The Tucker Realignment

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Luke Ford

Ross Douthat writes:

* The newer (and especially, younger) right is defined by a politics of suspicion — a deep distrust of all institutions; a comfort with outsider forms of knowledge and conspiratorial theories; a hostility toward official mouthpieces and corporate-governmental alliances; a skepticism about American empire and a pessimism about the American future — that used to be much more the province of the left.

And for six years, up until his sudden firing this week, Tucker Carlson’s prime-time hour at Fox was the place to watch this transformation happening.

The master key to understanding Tucker Carlson’s programming wasn’t ideology; it was suspicion.

* Which is why his show was the farthest right on cable news but also sometimes the farthest left. You could assemble a set of Carlson clips — encompassing everything from his frequent interviews with Glenn Greenwald to his successful opposition to a U.S. conflict with Iran in 2019 and 2020 — that made him seem like a George W. Bush-era antiwar activist given a prime-time show on Fox by some mischievous genie. You could assemble a similar array in which he sounded left-wing notes on economics.

These forays were not in tension with his willingness to entertain the far right’s “Great Replacement” paranoia about immigration or fixate on a possible F.B.I. role in instigating the Jan. 6 riot. They were all part of the same hermeneutic: For any idea with an establishment imprimatur, absolute suspicion; for any outsider or skeptic, sympathy and trust. It didn’t have to be political or contemporary, either. The U.F.O. mystery? He was there for it. The Kennedy assassination and the C.I.A.? He had questions.

His Covid coverage was a notable example: At a time when the public health and political establishments weren’t taking the coronavirus as seriously as internet alarmists, Carlson was willing to issue dire warnings, to break with the partisan optimism of the other Fox hosts, even to make a pilgrimage to Mar-a-Lago to force Donald Trump out of his denial. But once the establishment went all-in on Covid restrictions, he swung all the way the other way, elevating not just criticism of shutdowns and vaccine mandates but the full anti-vaccine case.

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Cut-price coronation: Why King Charles shouldn’t modernise the monarchy

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Luke Ford

From the Sydney Morning Herald:

* The British monarchy, like every other monarchy, lives or dies on its respect for tradition – that handing down of customs from generation to generation. By snubbing process and protocol in petty ways, the King shows scant respect for his predecessors. He also denies his subjects the chance to take their place in a great human chain that spans the centuries.

* Crowning is thus a sacred Christian liturgy, but in England it has also long since been a rite of contract. Kings since Henry I in 1100 have sworn oaths in front of their people to uphold their laws. The rule of law. It is surely right that Charles formally acknowledges his solemn duty to guard it in front of all of us.

* Making monarchy cheaper is unlikely to sway those who dislike it – and would abolish it – but it risks alienating those who do buy into its religious character or constitutional significance. The better lesson Charles could learn from pageantry’s novelty is this: it was developed at the dawn of the democratic age precisely because it gave the people who loved his great-great-grandfather the sort of spectacle they were asking for.

Charles will not generate much good long-term PR by taking the fun or the majesty away. Not even for having spared us the exquisite irony of Harry performing fealty to him on his knees, as would have happened under the old rite.

* No. Instead, we’re told this will be an inclusive coronation with multi-faith elements and all kinds of other nods to the diversity of modern Britain and the Commonwealth.

I’m sorry, but a coronation is inherently exclusive. The whole thing is predicated on the idea of investing office and authority in a firstborn male simply because he is those things. No other attributes or qualities required.

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Seduced by Story: The Use and Abuse of Narrative

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Luke Ford

From the LROB:

* It isn’t just that everyone now has a story; it’s that everyone is a story. Who you are is the narrative you recount about yourself. Whether the life history of someone forced into sex work reflects their true self, or whether self-narration might also be self-deception, are questions that seemingly don’t trouble this line of argument. What if someone tells contradictory stories about themselves? How do you decide which tales are true?

* Everyone these days is on a journey, which can lend some provisional shape to lives without much sense of direction. Humanity was also on a journey in medieval times, but it was a collective expedition with an origin, well signposted stages and a distinct destination. The Enlightenment notion of progress was more open-ended: to imagine an end to human self-perfecting was to deny our infinite potential.

* If you can carve your own path to the grave these days, it is because grand narratives of this kind have crumbled and can no longer constrain you. Journeys are no longer communal but self-tailored, more like hitchhiking than a coach tour. They are no longer mass products but for the most part embarked on alone. The world has ceased to be story-shaped, which means that you can make your life up as you go along. You can own it, just as you can own a boutique. As the current cliché has it, everybody is different, a proposition which if true would spell the end of ethics, sociology, demography, medical science and a good deal besides.

* …myths are fictions that have forgotten their own fictional status and taken themselves as real. Liberals like Brooks fear being imprisoned by their own convictions, or oppressed by the convictions of others; the ideal is a cognitive dissonance in which one believes and disbelieves at the same time…

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VF: The Medical Medium and the True Believer

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Luke Ford

From Vanity Fair:

When Stephanie Tisone met Anthony William, a cult-famous, self-billed clairvoyant, she felt an instant connection. Her belief in his abilities was unwavering. Her life would never be the same.

…William has said that negative energy can be a source of disease and that he can teach you to clear it; that he can give followers emotional support to rewire their brains and souls after post-traumatic stress disorder from long-term illness; that he can speak to the entity he calls the “Spirit of Compassion” on their behalf. He has said that his information is decades ahead of science, that he knows if objects are hidden in the walls of old homes, and that he fell into a long coma after running past a chemical spill from an overturned truck. His former associates say that much of his follower base is made up of women dealing with chronic illness and pain.

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Hayek: A Life, 1899-1950

Posted on April 28, 2023 by Luke Ford

From LROB:

Hayek was crossing the Atlantic, under radio silence, when the Reader’s Digest article appeared. He had been anticipating a relaxed promotional tour of a handful of American universities, but when he landed in New York he found that he was suddenly famous, and his publishers had booked him for a string of town hall meetings and radio shows. He didn’t like being ‘pressed into public lecturing’, but soon grew accustomed to people who, as he put it, ‘were enthusiastic about the book but never read it’. When he told them about the dangers of state intervention they responded with warm applause, but when he went on to argue that governments should ‘step in where competition cannot possibly do the job’ (financing hydroelectric power for example) and implement a ‘plan for competition’ (including ‘unemployment insurance’ and a ‘minimum-wage law’), he noticed that ‘the temperature of the room went down at least ten degrees.’

When Hayek returned to Britain he set about raising money for an international conference to carry on the work of the prewar Paris symposium on neoliberalism. The conference took place in the spring of 1947 at a hotel in the Swiss village of Mont Pèlerin, with Hayek guiding some forty participants – including an ambitious young American called Milton Friedman – through a long agenda, under the wary gaze of Ludwig von Mises. They agreed to create a permanent organisation called the Mont Pelerin Society, dedicated to the proposition that a ‘free society’ depends on ‘market-oriented economic systems’; but they stopped short of committing themselves to pure laissez-faire capitalism, which led Mises to storm out, denouncing them all as ‘a bunch of socialists’.

The fact that the Mont Pelerin Society is still going after 75 years testifies to Hayek’s organisational skill.

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