ucker Carlson's cable-tv show begins identically each night. After the words “Good evening and welcome to Tucker Carlson Tonight”—always intoned and inflected exactly the same way—the host launches into an opening monologue on the news of the day, or what he thinks ought to be the news of the day.
On January 2, 2019, though, there was no news. So Carlson used the holiday lull to deliver a non-stop, 15-minute, 2,571-word evisceration of America's ruling class—political, industrial, financial, intellectual, and cultural. Our rulers, he insisted, had failed at their ostensible tasks: to improve the health of the country and the lives of its citizens.
The show is usually leavened throughout with puckish humor. Not that night; Carlson was deadly serious. He laid at the feet of our ruling class a devastating litany of failure: the destruction of the family, skyrocketing out-of-wedlock births, the opioid crisis, rampant male unemployment, the sleazy effort to anesthetize the dispossessed with payday loans and pot, increasing financialization and techification of the economy and resultant wealth concentration, and foreign war without purpose, strategy, victory, or end.
But have our rulers really failed? Not if one understands, Carlson explained, that their real aim is to enrich themselves and maintain their power: “We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long-term obligation to the people they rule.”
Within a day or two, the speech had gone viral. Friend and enemy alike referred to it simply as “Tucker's Monologue.” Everyone knew instantly which was meant. To those sympathetic, here was a quasi-Trumpist rallying cry not merely for a new Right, but also for millions of apolitical Americans who feel—rightly—abandoned, even preyed upon, by the status quo. By contrast, those opposed sensed a clear danger: a message that—unlike the stale tenets of Republican-study-group, think-tank conservatism—might actually have a chance of inspiring and creating a new majority.
Carlson is the first to admit that he used to be one of the very people he now skillfully criticizes. His first job out of college was at the now-defunct conservative magazine Policy Review. He was one of three staff writers present on day one of the Weekly Standard's 24-year run.
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