How to Fight Like a White Man

Tucker Carlson Searches His Soul

portrtait of the brain trust as a young man

Yesterday The New York Times ran a text, in fragments interspersed with interpretation—though presented as straight reporting—sent by Fox News star Tucker Carlson to his producer, under this headline: “Carlson’s Text That Alarmed Fox Leaders: ‘It’s Not How White Men Fight’.” The story focused on the manifest racism of the sentence quoted in the headline and suggested that it was the blatancy of that racism, exposed in a text that might appear as evidence in a lawsuit against Fox, which alarmed Fox executives and led to Carlson’s firing.

It seems to me that in the context of Carlson's whole text, the Times has misconstrued the purport of the racist remark and thus revealed a fundamental liberal-establishment misunderstanding of the rightist ethos from which Carlson sprang and of which he may be the most successful public exponent—a misunderstanding of what his text tells us about Carlson’s role and about American right-wing activism generally.

Here’s the text in full:

A couple of weeks ago, I was watching video of people fighting on the street in Washington. A group of Trump guys surrounded an Antifa kid and started pounding the living shit out of him. It was three against one, at least. Jumping a guy like that is dishonorable obviously. It’s not how white men fight. Yet suddenly I found myself rooting for the mob against the man, hoping they’d hit him harder, kill him. I really wanted them to hurt the kid. I could taste it. Then somewhere deep in my brain, an alarm went off: this isn’t good for me. I’m becoming something I don’t want to be. The Antifa creep is a human being. Much as I despise what he says and does, much as I’m sure I’d hate him personally if I knew him, I shouldn’t gloat over his suffering. I should be bothered by it. I should remember that somewhere somebody probably loves this kid, and would be crushed if he was killed. If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?

The full text also comes from the Times, online. The print edition I read yesterday morning didn’t have the full quote, and yet, though at first I read only the fragmented version, and though I was momentarily distracted by the reporters’ misleading interpretive commentary, I could see how the racist remark really figured in the communication, because I too have a Scandinavian last name and an Episcopalian background.

Carlson uses the racist expression “not how white men fight” utterly by the way. It's a tossed-off remark between people with a mutual understanding of certain expressions’ connotations, shorthand apposition to Carlson’s “dishonorable obviously,” made in the process of moving quickly along to his real—and really quite strange—point about his gut reaction to what he witnessed. That real point is clearly not what the Times, as if simply reporting the news, tells us it is: that Carlson felt “dismay that the attackers, like him, were white.”

Nothing in the text says anything about that. His dismay is about something else entirely.

Nor does it seem likely that “the text message revealed more about his views on racial superiority,” as the Times reports, than anything his superiors, his viewers, or the public as a whole had known before. As the Times itself points out, “for years, Mr. Carlson espoused views on his show that amplified the ideology of white nationalism.”

The thrust of the text message presupposes commonly understood phrasings and underlying worldview agreements, between him and his producer, that I’ve mentioned. If Carlson had spelled out what he meant—“as you and I naturally agree, that's not how white men fight, by which of course we mean the decent and honorable kind of men”—the producer too would have a problem, but it's not the sort of thing you have to say. The agreement is deep, implicit.

What probably is true, as the Times says, is that “the board grew concerned that the message could become public at trial [in Dominion Voting Systems v. Fox News Network] when Mr. Carlson was on the stand, creating a sensational and damaging moment that would raise broader questions about the company.” Sure. The racist language in the text certainly would have gotten negative attention. It’s getting negative attention now.

But the way Carlson uses “white men” locates him in particular traditions of the right, which the liberal “look, he did another racism!” response tends to obscure. The Times seems to want us to think Carlson was telling his producer something like “I hereby announce that white men are superior to others, and it therefore dismays me that those dishonorable bullies are white.” But the racist reference to white men is at once entirely non-urgent to the communication and revealing of deep-seated elements in movement conservatism that are far creepier, really, than the Times’s reading would suggest.

“White men fight honorably” has a corollary: “Those who fight dishonorably aren’t white men”—or at least aren’t acting like it at the moment. All this goes well beyond fighting. In the tradition Carlson's drawing on, a white man can remind another white man, usually an inferior, to behave like one (“and for God’s sake, Hogeland, remember you’re a white man”). A man can express gratitude to another man for going the extra mile on his behalf with a quiet “you’re a white man.” If this sounds Kiplingesque British-imperialist, that’s because it is, yet it runs much farther back than Kipling—especially in the fantasies of the U.S. movement conservatives who hoelped shape Carlson’s worldview. The notion that codes for honorable approaches to friendship and conflict are exceptional to “the white race” and obscure to all others—fair play and loyalty and addressing issues via rules-based contest—is obviously white-supremacist, but let’s be real: it’s really upper-class Anglo-supremacist. When Carlson says “it’s not how white men fight,” it's important to understand that he doesn’t mean it’s not how, say, Italians, Jews, Greeks, or Irishmen fight.

An old fantasy about the supposedly deep Anglo-elite roots of the very concept of honorable conduct—”conduct becoming a gentleman,” or in Carlson’s parlance, conduct becoming a white man—muddles various sub-fantasies about ancient Arthurian Round Table chivalry with honor-culture rituals like jousts and dueling and Marquess of Queensberry boxing and tales of Robin Hood's Merry Men and the Norman Yoke and the White Man's Burden and the Southern Lost Cause and the Battle of Britain and on and on and on. This emotionally stunted, boy’s-own-adventure view of the history of the world underlies the intellectual origins of U.S. movement conservatism itself, as set out in William F. Buckley's National Review in the 1950’s. It’s a powerful romance—I wrote about it here—and Carlson, its leading latter-day exponent, has ridden romance all the way to Trumpism.

How such cartoon-level highfalutin fantasias of backward-yearning snobbism drives a right-populist ideology of American anti-elitism is a matter for another time. High-Anglican high Whiggism always had an interesting relationship to—and further fantasies about—the virtues and problems of the stoutheartedness of the English lower classes, in their place (Buckley's Roman Catholicism complicated the equation, though not as much as one would expect). Anti-Ivy Ivy alums’ dreams of ancient fundamental hierarchies, playing into supposedly “real American” values: that's a weird and fascinating tale, with an anti-corporate element worth examining more closely. Josh Hawley is another notable current exponent of the tradition, though charmless, compared with a Buckley or a Carlson.

But I've never cared that much about Tucker Carlson's rise from a latter-day wannabe Buckley to a pop figure whose TV ratings have left Buckley's in the dust. Unlike a lot of my fellow liberals, I've spent no time fixated on the impact of Fox News. I can't prove it, but I have a suspicion that Carlson's tentpole ratings, which were probably about half those for shows like “The Bachelor” anyway, depended on mass numbers of liberal viewers addicted to the titillation of bathing in the horrorshow night after night and grinding their teeth with “know your enemy” outrage. It's not for me.

What grabs me about the full quote of Carlson’s text, above, is the point he’s really making, where the casually racist terminology deployed along the way is possibly the least salient element in the racist narcissism of his vision, the lowest of the many absurd degrees of neurotic arrogance that led him to document his racist narcissism in a work text. If Carlson hadn’t dedicated himself to becoming the leading voice for certain malign political propositions, and the most successful example of everything that’s wrong with 24-hour cable news, the soul-searching honesty in his text might be at once touching and infuriating. It’s the kind of self-approving epiphany regarding the development of his own “character” that a terminally self-involved, philosophically inclined fifteen-year-old boy being groomed for the leadership class (a rising white man, in Carlson’s terms), already fully convinced of his own sterling capacity for self-awareness, might report home from his Anglicanesque prep school.

That Carlson is actually a grown man, and a TV star of the Trumpist right wing, and that he indulged in such self-examination in a work text with a colleague speaks volumes not just about him but about the intellectually and emotionally stunted ethos of his kind. The key is this: “If I don’t care about those things, if I reduce people to their politics, how am I better than he is?” Our fifteen-year-old philosopher of Anglican bent is troubled by having discovered a trait within himself that might hinder not his seeming better but his actually being better than somebody whose politics he abhors. That’s the burden, the ideal, the chivalric standard; that’s the “white” obsession. Carlson is painfully aware that he’s called upon and honor-bound to be not more correct or informed or thoughtful or tactical than his enemy, or any other accidental quality or learned achievement, but better, because that’s how white men fight, and if he fails that test, he undermines the ultimate purpose of the great Arthurian/real-American cause.

It’s therefore an admirable quality in him, a superwhite quality, this capacity for questioning his own well-beloved integrity, in order to grow and reinforce it through epiphanies regarding the baseness of the emotions that he must strive, for the good of all humankind, to rise above.

That’s the fantastical mindset. In real life, of course, his epiphany is utterly banal.

Young Tucker is gravely confessing to having confronted a dark side that many of us would pretty much take for granted he possesses. Why the golden manchild thinks his self-questioning process should go in a text to a work colleague may speak more to the tenor of our times than to anything specific about Carlson, but I’m pretty sure that while the outright racist expression “not how white men fight” would indeed have given his bosses PR concerns, for obvious reasons, the real problem the text gave them is legal: Carlson was indulging in questioning his own integrity, aloud—and thinking pretty well of himself for doing so—when his integrity is widely known to be so suspect that it was in fact one of the key issues in the trial.

What an idiot. That must have been the thinking. What a liability.

The bosses have encouraged a lot of racism from their star. After all of his remarkable success in that exact vein, the heave-ho might have come simply on the basis of pathetically poor judgment by a long-pampered precocious teen.