Tucker Carlson is a contrarian and a provocateur. These are both jobs that need to be done, but which are perilous. The need to be contrary can lead you into the error. The need to provoke can lead you into indecency.
But the virtue of contrarians and provocateurs is that they can free people to say true and important things which cut against elite and mass prejudices and taboos.
Carlson, a Fox News host, has freed up debate on a few important points lately. He’s raised a conservative critique of American capitalism, pointing out how the current economy doesn’t allow for a high-school-educated guy to raise a family. In the same breath, he’s violated a taboo by positing that there’s a real cost to our culture having fewer stay-at-home moms.
The beauty of both of these heresies is that they upset elites on both sides. The business lobby, the cultural elites, the Republican establishment, and the Democratic establishment don’t like any of these ideas.
And in a twisted, indirect way, Carlson has shattered taboos with comments he made a decade ago on a shock jock radio show — comments dredged back up by the liberal group Media Matters.
Specifically, Carlson has made it acceptable to point out that our public debate is raunchy and foul, that our attitudes towards sex and our conversations about it are depraved, and that this foulness and depravity has real human costs.
Carlson went a show whose host had the vaguely obscene name “Bubba the Love Sponge,” and made comments or went along with jokes degrading women, marriage, and sexuality. That ribaldry was the nature of the show doesn’t excuse Carlson’s comments. It indicts his decision to go on and play along.
This being 2019, the revelation of these comments has triggered a call for Carlson’s job. Media Matters is leading a charge to boycott Carlson’s advertisers for these decade-old sins. Carlson, being Carlson, is refusing to apologize or give in to the mob.
Surely an apology would do nothing to call off the wolves. There’s no absolution or redemption in the contemporary church of political correctness.
[Related: Tucker Carlson unapologetic, praises Fox News for not backing down]
So it’s an ugly mess. But the upside is that now we’re allowed to discuss the real harms of flippant attitudes towards sex and the sexualization of women.
If you tried to bring up those issues eight years ago, you would have been chased off the stage as a backwards prude dedicated to sexual repression. Consider that very recently — before we had a president who bragged about sexual assault — we had a president whose top asset on the campaign trail was rapper Jay-Z. Somehow, this seemed okay at the time.
“You know I thug em, f–k em, love em, leave em,” Obama’s favorite fundraiser explained in “Big Pimpin,'” “Cause I don’t f–kin need em.”
“Put your two lips on my wood and kiss it, could ya,” Obama’s good friend Jay-Z explained on another occasion.
The Obama White House also elevated vulgar sex columnist Dan Savage to be a crusader against bullying. Savage’s entire shtick was sexual depravity.
Even today, our press corps accepts as one of its colleagues a White House correspondent from Playboy, literally a smut publication.
Pornographic depravity, reducing sexuality to materialistic hedonism — in a word, debauchery — has been aggressively tolerated by the media elites. Chastise that debauchery and risk getting branded a prude. Hell, social scientists have even promulgated bogus studies arguing that sexual conservatism kills kids.
But now that someone has dragged up Tucker’s old bawdy remarks, we’re allowed, finally, to speak the truth: Modern American culture needs to treat sex more seriously. Our public discourse is far too lewd, and its lewdness is detrimental.
The irony is that much of Tucker’s current critique of today’s elites lead us towards this truth. The Left’s elites are constantly bashing the morality of the 1950s traditional family and small town, and constantly attacking the institutions (most importantly church institutions) that preserve, defend, and build the family and community. Then those same elites go home to Chevy Chase and Park Slope for supper with their intact families and bustling Little Leagues. They retire in the evening to the life they spent their workday undermining for others.
These are the elites Carlson is dedicated to challenging. But it’s not their conservative lifestyles that need challenging. It’s their unconservative assault on the norms and institutions that have historically helped the regular guy make good life decisions.
So here’s a salutary, contrarian, and provocative move for Carlson: Apologize, but not on the Left’s terms. Instead, apologize for appearing to endorse sexual licentiousness that violates moral law. Maybe begin by saying that sex is properly reserved for marriage, and so the jokes he made about a teenager sleeping with his teacher were immoral. Also, grant that the talk he indulged of teenage lesbians was indecent in seeming to endorse a hedonistic concept of sexuality.
A contrarian and provocateur, after all, need not push new ideas. Often the old ideas are the ones that most offend the elites.
