The Right Should Reject Tucker Carlson’s Victimhood Populism

By David French January 4, 2019

Carlson accurately identifies certain maladies, but they are maladies that public policy can’t cure. Yesterday Tucker Carlson delivered the monologue heard around the conservative world. He addresses one of the fundamental questions of our time — why, when GDP is rising and America is immensely rich, are so very many of our fellow citizens dying deaths of despair? As he bluntly says, “Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot.”

He says many true things...............But he also says false things.

• He says that manufacturing “all but disappeared over the course of a generation.” It hasn’t.
• He says, “increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the affluent in America can afford.” Yet a healthy, faithful marriage is often the gateway to affluence. Affluence is not a prerequisite for marriage.
• He casts American boys as a generation of burnouts, yet the best evidence shows that marijuana use is only on a slight uptick and is still way down from its highs in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (Some evidence even suggests its use has stabilized in recent years.)
• And he talks about wealthier Americans as if they’re indifferent to the plight of their fellow Americans. Here’s Carlson: “Those very same affluent married people, the ones making virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much nothing to help the people below them get and stay married. Rich people are happy to fight malaria in Congo. But working to raise men’s wages in Dayton or Detroit? That’s crazy.”

I’m not sure where he’s getting the idea that America’s wealthy citizens care more about the Congo than their own country. In 2017, Americans gave more than $410 billion in charity, and the idea that this charity flows principally overseas is ludicrous........To Read More....


Here’s One Thing Tucker Carlson Gets Really Right

By David French January 4, 2019

As I’ve written on the home page today, I’ve got my own issues with Tucker Carlson’s viral populist monologue, but there’s one thing he says that’s exactly right:

Study after study has shown that when men make less than women, women generally don’t want to marry them. Maybe they should want to marry them, but they don’t. Over big populations, this causes a drop in marriage, a spike in out-of-wedlock births, and all the familiar disasters that inevitably follow — more drug and alcohol abuse, higher incarceration rates, fewer families formed in the next generation.

A number of progressives have called him out for this statement, including the ladies of The View, but the best evidence indicates that he’s correct. To take just one example, according to a 2016 study, while women are increasingly happy to marry less-educated men, they still tend to marry-up in income, and this is especially true for highly-educated women. Here, for example is an excerpt of an Institute for Family Studies interview with the study’s author, Yue Qian, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of British Columbia:...........To Read More....