FOX EXITS OVER CARLSON REVEAL ALARMING TRUTH
It is fitting that two Fox News contributors have severed their ties with the network over Tucker Carlson’s glorification of Jan. 6 at exactly the moment when more than 150 scholars are sounding a loud, clanging alarm about the future of our democracy.
Because these two stories are unsettlingly related. Both should rivet our attention on the increasing flirtation among large swaths of the right with political violence, and on the role that the right’s campaign to delegitimize our political system is playing in it.
The two contributors — conservative writers Stephen Hayes and Jonah Goldberg — quit Fox to protest Carlson’s online special “Patriot Purge.” As Ben Smith of The New York Times reports, they objected to its depiction of an alternate history of Jan. 6 as a “false flag” designed to create a pretext to persecute conservatives.
This is being widely seen as the latest sign that the right’s institutions are purging themselves of the few remaining conservatives who are hostile to Donald Trump and his movement.
What’s more interesting is why this was the final straw for the two Trump critics. Hayes told the Times he was alarmed by Carlson’s propagandistic recasting of federal prosecutions of the rioters as a “domestic war on terror” against the right.
Specifically, Hayes noted that he was disturbed by Carlson’s comparison of Jan. 6 defendants to terrorism suspects tortured by the United States, and his suggestion that “half the country is going to be subject to this kind of treatment.” Hayes said this is “truly dangerous”:
In a follow-up statement, Hayes and Goldberg cited a quote from Carlson’s video — “the left is hunting the right” — and noted that this rhetoric could prompt Americans to act on it.
This moment could prove useful, by prompting a renewed focus on the right’s flirtation with political violence, whose manifestations are everywhere. As a good roundup from Steve Benen demonstrates, these include far-right members of Congress openly fantasizing about killing Democrats, and a refusal of GOP leaders to impose accountability for it.
But a true reckoning requires more than just observing this trend. It also requires reflecting on the instrumental nature of propaganda like that coming from Carlson. Much of the discussion treats the possibility of violence as a mere incidental byproduct of that propaganda, depicting it merely as conspiracy-theorizing-for-profit getting out of control. But this isn’t quite right.
Instead, let’s note that this bundle of propagandistic devices — the suggestions that our system is incapable of rendering trustworthy or legitimate outcomes, that the Jan. 6 rioters’ underlying cause was just, that they are persecuted political prisoners, and that this reflects broader scorched-earth warfare the left is waging on conservatives via our institutions — has a purpose.
This isn’t to say the propaganda is a deliberate effort to incite violence. The point is broader: It’s that all this appears designed to lay the justificatory foundation for efforts to resist or subvert legitimate democratic outcomes by any means necessary or available in the future.
That is what creates the risk of sparking more violence. That is what is so dangerous about what we’re seeing now.
Which brings us to a new letter signed by dozens of scholars. They warn that attacks on the “legitimacy of America’s elections” and, importantly, the use of this as justification to lay the groundwork to subvert democratic outcomes later, has grown to a crisis point.
This “represents a clear and present threat to the future of electoral democracy in the United States,” they warn, adding: “The history of other crisis-ridden democracies tells us this threat cannot be wished away. It must be promptly and forthrightly confronted.”
We should appreciate the decision by Hayes and Goldberg to quit over this. If anything, we need more public displays of alarm about this clear and present danger. It isn’t going away.