Tucker Carlson Claims to Be an Individualist but Espouses Collectivism
Specificity must cut through contradiction in the ideological fight for America's future.
In his instantly infamous interview with the highly influential white nationalist Nick Fuentes, which was released in late October and has accrued almost 7 million views on YouTube alone, Tucker Carlson challenged Fuentes on collectivism.
What I do think is bad, just objectively bad and destructive, is the ‘all Jews are guilty,’ or all anybody is guilty of anything. Because that’s just, like, not true. …there’s a true, not just principle, but spiritual reality that we have to defend, which is: God created every person as an individual, not as a group. No woman gave birth to a community. Like, we hate that kind of thinking, right? Collectivist thinking like that. That’s identity politics. …that principle, that we’re all judged as individuals by what we do, our faith, the decisions that we make, the way we live our lives. And God will judge every one of us in that way, and that’s how we’re supposed to judge. I think that’s true.
I was happy to hear Carlson challenge what I regard to be unsound and dangerous collectivist concepts, especially in conversation with one of America’s leading collectivists. But I was also skeptical because Carlson frequently espouses precisely the fallacious sentiment that he refuted in conversation with Fuentes.
A good example came soon after the Fuentes interview in another Tucker Carlson podcast, this one reflecting on the Fuentes interview and criticizing #1 New York Times bestselling author and Daily Wire podcast host Ben Shapiro.
Talking about the high cost of living in New York City during a recent interview, Shapiro had suggested that certain policy changes, such as building code and rent control reform, could improve affordability in NYC. But he also made a broader point about the nature of affordability in a free-market capitalist system:
If you’re a young person and you can’t afford to live [in New York City], then maybe you should not live here. I mean that is a real thing. I know that we’ve now grown up in a society that says that you deserve to live where you grew up, but the reality is that the history of America is almost literally the opposite of that. The history of America is you go to a place where there is opportunity. And if the opportunities are limited here and they’re not changing, then you really should try to think about other places where you have better opportunities.
Carlson reacts to this by accusing Shapiro of having “contempt for the people who live here” and says that people “really should” experience “gut-level revulsion” from Shapiro’s statement. Carlson suggests that in fact you do have the right to live in a town, “just because your parents are buried there,” and “your ancestors built the town.”
But what does “the right” to live in a particular town mean in practice?
According to the individualist system of free market capitalism, you only have a right to what you personally built, purchased, or were gifted.
Carlson’s above-mentioned statement of individualism, according to which people are to be judged only on the basis of their own actions, runs counter to his idea that anyone has a right to live anywhere because their ancestors built it. To give someone the “right” to live in a particular place because of what their ancestors built, you would have to judge them on the basis of their belonging to a particular familial group, rather than purely what they built, purchased, or were gifted themselves. This would violate Carlson’s individualist principle (or “spiritual reality” as he calls it).
And since one person’s right is another person’s responsibility not to transgress upon that right, this would also require you to impose force on others on the basis of their familial group belonging (or lack thereof), regardless of their individual behavior. For example, if I had a right to live on a particular plot of land because my father was buried there, even though he sold the land to you before he died, my right to live there would constitute a revocation of your right to use your land as you see fit. And both my right and your lack of a right would be based on our familial group characteristics rather than any individual choices we made.
Individualism results in a system of free market capitalism because it rejects collectivist notions of property rights in favor of individual consumer and producer decisions.
Since Carlson seems to accept both individualist and collectivist principles even though they contradict each other, how can we discern which direction he leans in more strongly?
His largely anti-free-market policy positions, such as banning self-driving cars, breaking up big tech companies, outlawing high-interest loans, and countless others strongly suggest an answer to that question that individualists should find rather unfortunate.