Tucker Carlson is not an economic populist (Part one in a series)

The notion of an ascendant right-wing economic populism should have died with Donald Trump’s first years in office. Recall that Trump campaigned in 2016 on raising the minimum wage to $10/hour, protecting Social Security and Medicare, re-instating Glass-Steagall, and even delivering universal health care, but has reneged on all of these promises.

Beyond prosecuting an erratic trade war with China, and signing the USMCA, which was so innocuous to corporate power that nearly all members of Congress voted for it, Trump’s policies have been thoroughly anti-progressive.

A group of Trump-admiring conservatives have nevertheless wrapped themselves in the mantle of “right-wing economic populism.” But like Trump’s, this group’s economic populism is wildly overrated at best. In a series of articles, I shall critique their most prominent members:

This first entry in this series is Fox News talk show host, Tucker Carlson.

In a famous 2018 segment on his Fox show, Carlson attacked Amazon, Wal-Mart, and large corporations in general for paying low wages while effectively being subsidized by governments who provide food stamps, Medicaid, and other benefits to their workers.

The segment has been credited with helping to compel Amazon to pay a minimum wage of $15 per hour to all of its employees, and has been the subject of several op-ed articles. It also helped form the popular notion that Bernie Sanders and Tucker Carlson share similar views of corporate power.

It is perhaps the single best expression of Carlson’s “economic populism.” But it implies a mostly right-libertarian view of economics, and in turn, exposes Carlson’s economic populism as a fraud.

Carlson conveyed five ideas of substance in the piece: 1) that “liberals” and “the left” are plutocrats’ principal enablers, 2) that U.S. taxpayers should not fund welfare benefits to underpaid employees of wealthy corporations, 3) that free markets are best, 4) that regulations advantage monopolies over competitors, and 5) that Bernie Sanders’ “Stop Bezos Act” is a good bill.

A few of these ideas seem to be economically populist at first glance. But in the full context of Carlson’s piece, they reflect a right-libertarian ideology — if they are even coherent.

I. Carlson’s attack on “the left.”

In the piece, Carlson claimed that large corporations are “the backbone of the left,” and that Sanders and Jeff Bezos are ideological allies who are “both left wing activists.” He also suggested that Democrats, rather than Republicans, receive the lions’ share of corporate donations.

Such claims demand a heavy burden of proof that Carlson does not attempt to carry. Bernie Sanders, of course, eschews campaign donations from corporations. So do many of Sanders’ left-wing allies, such as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. And Carlson offered no evidence that Sanders and Bezos agree on anything.

That “the left” benefits from corporate largesse as much as Republicans do is only plausible if you assume that the Democratic Party as a whole, rather than its left wing, represents “the left.” Nor is Carlson correct that Democrats receive far more money from corporations than Republicans do — although Carlson used the historical anomaly of Clinton’s being better-funded than Trump in 2016 to distort this picture.*

So yes, Carlson’s segment was dishonest and hacky. But if we ascribe to him a right-libertarian view (which he explicitly asserts later in the segment, as shall be seen), his insisting on attacking “the left” and refusing to attack Republicans gains coherence.

For right-libertarians, the only way that politicians can unfairly serve corporations is by interfering with the free market. And since Democrats’ enriching Amazon by providing food stamps to their employees interferes with free markets, it is by definition an unfair way of helping corporations (Carlson mostly faults Democrats, rather than Republicans, for giving welfare to Amazon workers — as if Republicans would let them starve.)

By contrast, most ways that Republicans bolster corporate power result in freer markets, according to right-libertarians. Tax abatements, gutting labor regulations, implementing right-to-work laws, and packing the courts and presidential cabinets with foes of labor all engender free markets, for right-libertarians. Therefore, these are all fair and even proper ways of helping corporations.

And so, Carlson’s idiosyncratic view that Democrats do corporate bidding and Republicans mostly do not, seems to reflect a right-libertarian ideology that is the opposite of economic populism. Or, perhaps he is simply a partisan hack, who is biased against Democrats because he works for Fox News.

II. Carlson explicitly endorses the “free market,” and denounces regulation in his segment.

Carlson rightly views Amazon, Wal-Mart, and Uber as de facto monopolies. But like right-libertarians, and unlike serious anti-monopolists, Carlson’s solution for ending monopolies is to decrease government regulation. He gave a full-throated endorsement of standard right-wing libertarianism in his segment:

“Conservatives, like us, support the free market, and for good reason; the free market works. But there’s nothing free about this market. A lot of these companies operate as monopolies. They hate markets. They use government regulations to crush markets.”

The idea that regulations have much to do with monopolies in the first place is already a stretch. That they advantage large corporations over small ones to such an extent that they crush markets and ensure monopolies enters cuckoo territory.

But lunatic as it seems, the belief that regulations create monopolies is common among libertarians. This is what I think they (and Carlson) mean when they claim this:

Large companies are more powerful than small ones. It is therefore easier for large companies to abide by health, safety, environmental, and labor regulations — and every sort of regulation — than smaller companies. Therefore, all regulations tend to hurt smaller companies and empower larger ones.

This is of course a silly reason to oppose regulation in general. Governments do not require that minimum wages be paid, or safety standards be met, in order to empower large companies. And it is a silly (almost tautological) argument on its face. But it is the only coherent way to explain why regulations in general might provide a comparative advantage to large companies.

Unhappily, for Carlson, regulations are totally irrelevant to his condemnation of Amazon — for governments’ providing welfare benefits to workers is the opposite of a burdensome regulation. And low-wage workers at small businesses get food stamps too, just as workers at Amazon do. So, welfare benefits afford no comparative advantage to Bezos over small businesses. All businesses, large and small, benefit when they pay starvation wages and governments pick up the slack.

So, it remains unclear why Carlson even mentioned regulations in his segment, and what they have to do with his complaint against Amazon. What is more clear is that Carlson wished to signal his fealty to a right-libertarian ideology that quite opposes the economic populism that he gets credited with.

III. Unlike Sanders, Carlson does not support raising the minimum wage.

Carlson’s reputation for economic populism rests largely on his having endorsed, in his segment, Sanders’ “Stop BEZOS Act.” This bill would have forced large companies to pay in new taxes, the equivalent of what their workers receive in welfare benefits.

Sanders’ bill famously pressured Amazon to codify a $15 minimum wage for its workers. But the bill in itself, would not have raised low-wage workers’ pay at large corporations. It merely would have raised taxes so that the government would “break even” with Amazon.

Amazon, presumably, raised its wage floor to avoid the embarrassment that the bill brought upon the company. And this was a big win for Sanders.

But unlike Sanders, who enthusiastically supports a $15 minimum wage, Carlson has not publicly supported any hike to the current federal minimum wage of $7.25.

In a hostile interview with Fight for $15 leader Kendall Fells in 2017, Carlson said, “I’m always for higher wages. I’m not even here to make a case against raising the minimum wage. You could make a case for it.”

At the time of that interview, the federal minimum wage had not been raised for a full decade, and Carlson was still ambivalent (at best) about whether it should be raised at all.

Carlson dislikes low wages, but is unwilling to embrace the obvious solution to raising them. And Carlson cannot pretend to believe, as many Republicans do, that raising the minimum wage won’t work — because his whole segment is premised on the notion that large companies can pay higher wages, but choose not to.

That makes Carlson worse than a libertarian. Carlson does not want to raise the minimum wage, apparently because he does not care whether Amazon workers earn a living wage — unlike right-libertarians who claim that minimum wages “hurt the very people whom they are supposed to help.”

Indeed, it is far worse than that. Since he opposes their receiving food stamps, but does not want a guarantee that their wages will be raised to compensate for this, Carlson actually does not care if Amazon workers starve.

That’s economic populism? Carlson is, to the contrary, far less economically populist than the Democrats whom he despises, who at least would have low wage workers eat.

And of course, one must note — although Carlson irresponsibly refuses to — that Democrats have wanted to raise the minimum wage for many years, but have failed to, because of Republican opposition. And if Democrats ever do manage to raise the minimum wage, then the federal government will spend less money on welfare benefits than it does now.

If that happens, Carlson’s conspiracy theory falls apart: It becomes clear that Democrats provide food stamps to low wage workers, not simply to enrich Jeff Bezos types. They do so because they want these workers to live with a minimal level of dignity and security — but would prefer that their wages alone would afford them such comforts.

Thus, given a thorough hearing, Tucker Carlson’s most famously “economically populist” segment of commentary indicates a few aspects of Carlson’s thought:

It indicates a partisan hackery that insists on only blaming Democrats for subservience to corporations.

It indicates a refusal to think arguments through, to the point where Carlson essentially blames the party who wants to raise the minimum wage for low workers’ low wages — rather than the party that is actually keeping them low.

It indicates an ideology that is akin to right-libertarianism.

But it does not, by any stretch, indicate an authentic economic populism

* Recall that Clinton was widely expected to win throughout the 2016 campaign, that Trump frequently pretended that he was self-financing his campaign, and that Trump is widely viewed as being personally despicable. These factors best explain Clinton’s massive fundraising advantage. The notion that Trump does not serve corporate interests as well as Clinton would have, is risible now, and was in 2016.