- The Carlson monologue became an extended subject of debate, which my Times colleague Ross Douthat also examined. For example, in “The Right Should Reject Tucker Carlson’s Victimhood Populism,” David French, a senior writer at National Review, argued that “it is still true that your choices are far more important to your success than any government program or the actions of any nefarious banker or any malicious feminist.”
“If an obscure senator gave this speech, he’d be famous overnight,” Kyle Smith, a critic at large for National Review, wrote the next day. “Carlson scores some major points, and like most great speeches this one can’t easily be dismissed as either left or right-wing.”
Carlson touched nerves well outside conservative circles. I asked Dean Baker, co-founder of the liberal Center for Economic and Policy Research, for his response to the monologue. He replied: “It’s a bit scary to me how much of this I agree with.” Baker quibbled with some minor points, but
ignoring these off the mark comments, he is absolutely right that the leadership of both parties has largely embraced an agenda that serves the rich with little concern for average workers.
Edsall is great. I'm loving his quote finding, fact gathering, and insight generating columns. First off, I agree 100% with Massing, quoted by Edsall: Carlson's main thrust is pretty on-point, based on the excerpts I read here (I've been so tuned out of the news that this is completely new to me). However, his argument that the reason is... illegal immigrants is too clever (and Fox News) by half. For sure, unskilled immigrant labor depresses those wages, and certainly a lot of middle and lower class America is unskilled. But why are they unskilled? That's hardly the fault of immigration policies. I'm not familiar enough with the relevant history to assign the blame of an uneducated, unskilled workforce to Democrats or Republicans, although both surely contributed. I'm really interested in the idea of an expanded EITC and a wage subsidy. Couldn't a lot of means-tested welfare programs be rolled into a wage subsidy, ameliorating some of the concern right-wingers have about welfare queens, but also providing exactly the support that Democrats campaign on? I forget the numbers, but I recall that social spending--i.e. cash benefits, direct in-kind provision of goods and services, and tax breaks with social purposes--makes up almost a third of US GDP (we can thank employer income that's tax-exempt if contributed to healthcare for a significant portion of that amount). Where's the imagination? Where's the ingenuity, the A/B testing, the experimentation?What, then, to make of Carlson? Is he a cynic? A hypocrite? A headlong pursuer of ratings? Perhaps he’s best described as a charter member of the same ruling class that in his monologue he indicted for working so intently to divide and confuse the American people.
Related: Most people know the "Up series." They're illuminating in that they give you a longitudinal view of English life from 1958 to 2012. But that's English life. Frontline has done a couple; they aren't immediately searchable to me but they followed three families for ten years in Michigan and they followed two boys for ten years in Kentucky. So let's take two families: the Clampetts and the Garcias. For stereotype's sake, let's have the Clampetts have two generations of heritage where they are; Grandma Clampett moved to town after WWII. All else is equal. Same family size, same family intelligence, same family makeup, same family education. The Clampetts: - likely live in a town whose population has declined. Everyone of means has moved away. - likely have a mortgage on a property whose value is not going up. Everyone wants to move to the city because that's where the jobs are. - likely remember when things were better. The highways were built when Meemaw was young, the schools were built when Maw was young, and the Walmart skeletonized downtown a decade ago. The Garcias: - Have no roots locally. They can move anywhere. They've already given up everything to be here. - Have no nostalgia. It's all new to them, and no one is threatening to kill them if they rat out the local dealer. - Have no burdens. They might have coyotes to pay off. They might have relatives to send money to. But they can do that from anywhere. All else being equal, immigrants have an easier time in These United States because there's nothing holding them back. Meanwhile the locals are trying to build the American Dream for their kids the same way their parents built it for them and they can't. The game has changed. It's radically harder. It's overwhelmingly less rewarding. And all around them are the ruins of empire reminding them how much better things were back when Reagan was president. There's a long conversation that could be had about capital investment, marginal tax rates, globalism, educational policy, tax policy, predatory lending, the lot of it. But there's a short conversation that sounds a lot like "if you're not with us you're against us." And when they look around the town, it seems like the only people who are better off than they were five years ago are the auslanders. Until we, as a country, can say "we fucked up the Heartland and we're sorry, here's what we're going to do to fix it" the Heartland is going to be resentful of everyone who isn't stuck paying a mortgage in a decaying town in upstate Ohio where nobody works anymore and where the kids shuffle off never to return as soon as they graduate high school. Civilization naturally accumulates in cities and the impediments to mobility we've renamed "the American Dream" are depriving large swaths of the United States the opportunity to advance.What our survey found about the American dream came as a surprise to me. When Americans were asked what makes the American dream a reality, they did not select as essential factors becoming wealthy, owning a home or having a successful career. Instead, 85 percent indicated that “to have freedom of choice in how to live” was essential to achieving the American dream. In addition, 83 percent indicated that “a good family life” was essential.
Being new to Hubski, thank you for these insightful deep-dives into many topics like this. To add a little more , learned from personal experience with both families: The Clampetts economic conditions relate to much of the North- eastern US. Towns and cities built up by a growing industrial-economic base that imploded in a generation or two. The causes are not complicated, in my limited view: Citizens consumed more and more lower priced goods manufactured outside the country, produced at labor rates unacceptable to themselves. Companies took advantage of lower production costs to do what business does: make more profit. State and local politicians, having build infrastructure and support systems for a good local economy, increased taxes to make up for falling tax revenues ( less businesses and people paying taxes, so increase taxes on those left). This accelerated the flight from the area. Wholesale deletion of resource-based, rural " only game in town" businesses through national legislation, where compromise and investment in safe production/ consumption might have increased. We got what we paid for. The Garcias economic conditions driving their migration are the same as the Clampetts, " on steroids". Maybe we switch to using " economic migration"? Thier family has lived in the same town for generations, each successive generation building a modest house next to each other, on land thier grandfather or earlier generations purchased. Built with concrete and metal, these buildings last for hundreds of years. Much of thier country is in the same state as the Clampett's area- the Garcias have no where to go except to migrate to a distant foreign land to feed thier family. The head of the household, and/or other able-bodied family members, make a perilous journey to this land of plenty, as seen on TV. Once there, if they have working papers, thier qualifications for work in their profession don't apply, so they take any two to three jobs they can get, working 18 hours a day. Being the economic engine for an extended family, they send as much money as they can back home. If they have no working papers, they take what ever work they can get. The cost of living in this new land of opportunity proved to be shockingly expensive, so they pool their resources with others, live in substandard conditions even when compared to thier home country. This maximizes the amount of money they can send home. For those that cannot speak the local language, transactions of any form are difficult. Their inability to communicate limits thier options and opportunities. The Clampetts and the Garcias are the same people, in the same situation. In both cases, the citizens of the country, businesses, and governments could have prevented, and still can reverse, these conditions by making different decisions. For us, ( sorry- have to add my opinion) , the leadership in our country is too wrapped up in opposing one-another because of economic and ideological conflicts of interests. How do politicians enter public service broke and leave multi-millionaires, on both sides? Lobbyists spend millions of dollars while the Clampetts could do a lot with $100 before the end of the month. $100 goes even further for the Garcias.
It's insightful to draw the parallels between both. You're right - the Garcias were just forced to adjust first. That adjustment, however, is powerful. Becoming an immigrant is world-changing. Your expectations are gone and your traditions are what you can carry. It's shit - no doubt. Expect to be knocked down an entire economic rung; if you were wealthy you're middle class and if you were middle class you're picking lettuce. So from the Garcias' perspective, they've given up everything to lick the boots of the Clampetts... and from the Clampetts' perspective, the Garcias have crossed thousands of miles to destroy their way of life. You're right - the Garcias are just ahead of the Clampetts. But the Clampetts are fighting to not be the Garcias.