Beyond that, however, is the fundamental difference in their respective positions: Buckley came to be part of the political class, the coastal elite that has ruled the nation since its earliest days: Carlson targets those people as the hapless captains of a “ship of fools,” the title of his new book.Ī decadent and self-isolated elite elected Donald Trump, says Carlson. The revolution in conservative thought represented by Carlson sets many of what Buckley would have recognized as the central principles of modern conservatism on their head. The America First coalition personified by Carlson connects the paleoconservatives, long thought to be the least influential of the right’s many factions, with millions of radicalized middle Americans, the inhabitants of “flyover country”-that is, the least influential people in the nation, the “forgotten people” Trump directly appealed to. The original Buckley program brought together the three contending factions of the conservative movement: the anti-communists, the social conservatives, and the nascent libertarian movement. The “fusionism” of Buckley and National Review was a far cry from the unreconstructed America First-ism of an earlier American right, so ably reconfigured by Carlson for the twenty-first century. Both emerged as symbols of a new and rising movement, an insurgency on the right that delighted in confronting and demolishing the mythology of modern liberalism-“owning the libs” as we say nowadays-as Buckley regularly did on his PBS-aired TV show Firing Line and as Carlson does five times a week on Fox News. While Tucker Carlson’s rhetorical reach may not stretch as far and wide as Buckley’s, he evokes the same gaily combative spirit that young conservatives of the 1960s admired in the founder of National Review. The Bill Buckley of the paleoconservatives has arrived, and just in time for the Trump era. Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class Is Bringing

This review appears in the Winter 2019 issue of Modern Age.

Tucker carlson ship of fools review