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.
Sean Hannity is the purest specimen Mearsheimer‘s anthropology could ask for, because in Hannity there is no residue of the liberal man at all. No performance of reason, no individualist interior, no gap between the socialized self and the broadcast self. The infusion runs all the way down.
Start with the infusion. Franklin Square, Long Island, Irish Catholic, grandparents off the boat. A father who worked as a family-court probation officer, a mother who worked in a county jail. Altar boy, seminary schooling at Sacred Heart and St. Pius X. The home’s code: God, cops, country, family, loyalty, and respect for the uniform. Mearsheimer says a man’s moral code arrives before his critical faculties do, installed by family and surrounding society, and that reason arrives later as a junior partner. Hannity’s adult worldview is the Franklin Square code without one alteration. He came of age at nineteen as Ronald Reagan won the presidency, took his political identity from that moment, and has not revised a premise since. He did not reason his way to anything. He is what the home made, broadcasting nightly, and his sign-off is the Gospel of John: let not your heart be troubled. The seminary boy still closes with scripture, consoling the congregation.
Now the form of the show, which separates Hannity from every rival. Rush Limbaugh performed argument. Tucker Carlson performed thinking, the furrowed brow, the dissident intellectual. Hannity performs neither. His program is recitation: the same phrases, the same villains, the same loyalties, repeated nightly like a catechism, and his critics have spent thirty years calling him dumb for it. Mearsheimer’s frame says the critics grade him on the wrong scale. Hannity is not in the reason business and has never pretended to be. He said it himself in 2016: I’m not a journalist, I’m a talk show host. That sentence, like John Laws‘s version of it, declines the liberal role outright. The liberal anthropology says a broadcaster serves the audience’s reason. Hannity serves the audience’s solidarity, knows it, and says so, which makes him more honest about his function than the colleagues who dressed the same function in the costume of inquiry.
His political career is a chain of attachments to chiefs. Reagan formed him, Newt Gingrich (b. 1943) elevated him, George W. Bush commanded his war years, and Donald Trump completed him. The nightly phone calls, the advice, the rally stage in Missouri in 2018, the texts to the White House. And here the Dominion discovery, which damaged everyone else, distinguishes him. Carlson’s texts revealed a private self that loathed Trump, a gap between the tribal broadcast and the individual underneath. Hannity’s texts revealed concern, management, loyalty, the same man inside and out. He told lawyers he never believed Sidney Powell‘s (b. 1955) fraud claims for one second, yet his on-air accommodation of the tribe’s belief was not cynicism layered over a hidden self. It was the member subordinating his own judgment to the group’s need, which Mearsheimer says humans have always done, because the group is how they survive. Hannity holds his private opinions the way a man holds opinions inside a family: they yield to the family.
His foreign policy record shows ideology trailing the tribe, exactly as the anthropology predicts. Under Bush he was the loudest crusader on cable, and his 2004 book title joined terrorism, despotism, and liberalism as the trinity of evil. The war talk wore some universalist clothing, but the engine was tribal: our country, our troops, kill our enemies. When the tribe’s chief changed and Trump turned the movement against the wars, Hannity adjusted without visible strain, kept the hawkishness where the tribe kept it, on Iran, and dropped it where the tribe dropped it. The doctrine moved. The constant was membership. A man whose positions derive from reason shows friction when the positions reverse. A man whose positions derive from the group shows none, because nothing fundamental changed.
His bond with the audience is membership authority rather than intellectual authority. He tells the dishwasher stories, the bartending, the construction jobs, the college he never finished. He is the audience’s self-image made good: the working-class kid who rose without leaving, who kept the faith of the home. Limbaugh’s listeners looked up at a talent on loan from God. Hannity’s viewers look across at one of their own who got the big chair, and they trust him the way the tribe trusts a member, on the credential of sameness.
His durability delivers the frame’s final lesson. Consider the fates of the stars who built individual brands. Bill O’Reilly, the biggest name in cable, fired. Megyn Kelly (b. 1970), who bet on herself as an individual talent and left for NBC, crashed within a year. Carlson, whose personal brand grew larger than the network, cut in a day. Alan Colmes (1950-2017) is remembered as the liberal foil. Hannity, the least brilliant of all of them by the liberal measure, has held his chair across three decades, every purge, every scandal, every regime change at Fox News, because he never once elevated himself above the group. The individualists rose higher and fell. The loyalist endured. Mearsheimer says embedding in the group has always been the human survival strategy, and reason a lesser instrument. Hannity’s whole career is that sentence with a time slot.
