It is difficult to begrudge anyone for celebrating the downfall of far-right provocateur Tucker Carlson, ignominiously ejected from Fox News.
Slack-jawed, spitting rage, his tirades were calculated at stirring the resentment of angry white Americans: from declaring that immigrants made the US dirtier and poorer to embracing the “great replacement theory,” which spreads the noxious lie that the authorities were deliberately “undermining democracy” by replacing US-born Americans with immigrants.
Fox staff were reportedly jubilant at his departure. Perhaps this quote from a Fox reporter, in which they celebrate seeing the back of the network’s premier conspiracy theorist, will give you pause: “It’s a great day for America, and for the real journalists who work hard every day to deliver the news at Fox.”
Illustration: Yusha
Oh, really? Were they the journalists who prompted a potential lawsuit from the Paris City Government after falsely claiming that the French capital had “no-go zones” for non-Muslims? Or aired many negative and skeptical statements about COVID-19 vaccines at a critical point in the pandemic? Or indeed aired the false claims that voting machines had been rigged to steal the 2020 US presidential election, leading to Fox News’ US$787 million settlement with Dominion Voting Systems?
With journalistic standards like these, Carlson will no doubt be replaced by another demagogue committed to stoking the same fear and rage. The focus on specific bogeymen such as him stops us from understanding the real problem.
Carlson is merely one figurehead of a misinformation industry that has dramatically reshaped right-wing politics across the world. Defined by conspiratorial thinking, often crude racism and bigotry and calculated deception, it has succeeded in destroying whatever barrier existed between the traditional center right and what lies beyond.
Carlson — or indeed the modern godfather of this movement, former US president Donald Trump — are easy to single out on account of their vulgarity and open repudiation of respectability. This allows the mainstream right that originally courted and enabled this extremism to evade responsibility.
Consider the case study of former US representative Liz Cheney, who was celebrated as a principled leader of the besieged moderate Republicans for her opposition to Trump. This was the same Cheney who, when offered the opportunity to eschew the conspiracy that former US president Barack Obama was foreign-born, responded: “People are uncomfortable with a president who is reluctant to defend the nation overseas.”
Here was a climate denier who almost always voted with the Trump administration. Difficult, then, not to conclude that it was the style, rather than substance, of Trumpism that the likes of Cheney found so objectionable.
Cheney was crushed in her Republican primary at the hands of a Trump-backed candidate, consumed by a monster she helped create.
It was the “moderate” Republican pinup John McCain who selected Sarah Palin as his running mate when he ran for US president in 2008. It was the former Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney who suggested wiretapping mosques and placing foreign students under surveillance. It was US Senator Ted Cruz who called on law enforcement to “patrol and secure Muslim neighborhoods.”
A previous generation of right-wing zealot pundits walked so Carlson could run, including Rush Limbaugh, who identified the “four corners of deceit”: government, academia, science and the media.
It was, in sum, a collective effort on the US right to promote bigoted and conspiratorial modes of thinking that radicalized the base of the Republicans and transformed a right-wing capitalist party into a more conventionally far-right movement that increasingly rejects democratic norms.
It is why Trump’s main Republican rival is Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, a right-wing authoritarian who has claimed that the US Federal Reserve would seek to prevent Americans from buying guns and fuel, and who has shared a platform with people who appear to echo QAnon and other conspiracy theories.
This is a tendency long ago identified by US historian Richard Hofstadter, who unpacked the “paranoid style in American politics” in a 1964 article, in which he described what he called a mechanism for remolding society: that by identifying a menace to society — be it Muslims, transgender people, or anti-fascists — you could marshal support for radical right causes.
It is a phenomenon well beyond the US. At the time of the Brexit referendum in the UK, it was the Vote Leave faction that took over the Tories who spread the deception about Turkey joining the EU, then-British secretary of state for justice Michael Gove who denounced “experts” and then-London mayor Boris Johnson’s ugly rhetoric around surrender, betrayal and traitors that attracted the support of far-right extremists.
It was former Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro who synthesized bigotry toward minorities and disinformation about COVID-19 and stolen elections.
It is Hungary’s far-right government that spreads anti-Semitic conspiracy theories about Jewish businessman George Soros and implies that outside forces would force children to have gender-affirming surgery.
Indeed, Hungary itself is a striking case study about what has happened to the modern right globally. The ruling party, Fidesz, was long considered a conventional center-right party until it radicalized in power, hollowing out the substance of Hungarian democracy.
Misinformation, bigotry and conspiracism acted as battering rams, radically reshaping rightwing politics.
Carlson might well have been booted from Fox News, but what victory does it represent? The brand of conspiratorial demagoguery he belongs to has succeeded in drastically reshaping right-wing politics. The “paranoid style” that was once identified as a dangerous trend in conservatism is now its main operating system. The consequence? Democracy as we understand it is imperiled in the US and beyond. The likes of Carlson played their role, but this political catastrophe would never have happened without those who retained ill-deserved reputations for moderation while throwing open the door for the most radical extremism.
Owen Jones is a Guardian columnist.
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