than any other country is, but that doesn’t mean, and should not mean that the individual always prevails.
Conservatives like Charles Murray have made careers out of putting poor people under a microscope, examining their every fault, and prescribing solutions to cure their faults. I am not against this: everybody has faults, many poor people are hurting themselves and others with their behavior, and it’s ok to say so. However, conservatives like Charles Murray who seem to think that contemporary upper class people are generally paragons of virtue-except for the fact that some of them don’t want to criticize poor people-are not helping matters.
I realize that most rich people are not getting rich off of China, and my beef is not with them: it is with the minority who are. As someone who is neither rich nor poor, I consider a person who gets rich helping the Chinese military to be far far more of a threat to me personally than poor single mothers. That doesn’t mean that single mothers aren’t a problem, but powerful people aiding and abetting the enemy is far more of a problem. And the vast majority of conservatives, until Trump, and Tucker Carlson, have remained totally silent about it. Apparently, aiding and abetting a military enemy doesn’t go against conservative principles-and anyway, they are way too busy wringing their hands about American poor people to notice.
I stand corrected on a minor point, although if they go to Canada it’s still an export. Half of of them stays in the United States. BMW sells about 50,000 units a year in Canada but there’s no breakdown of country of origin that I could find.
The rest of the cars seem to stay in the Western Hemisphere, with very few of the high end larger SUVs ending up in China.
Can anyone imagine buying jet fighter ejection seats from the Russians? (Okay, we’ve done that. I suppose I’ll never know what it was about the ejection seats that grounded our, I think, B-2s.) But can you imagine buying your electric, auto-driving cars from your sworn enemy? 80-mile-a-hour collisions. Batteries that spark and burn at intersections. Cars that stop dead on highways and can’t be towed off the road. Police cars that won’t start.
That to me seems ridiculous. But hey. What a deal!
Except when those with that question want to use the government to enforce their ideas on others.
No one is s arguing any executive is a champion of freedom (except for some reason the one currently in the Oval Office).
Charles Murray is a social scientist, he studies people and communities as a job. His studies are hardly limited to the poor nor does he argue, or even suggest, the rich are paragons of virtue.
China is a competitor, not an enemy.
https://www.bmwblog.com/2018/03/13/bmw-x5-was-europes-best-selling-premium-suv-in-2017/
I think Rousseau used the term “general will.” I don’t think it’s synonymous with “common good.”
Best selling “premium SUV” doesn’t even compute in to be in the top 30 in sales in the entire country of Germany. If they only sell 10 and 5 of them are X-5s it’s a technically true statement but misleading.
https://www.best-selling-cars.com/germany/2017-full-year-germany-best-selling-car-models/
http://carsalesbase.com/european-car-sales-data/bmw/bmw-x5/
In his hour-long video interview on the Ben Shapiro Show, Carlson said he would be “thrilled” to have the government stand in the way of the introduction not of robots, but of driverless cars.
Shapiro was appalled.
Carlson pointed out that truck-driving is the number one occupation of high-school educated men in America and he could not see how it would be a good idea for 10 million of his fellow Americans to be thrown out of their jobs – with all of the inevitable, predictable upheavals in families and community life – because Apple or Google or Waze had made their livelihoods obsolete with software incorporated into GM and Ford vehicles, all in the span of a few years.
Shapiro defended the depredations of the free market upon human beings like either a well-compensated stooge or a true zealot. He pointed to the Industrial Revolution in England and said that despite the Luddites’ protests, industrialization proceeded and England and its people were the better for it. It was the “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs” argument, soulless capitalist version.
Carlson countered with The Bolshevik Revolution, where the failure of a ruling class to manage the transformation of a rural economy to an industrial one resulted in enough catastrophic death and destruction over 70 years to make Russia “The Slaughterhouse of the Twentieth Century” (my expression, not Carlson’s, although I doubt he would disagree.)
As the great Enoch Powell – wouldn’t it have been wise had the British listened to him? – said in 1968: “The supreme function of statesmanship is to provide against preventable evils.”
Tucker Carlson understands that. Ben Shapiro hasn’t learned it – yet.