Tacitus never saw the Teutonic forests, but in his first-century bestseller Germania, he told Romans that the German tribes who lived there had an “inherent love of liberty” and a rude kind of self-government. The men kept their women “fenced-in and chaste, without seductive display,” and if they caught a woman jumping the fence in adultery, they scourged her in public. They were an honorable and warlike people, and levying interest on loans was “unknown” among them.
Tacitus was an old-school republican orator from an established patrician family that had lost its status. The new, imperial Rome was glitzy, materialistic, hedonistic, and promiscuous. Tacitus rose through the system by playing a game he despised. When he praised the uncivilized Germans, he implicitly damned his over-civilized contemporaries. After writing Germania, he stepped back from public life. Perhaps he despised himself for his complicity in the trashing of republican virtue.
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Tucker Carlson was an old-school Republican orator from an established patrician family that lost its status. He rose through the system by playing a game he despised. He now praises Islam in terms closely resembling Tacitus’s praise of the German tribes, and with a similarly thwarted passion. Perhaps he despises himself for his complicity in the trashing of republican virtue, or at least the Republican coalition.
“There’s not a single Western city that’s thriving,” Carlson said in March. “They’re all in moral and physical decay because of self-hatred and a lost will to live.” By comparison, Carlson said, the “amazing” cities of the Middle East are full of “pride,” “self-confidence,” and “stability.” The reason is that, like the German tribes of Tacitus’ imagination, the Arabian tribes stayed true to their manly code: “Sharia law has made Islamic societies more advanced than the West.”
Carlson did not mean Baghdad, Beirut, Aleppo, Sanaa, and all the other cities ruined by sectarian and tribal warfare. He did not mean the slums of Cairo and Islamabad, which are timebombs of instability, or the oppressed millions of Tehran, or even the cities of Israel, which really are bursting with pride and self-confidence. He meant the Gulf monarchies, especially Qatar, the Islamist propaganda factory where he wants to buy a home and where every advance has come from the West.
Tacitus would call this “the stuff of fables.” Carlson’s fictions fall into a historical pattern. The Western appropriations of fantasy Islam are as venerable as they are delusional. Little more than a century after Ottoman armies had been repulsed from the gates of Vienna, Goethe was admiring the “rigid simplicity” of Muhammad’s doctrine. Thomas Carlyle, searching for models to counter the unmanning mediocrity of commerce and liberalism, acclaimed Muhammad as “a Hero-Prophet,” though he found the Quran a “wearisome, confused jumble” of “endless iterations, long-windedness, entanglement” and “insupportable stupidity,” albeit with a “vein of true, direct insight, of what we might also call poetry.”
“War to the knife against Rome! Peace and friendship with Islam,” Nietzsche wrote in The Anti-Christ. Christianity, Nietzsche claimed, suppressed the “noble and manly instincts,” and modern democracy was womanish. And on and on, through 20th-century academics such as Maxime Rodinson and Edward Said, who thought they could conscript Islam into their campaign against capitalism, to the crackpot Russian racist Aleksandr Dugin and the crackpot American racist Carlson, who idealize Islam as a counterforce to Western liberal decadence, to Piers Morgan and Megyn Kelly, whose willingness to degrade themselves for money resembles that of the hired freaks in another Roman indictment of late-republic decay, Petronius’ Satyricon.
Consider the descent from Goethe, Carlyle, and Nietzsche’s confused jumble to Carlson’s endless entanglement and Kelly’s insupportable stupidity, and it’s hard not to conclude that decadence is what it is, and nihilism is what it has become. Like all moral degenerates, Carlson blames the Jews and retreats into hyperbole and fantasy. There is “no sense in which Israel is an ally,” he says. Israel is a “liability.” It manipulates President Donald Trump, though Carlson coyly struggles to identify the “mechanism.” Its supporters manipulate the minds of ordinary Americans, who are, Carlson believes, too bovine to realize.
IRAN AND THE MODERN WAY OF WAR
The “people in charge don’t want you to know this,” Carlson says, “but Muslims love Jesus.” So much so that the Middle East’s Christian population has fallen from about 20% of the total in 1920 to less than 5% today. In Qatar, which Carlson calls a model of tolerance, apostasy from Islam is illegal, and Christianity is so loved that the handful of churches for Qatar’s miserably indentured foreign laborers operate under tight restrictions. Like Tacitus, Carlson’s political target is the “people in charge” in his own late republic. Unlike Tacitus, Carlson now finds most of his target audience outside his country. His resentment drives him to hatred and to pander to those who hate America.
Tacitus managed to return to public office after writing his histories. There will be no way back for Carlson. It took a while, but conservatives and Republicans now see him as little more than a clickbait Benedict Arnold. This too is the stuff of fables: Goethe’s Faust.
Dominic Green is a Washington Examiner columnist and a fellow of the Royal Historical Society. Find him on X @drdominicgreen.
