The Tucker Carlson consensus: What the right-wing rabble-rouser can teach us about the future of American politics

“Prepare yourself,” popular Fox News host Tucker Carlson warned his audience on a recent episode of his program, “because wherever there is Elizabeth Warren, there is falseness… Fake is who Warren is!” 

The conservative firebrand roasted Warren, who according to the latest poll has taken a commanding seven-point lead over Joe Biden in the race to become her party’s presidential nominee. He called out the new Democratic frontrunner for faking Native American ancestry, and mocked her media appearances as stiff, stage-managed performances. Given this sharp criticism, it would be hard to imagine Carlson admitting to having anything in common with the Harvard law professor turned legislator. But he did precisely that in a speech entitled “Big Business Hates Your Family,” delivered this July at the National Conservatism Conference held in Washington D.C. It was an early sign of an unlikely shift that could transform American politics. 

In that address to a crowd of right-wing intellectuals bent on reforming conservatism in the era of Trump, Carlson was true to form in his denunciation of Warren as a wacky progressive zealot, for whom he insisted he would never vote. However, he also singled her out as one of the few political leaders in America with an actual plan to help American workers and families. Echoing the praise he had earlier lavished on Warren’s program of “economic patriotism,” he commended her 2003 book about the difficulties of raising a family in modern America, The Two-Income Trap. He also chided his erstwhile allies among the social conservatives for failing to produce anything of comparable value aside from mouthing platitudes about family values. 

A key theme of the speech was how American conservatives have gotten things wrong about the real threats to America’s freedoms. Nowadays, according to Carlson, the mortal danger “comes not from the government but from the private sector.” Carlson’s presentation that day capped off a series of increasingly assertive bromides against the excesses of free market capitalism. In January, he denounced the hegemony of the “ruling class” of financial elites in both parties. Some months later, he packed another punch when he blasted the “inflexible” libertarianism of the Koch brothers and denounced their undue influence on Republican economic policy.

The growing sympathy for left-wing critiques of free market capitalism on the part of certain segments of the conservative commentariat is only one of the more telling manifestations of an ideological realignment underway in American politics. Though often obscured by culture war conflicts over race and identity, the fact of the matter is that on economic issues, these partisans of the populist right and left have come to implicit agreement on more things than either side would be willing to admit. 

Other signs of this overlap include a February 2017 appearance by President Trump at the Conservative Political Action Conference in which he got the crowd of right-wing activists to cheer for Bernie Sanders when he reminded everyone what they had in common: “Because he’s right on one issue: Trade. He was right about trade.” Another was a July 2015 interview Sanders gave with the editor of the left-liberal website Vox, in which the socialist senator ripped the idea of ‘open borders’ as a right-wing “Koch brothers policy” that would depress the wages of American workers to the benefit of business interests. 

However, the formation of a cross-party populist consensus, if it can be called that, won’t necessarily mean that leaders in Washington will promptly change their ways and deliver on a populist governing agenda. For instance, Trump distinguished himself in 2016 from a dozen other GOP primary contenders by running as a pro-worker economic nationalist. But as president, with the exception of his erratic trade policy, he effectively governs as a conventional free-market Republican in the mold of Jeb Bush or Mitt Romney. After all, his signature legislative accomplishment was the 2017 corporate tax cut, which overwhelmingly benefited millionaires, billionaires and multinationals. Breaking with Trump, Carlson would later criticize it as having been “better for corporate America than it was for the middle class.”

There will be a natural delay between the emergence of new political preferences in the electorate and the development of policy options to follow through on those preferences. This is because, for the most part, the political establishment will be slow to process the unfolding paradigm shift. After all, it is they who were most responsible for upholding the old free market orthodoxy of low taxes, free trade, and deregulation, so it will take some time before they are able to concede the need for change and act on it. 

There are already signs of notable progress on the policy front. At least three different proposals for a Green New Deal have been released over the past year, while a small coterie of conservative policy mavericks in the Senate have crafted their own version of a detailed program of national redevelopment. A recent New York Times op-ed by Julius Krein noted the commonalities between the two sets of plans, which seem to be converging on industrial planning, in the same way that the old Reagan-Clinton consensus once converged on free markets. Whether this epochal break will come to fruition under a President Elizabeth Warren, a President Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or perhaps a President Tucker Carlson, what is clear is that the landscape of American politics has shifted and there is no going back.x