There are sentences I did not expect to write. Here’s one I prepared earlier: I have started watching Tucker Carlson.
Not obsessively. I have not bought a bow tie. Jon Stewart destroyed that for me many years ago. I have not discovered that the principal problem facing Western civilisation is immigration, feminism or insufficient enthusiasm for Jesus. Nor that all is great in Putin’s Russia. Nor have I undergone one of those late-life political conversions in which a formerly irritating liberal announces that the left has gone too far and spends the remaining twenty years of his life appearing on podcasts complaining about pronouns.
I prefer Emily Maitlis and John Sopel. I like The News Agents. Maitlis appears to have discovered, since escaping the constraints of the BBC, both a more natural voice and the word fuck, and seems happier for both. Sopel remains Sopel: clever, sceptical, amused, sufficiently familiar with institutions to know how they work and sufficiently irreverent not to worship them.
I watch Owen Jones. I watch Sam Seder, Kyle Kulinski, sometimes The Young Turks. There is no shortage of intelligent criticism of American capitalism, American foreign policy or the increasingly strange distribution of wealth and power in the United States.
And yet, when something happens inside the American right – particularly around Israel, war, Trump, the security state or the relationship between money and politics – I find myself opening Tucker Carlson.
Sometimes Candace Owens.
This requires explanation.
I used to find both extremely difficult to listen to. There was a performative anger to much of what they did, a culture-war quality in which another absurdity committed by a liberal university student apparently heralded the collapse of civilisation. Owens came out of Turning Point USA and later the Daily Wire. Carlson became the most famous presenter on Fox News. They inhabited the political ecosystem I had spent much of my adult life regarding as reactionary.
I have not suddenly decided they were right all along.
Owens provides a particularly useful warning against that temptation. If Brigitte Macron was once a man is both absurd and irrelevant.
The interesting question is therefore not whether Candace Owens has become Walter Cronkite. It is why people like Owens and Carlson sometimes appear to be asking questions that large parts of respectable American politics seem peculiarly reluctant to ask.
In July Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review that the two American parties were in effective agreement on what he regards as the fundamental questions of “war and finance.” He had broken publicly with the Republicans over the war with Iran and Trump’s foreign policy, while remaining strongly nationalist and advocating, among other things, an end to immigration.
Carlson has not become left-wing. He is not Bernie Sanders. But he has become, in one particular sense, radical. He keeps pulling at things which are supposed to remain underground.
Why this war?
Why this alliance?
Who pays for it?
Who profits?
Why do politicians who disagree violently about bathrooms, universities and children’s books so often rediscover harmony when discussing weapons budgets?
Why does the state repeatedly announce its helplessness in the face of housing costs, medical bills, inequality or industrial decline, then reveal almost breathtaking competence when required to move aircraft carriers across an ocean?
These are not exclusively left-wing questions. They never were. But they once sounded much more at home on the American left than on the American right.
Something seems to have moved. For decades, the economic language of the American right was remarkably simple. Lower taxes. Less regulation. Free trade. Weaken organised labour. Allow capital to find its most efficient use. If a factory in Ohio closed and reopened in Guangdong, economic theory had an explanation. Consumers received cheaper televisions. Capital flowed more efficiently. Eventually everybody benefited.
A significant part of the contemporary conservative intellectual world now openly attacks that model.
American Compass, one of the organisations associated with the emerging post-neoliberal right, describes the older conservative programme as “market fundamentalism” and argues that markets should be judged by whether they sustain workers, families, communities and productive industry. Its programme embraces industrial policy, reshoring, worker representation and constraints on forms of capital that it regards as speculative or socially destructive.
You could have removed some of those sentences from an older social-democratic pamphlet, changed the nouns and nobody would have noticed.
That does not mean the new right has become social democratic either. Its conception of community can be nationalist, culturally conservative, exclusionary or religious. Its solutions can lead somewhere very different from those of the left.
But again: the questions have migrated. And they have done so because something happened to the society beneath them.
In 1983, 20.1% of American wage and salary workers belonged to unions. In 2025 the figure was 10%. For decades, the institutions which once translated economic grievance into organised politics weakened. Factories disappeared, financialisation expanded and labour became more precarious. Some regions prospered, others did not. At the same time, politics became extraordinarily good at discussing cultural symbols.
There is nothing imaginary about cultural conflict. Race, abortion, immigration, gender, religion and identity are real political questions. But they also became extraordinarily useful substitutes for another question:
Who owns what?
Or perhaps: Who gets what?
And then Trump arrived.
For a long period, Republicans and Democrats disagreed over the precise management of an economy whose basic architecture was largely accepted: globalised production, financial liberalisation, free movement of capital, weakening organised labour, technological disruption and the extraordinary accumulation of private wealth.
Then somebody came along and said the system was rigged.
The somebody happened to be a billionaire. America does irony well sometimes.
Trump’s answer was nationalism. Sanders offered another answer from the left. Their moral universes were profoundly different, but both recognised something the political centre had struggled to articulate: millions of people did not believe the economic system was working for them.
Only 24% of Americans told Pew this summer that economic conditions were good or excellent. Yet when asked which party’s economic policies they agreed with, 37% chose the Democrats and 36% the Republicans. One quarter chose neither.
People think something is wrong. They are considerably less certain that either political party knows what it is.
Into that space come Carlson, Owens, Seder, Kulinski, Jones, Sanders and hundreds of podcasters, streamers, Substack writers, conspiracists, Marxists, nationalists and men (usually) sitting in basements.
The old gatekeepers have lost much of their monopoly.
Some of what replaces them is excellent journalism. Some is complete rubbish and sometimes the distinction becomes apparent only around minute 47.
Which brings us to war.
America has spent decades describing government intervention in the economy as vaguely suspect while maintaining perhaps the world’s most magnificent example of state-directed industrial policy.
It is called the Pentagon. The United States did not fully abandon Keynes.
National-defence spending passed the trillion-dollar mark in fiscal 2026 under the broad accounting used by Brown University’s Costs of War project. Between 2020 and 2024, $771 billion in Pentagon contracts went to five large defence firms alone. Brown’s researchers also estimate that military expenditure produces substantially fewer jobs per dollar than equivalent spending on education or healthcare.
One can argue that defence spending is necessary. Given the world as it exists, much of it may be. But the ideological contradiction remains fascinating.
Government cannot pick winners. Except Lockheed Martin.
Government should not interfere with markets. Except when national security is invoked.
Public investment distorts the economy. Unless the investment explodes in foreign soil.
The point is not that aircraft carriers should be replaced tomorrow by kindergartens. States have military responsibilities.
The point is that America never stopped practising industrial policy. It merely restricted some of its most politically acceptable forms to defence, aerospace, intelligence and – increasingly – technology.
And now Silicon Valley is entering the same architecture.
Artificial intelligence, cloud computing, surveillance, cyber security and autonomous weapons are creating an ever closer relationship between the federal security apparatus and enormously powerful private technology companies.
The libertarian mythology remains oddly intact. The state is apparently oppressive until it becomes a customer.
This is where Carlson becomes interesting to me. Not because his answers are persuasive, but because he repeatedly points at the machinery.
Who benefits?
Why is this happening?
Why are we fighting?
Why does Congress behave this way?
Why does money move here rather than there?
Those are useful questions even when the person asking them subsequently reaches a conclusion I reject.
Israel has become one of the clearest places where this rupture is visible.
The traditional American political relationship with Israel rests on many things: strategic cooperation, military ties, congressional support, pro-Israel advocacy organisations, evangelical Christianity, historical attachment to Israel, Jewish-American political engagement and decades of bipartisan foreign-policy thinking.
Reducing all of that to a single “Zionist lobby” explains too little and invites too much conspiracy. But it is equally inadequate to pretend that the old consensus has remained untouched.
American opinion has shifted substantially. In Pew’s 2026 polling, 60% of Americans held an unfavourable view of Israel. Among Republicans aged 18 to 49, 57% did. Another Pew survey found Republicans under 30 viewing Israelis and Palestinians with roughly comparable favourability, a striking departure from older Republican voters.
This is precisely where Carlson sits: inside a conservative movement whose older religious and foreign-policy establishment remains strongly pro-Israel, while younger and more populist parts of the right increasingly question the relationship.
It is also where Candace Owens sits, although with fewer brakes.
And it is why their battles with their former allies matter beyond the personalities involved.
Something is breaking apart. The conservative coalition assembled over decades was always an improbable construction. Free-market libertarians, evangelical Christians, foreign-policy hawks, economic nationalists, corporations and social conservatives did not necessarily believe the same things. They believed enough of the same things, or hated enough of the same things, to remain in the same room.
Trump rearranged the furniture and now they are discovering they may not actually like one another.
There is no shortage of critique. The American left has serious things to say about inequality, medical care, corporate concentration, Gaza, trade unions, housing, monopoly power and the climate. One can listen to Seder or Kulinski and encounter a recognisable structural argument about what has gone wrong.
What seems less clear is the institutional vehicle through which that critique becomes a durable alternative political settlement.
That is different from saying there are no policies.
There are plenty. The missing element is closer to political imagination: a believable account of how the pieces fit together.
Which things should markets allocate and which should they not?
How much inequality can democracy absorb before political equality becomes fictional?
What does prosperity mean if GDP increases but people cannot afford houses, medical treatment or children?
Those are very old questions.
Perhaps that is why it is so strange hearing fragments of them emerge from the American right.
Sometimes an unreliable person notices something real. Sometimes a respectable person refuses to notice it.
That, I think, is why I watch Tucker Carlson.
Not because I have joined him. Because I want to know where the argument has gone.
The ideological map I grew up with no longer works terribly well. The left is not always where the anti-war argument lives. The right is not always where free-market orthodoxy lives. Protectionism, industrial policy and scepticism about corporate power have migrated across ideological borders. Younger conservatives can be markedly more sceptical about Israel than their parents. A nationalist broadcaster can attack Wall Street while a liberal economist explains the benefits of trade.
Everyone has wandered into somebody else’s room.
Political systems occasionally require their categories to break down before new ones emerge.
But it is also dangerous because a political vacuum does not distinguish between good explanations and seductive ones.
If people know that institutions are failing them but cannot agree why, explanations will arrive.
The oligarchs.
The immigrants.
The Jews.
The corporations.
The bureaucrats.
The Chinese.
The deep state.
The billionaires.
The woke.
The fascists.
Usually somebody has a podcast.
The task of serious politics is harder. It is to distinguish power from fantasy. To identify institutions rather than invent cabals. To ask who benefits without assuming that everybody benefiting met secretly in a hotel. To recognise that markets can fail without imagining markets are evil. To recognise that states can act without assuming states are benevolent. To recognise that military power may sometimes be necessary without allowing war to become an economic development programme.
And above all, perhaps, to recover the idea that an economy exists inside a society, rather than the other way around.
That was once an unremarkable proposition. Then for several decades it began to sound vaguely radical.
Now, strangely enough, you can sometimes hear it on the American right.
Which is why, to my continuing surprise, I occasionally find myself watching Tucker Carlson.
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