Tucker Carlson and National Conservatism

What is it about Tucker Carlson that unites the divergent ideologies of national conservatism? In July 2019, the writer and historian Thomas Meaney attended the first National Conservatism Conference in Washington, where Tucker Carlson, Peter Thiel, and other right-wing thinkers sought to expand on Donald Trump’s politics. One reason that Carlson is so effective, Meaney remarks, is his consistent attack on two common foes of national conservatism: neoliberalism, and the neoconservatism of the Bush years. “It’s the shared enemy rather than any kind of shared mission among themselves,” Meaney says. And while these shared enemies (and the National Conservatism Conference itself) are nothing new, they are newly relevant as Carlson relaunches his program on Twitter, declaring, “You can’t have a free society if people aren’t allowed to say what they think is true.”

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