Tucker Carlson said in 2008 as the host of a major Ron Paul presidential campaign event, “I voted for Ron Paul in 1988 when I was in college.” Carlson was referring to Paul’s bid for president over three decades ago as the nominee of the Libertarian Party. “I voted for Ron Paul for a bunch of different reasons. One, I grew up in a libertarian family … I grew up around libertarianism.”
“I believe Ron Paul’s ideas are important,” Carlson said that night. “I believe Ron Paul’s personal example is inspiring, and I think the country benefits from listening to Ron Paul.”
Eleven years later, Carlson apparently has a different view of libertarianism.
“In Washington, almost nobody speaks for the majority of voters,” Carlson said Wednesday night on his top-rated Fox News program, portraying the conventional Republican as a “libertarian zealot controlled by the banks, yammering on about entrepreneurship and how we need to cut entitlements.” (As the Washington Examiner’s Tiana Lowe notes, who, exactly, are these Republicans willing to slash entitlements?)
After endorsing 2020 Democratic hopeful Sen. Elizabeth Warren’s economic program — a curious stance for a conservative pundit—Carlson asked if any Republican would dare show the same kind of “economic patriotism” the Massachusetts Democrat is offering.
“Probably not,” Carlson lamented. “Here’s the depressing part: Nobody you voted for said that, or would ever say it. Republicans in Congress can’t promise to protect American industries. They wouldn’t dare.”
Then he tore into libertarians again. “It might violate some principle of Austrian economics. It might make the Koch brothers angry. It might alienate the libertarian ideologues who, to this day, fund most Republican campaigns.”
In a follow-up segment Carlson pinned these destructive “Austrian” free market ideas on “libertarian” … Mitch McConnell?
Really?
Throughout both segments, Carlson conflated libertarianism with the current or at least pre-Trump economic policies of the U.S., the contemporary Republican Party, and insisted that the political class’s blind adherence to “libertarian” capitalism has hurt the middle class.
I had no idea libertarians were so powerful! Did Rand Paul actually win the last presidential election?
Similar to Carlson, there is another figure on the Right who has criticized current U.S. economic policy including the policies pushed by most Republicans and particularly McConnell — and this critic even takes issue with the term “capitalism”: Libertarian icon and one time Tucker Carlson-inspirer Ron Paul.
“I oppose today’s so-called capitalism. I don’t even like the word capitalism, I like free markets,” the former Texas representative said in 2016.
“But if you say free markets and capitalism together, we don’t have that,” Ron Paul continued. “We have interventionism. We have a planned economy. We have a welfare state. We have inflationism. We have central economic planning by a central bank.”
So much for libertarians being “controlled by the banks.” Carlson himself sympathized with Ron Paul’s concerns about America’s central bank, the Federal Reserve, in 2007.
“We have a belief in deficit financing,” Ron Paul continued. “It is so far removed from free market capitalism that it’s foolish for people to label it free market.”
“I am a champion of free markets, but not of the current system that we have today,” he said. Paul continued with sentiments Carlson might sympathize with. “It is designed to reward the rich; it is designed inevitably to destroy the middle class, and also to finance some of the worst things in government: all the deficits with the welfare state and for the warfare state” (emphasis added).
“So yes, it’s failing,” Ron Paul said, using the most un-Mitch McConnell-like rhetoric imaginable.
While Ron Paul no doubt rejects some of the protectionist measures Carlson advocates, he also rejects the current system he sees as a cronyist cabal that uses government to hammer the middle class to the benefit of elites, both political and corporate. Ron Paul has been saying this for years. Decades, even.
Carlson now says our current economic system disenfranchises the average American because free market libertarians are in charge. Ron Paul says our current system disenfranchises the average American because government empowers elites under the false pretense of the “free market” or “capitalism,” but he wishes actual libertarians were in charge because it would help the middle class.
Carlson is not wrong to question Republican economic orthodoxy and how it might hurt the middle class, but the system he’s challenging is not one born of the libertarian or Austrian economics Ron Paul advocates (far from it) but cronyism and bad trade deals (where not only Ron Paul and Donald Trump, but also Bernie Sanders share common ground) that endure under the auspices of free markets, while being anything but.
In the past, I’ve defended Carlson far more than I have taken issue with him, and while I might not necessarily agree with all of his policy prescriptions, he’s not wrong that America’s longtime economic priorities have been askew to the detriment of the middle class.
But libertarianism, or at least arguably the most prominent libertarian of the last few presidential elections, Ron Paul, has posed the same challenge to the status quo.
There have really been only two primary philosophies that have emerged on the Right over the last decade that have seriously targeted conventional political wisdom, economic or otherwise: Ron Paul’s conservative brand of libertarianism and Trump’s populism. There’s as much overlap between the two as there is divergence.
“I believe Ron Paul’s ideas are important,” Carlson proclaimed over a decade ago.
If he still believes this, and he may not, Carlson should not only show those ideas more respect, but quit lumping them in with today’s establishment-created disasters that have little to do with actual libertarianism.
If he still believes America could benefit from listening to Ron Paul, as he once did, Tucker Carlson should not only show more respect to the philosophy he claims to have grown up on, but to the man who popularized libertarianism more than anyone else this century.
Jack Hunter (@jackhunter74) is a contributor to the Washington Examiner‘s Beltway Confidential blog. He is the former political editor of Rare.us and co-authored the 2011 book The Tea Party Goes to Washington with Sen. Rand Paul.
