In his 2018 book, The Great Delusion: Liberal Dreams and International Realities, John J. Mearsheimer wrote:
My view is that we are profoundly social beings from the start to the finish of our lives and that individualism is of secondary importance… Liberalism downplays the social nature of human beings to the point of almost ignoring it, instead treating people largely as atomistic actors… Political liberalism… is an ideology that is individualistic at its core and assigns great importance to the concept of inalienable rights. This concern for rights is the basis of its universalism—everyone on the planet has the same inherent set of rights—and this is what motivates liberal states to pursue ambitious foreign policies. The public and scholarly discourse about liberalism since World War II has placed enormous emphasis on what are commonly called human rights. This is true all around the world, not just in the West. “Human rights,” Samuel Moyn notes, “have come to define the most elevated aspirations of both social movements and political entities—state and interstate. They evoke hope and provoke action.”
[Humans] do not operate as lone wolves but are born into social groups or societies that shape their identities well before they can assert their individualism. Moreover, individuals usually develop strong attachments to their group and are sometimes willing to make great sacrifices for their fellow members. Humans are often said to be tribal at their core. The main reason for our social nature is that the best way for a person to survive is to be embedded in a society and to cooperate with fellow members rather than act alone… Despite its elevated ranking, reason is the least important of the three ways we determine our preferences. It certainly is less important than socialization. The main reason socialization matters so much is that humans have a long childhood in which they are protected and nurtured by their families and the surrounding society, and meanwhile exposed to intense socialization. At the same time, they are only beginning to develop their critical faculties, so they are not equipped to think for themselves. By the time an individual reaches the point where his reasoning skills are well developed, his family and society have already imposed an enormous value infusion on him. Moreover, that individual is born with innate sentiments that also strongly influence how he thinks about the world around him. All of this means that people have limited choice in formulating a moral code, because so much of their thinking about right and wrong comes from inborn attitudes and socialization.
Mearsheimer’s anthropology exposes Fox News at the level of its slogans. Fair and Balanced. We report, you decide. Both assume the liberal man: a rational individual who weighs evidence and forms his own conclusions, with the network as neutral servant of his reason. Mearsheimer says that man barely exists. Reason is the weakest of the three sources of preference, behind innate sentiment and socialization, and the deciding was done decades before the viewer ever found the channel. The slogans flatter the liberal self while the product feeds the tribal one, and the gap between slogan and product is the business model.
Look at what the programming does rather than what it claims. It names the group: real Americans, the heartland, the folks. It names the enemies: coastal elites, the mainstream media, Hollywood, the universities, the bureaucrats, the border crossers. It patrols the boundary nightly and reports on threats to the group’s standing and survival. Mearsheimer holds that survival is the prime human motive and that survival has always been social, secured through the group. Fox grasped that the deepest available appeal is not policy but group survival, and its strongest content has always run on extinction anxiety: your country is being taken, your culture erased, your kind replaced. Carlson took that logic to its limit with replacement talk, which is group-survival anthropology broadcast straight, stripped of liberal politeness. The ratings rewarded him because he was speaking to the fear Mearsheimer puts at the bottom of the human stack.
The socialization argument cuts deeper. Mearsheimer says our moral codes are infused in childhood, before the critical faculties mature, by family and surrounding society. Fox’s core audience received its infusion in mid-century America: church, flag, two-parent home, the schoolroom pledge. Then the surrounding society changed its values while the audience’s infusion stayed fixed, as infusions do. Fox does not convert anyone. It curates a world where the old infusion remains valid, honored, and right, and it frames the new dispensation as an alien imposition rather than the same process that formed the viewers themselves. The grievance underneath the channel is that the socializing machinery, the schools, the networks, the studios, the platforms, now infuses different values into the grandchildren.
Which explains the content mix better than any media theory. Run down Fox’s recurring panics: critical race theory in schools, gender ideology in classrooms, campus indoctrination, Disney, drag story hour, library books. Every one is a fight over the socialization of children. Mearsheimer’s anthropology predicts that the fiercest political conflicts will erupt over the value-infusion machinery, because whoever holds it writes the moral code of the next generation, and adults cannot be argued out of codes installed before argument was possible. Fox is a nightly war report from the socialization front. Its audience cannot win back the universities or the studios, so it watches the battle the way exiles follow news of the old country.
On nationalism the channel sits exactly where Mearsheimer’s ranking puts the human heart. Liberal universalism says rights belong to everyone and borders are administrative. Fox’s content says the nation is the unit that counts: sovereignty, the border, America First, suspicion of the UN and the globalists, contempt for foreign policy run as missionary work. Its cable rivals spoke the universal language, facts first, citizens of the world, and lost the ratings war for a quarter century to a channel that spoke particularism, because particularism matches the anthropology. The audience’s drift on foreign wars completes the picture. The same viewers who cheered Iraq in 2003 turned against liberal hegemony as its costs came home, and Carlson spent his last Fox years making the realist case against the Ukraine project, NATO expansion as provocation, to the largest audience in cable news. Mearsheimer’s arguments about the war circulated through that audience while the liberal networks treated them as heresy. The professor’s foreign policy found its mass constituency on the channel his anthropology explains.
One contradiction runs through the network, and it is Reagan’s contradiction inherited. Fox preaches economic individualism, bootstraps and markets, while practicing tribal politics, and the two never conflict on air because the individualism functions as a tribal marker rather than a philosophy. Celebrating the self-made man is how this tribe sings about itself. The content is liberal vocabulary, the function is group emblem, and nobody in the audience experiences any tension, because nobody is processing it as philosophy.
The Arizona call reads differently through this frame than through Collins. The decision desk acted on the network’s official anthropology: viewers are rational individuals, we report, they decide. The audience responded with its real anthropology: the group’s chief was under attack and the channel had joined the attackers. Loyalty beat accuracy within weeks, measured in ratings, and the network capitulated to the tribe at a cost of $787 million. The liberal theory of its own audience was the most expensive mistake Fox ever made about human nature, and it never made it again.
Fox News took the Randall Collins ritual that talk radio built for the commute and rebuilt it for the hearth. Same theory, different hour, different chamber, and a few inventions radio could not make.
Begin with the founder, because the design was deliberate. Roger Ailes (1940-2017) came out of daytime television and Nixon’s image shop, and he understood that he was not building a news channel. He was building a place viewers lived. The instruction he gave his producers was emotional: make the audience feel defended, make them feel at home. Collins would translate: maximize shared mood, and the information will take care of itself.
Television restores something radio lacked: the face. Collins puts the face near the center of ritual life, since entrainment runs through expression as much as voice. Fox News built its prime time on faces held in close-up for minutes at a time. Bill O’Reilly‘s (b. 1949) glower, Sean Hannity (b. 1961) disgust, and above all Tucker Carlson‘s (b. 1969) furrowed bafflement, a face that performed the audience’s own incomprehension back at it and invited synchrony. The monologue is the same entrainment engine the radio men used, with the face as a second channel of rhythm. The viewer’s expression follows the host’s. That is bodily co-presence at one remove, and it is stronger than the dashboard voice.
The second invention is on-screen assembly. A radio host is alone with the audience. Fox stages the group itself. Fox & Friends puts three people on a couch at dawn, bantering like family at a kitchen table, and the viewer at his own kitchen table joins the circle as the silent fourth. The Five stages a simulated friend group at the happy-hour slot, with laughter, teasing, and one designated liberal to absorb the group’s corrections. Collins says solidarity requires members to witness each other’s mood. Fox solved the problem of the invisible audience by hiring a visible one and seating it on a couch. The viewer entrains with people he can see entraining with each other.
Then the schedule, which turns a channel into a chain. A story enters in the morning shows at low charge, passes through the afternoon, and arrives at prime time fully loaded, each host recharging the symbol and handing it on. The chyrons compress the day’s outrage into liturgical phrases the regulars can read in a glance and outsiders find half coded. By the time Carlson opened at eight, the audience had been entrained for twelve hours, and the monologue landed on prepared ground. Collins describes ritual chains running through individual lives. Fox runs one through its own broadcast day, inside the building, then out through the country each evening.
The audience side is the hearth. Fox skews old, and its core viewers run it six, eight, ten hours a day, in the living room, the kitchen, the nursing home lounge, the airport bar. For the isolated elderly viewer, the widower alone at four in the afternoon, the channel is the household’s other presence, a continuous supply of focused attention, familiar faces, and shared indignation. Collins says people starved of interaction rituals will take emotional energy from whatever source offers it. Fox is the ambient ritual, always on, and the loneliness of its audience is the foundation of its ratings. The set glows in the corner like the fire it replaced.
The sacred objects are visual now. The flag in the graphics, the gold and blue of the set, the dress code that functions as vestments, the logo in the corner of the screen marking consecrated ground. The calendar fills with seasonal rites, and the War on Christmas is the purest case: an annual festival of righteous anger, returning each December like a feast day, in which the group rehearses its persecution and its solidarity on schedule. Collins notes that ritual life organizes itself into calendars. Fox built one. Election night sits at the top of it, the high holy day, the longest assembly, the night the whole tribe watches together.
Which is why the Arizona call of November 3, 2020 was a catastrophe of a kind the frame predicts. The decision desk, acting on the liberal premise that a news channel reports outcomes, called the state for Biden in the middle of the high rite. The audience experienced it as profanation at the altar, the priests desecrating the sacred object on the holiest night. Within weeks, viewers defected to Newsmax in the hundreds of thousands, not because Newsmax had better information, but because it offered the unbroken ritual. The Dominion discovery later showed the aftermath from inside: hosts and executives texting their private disbelief in the fraud claims while broadcasting accommodation of them, terrified of the audience. Collins explains what the texts show. The congregation disciplines the priests. A ritual that has run long enough belongs to its members, and the celebrants keep the rite or lose the church. Fox chose the rite, and the choice cost it $787 million, which the network paid as the price of solidarity.
Donald Trump (b. 1946) fits the frame as the rival sacred object. For years Fox charged him nightly, and a symbol charged by that much ritual attention accumulates more energy than the apparatus that charged it. By 2020 the audience’s loyalty ran to the symbol over the church, and when the two split, the members followed the symbol. Networks can build sacred objects. They cannot repossess them.
The hosts, last, are Collins’s energy stars at maximum wattage. An hour of prime time with three million entrained viewers is the richest EE position American media offers, and the men who hold it behave like men who cannot give it up: the contract wars, the post-firing podcasts and streaming ventures, O’Reilly and Carlson reconstructing smaller altars rather than accept silence. Ailes himself kept the monitor wall running at home. Whoever stands at the focus takes the largest charge, and withdrawal is the one outcome none of them chose freely.
