Tucker Carlson Joins the Movement Against Market Capitalism

Summary

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The Political Scene | The New Yorker

Episode: “Tucker Carlson Joins the Movement Against Market Capitalism”
Date: February 7, 2019
Host: Dorothy Wickenden
Guest: Evan Osnos

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Episode Overview

This episode delves into the surprising conservative backlash—led most notably by Fox News host Tucker Carlson—against unchecked market capitalism. Host Dorothy Wickenden and staff writer Evan Osnos explore how Carlson’s critique signals a broader rethinking across the political spectrum about the future of capitalism, wealth inequality, and what it means for the emerging 2020 election landscape. The conversation examines both right- and left-wing responses to economic dislocation and highlights how these shifting debates are redefining the boundaries of mainstream American politics.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Tucker Carlson’s Critique of Market Capitalism

• Tucker Carlson’s Message:
  Carlson publicly rebuked both political parties for perpetuating an economic system that enriches elites at the expense of average Americans, declaring, "We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long term obligation to the people they rule. They're day traders." (02:01, Carlson quoted)
• Carlson’s “Apostasy”:
  He argued that “market capitalism is not a religion... You’d have to be a fool to worship it,” marking a dramatic departure from standard GOP orthodoxy which has treated the free market as almost sacred. (02:13, Carlson quoted)

2. The Shift in Conservative Rhetoric

• Not a Sole Voice:
  Osnos identifies Carlson as a bellwether: “He is sensing that there is a real problem for the party... a sense that there is a system in place... which is simply not functioning for a large portion of the American public.” (03:21, Osnos)
• Historic Context:
  Until recently, even raising questions about capitalism was “sort of regarded as a kind of faintly political gesture,” whereas “now you’re hearing about it from all over the place.” (04:33, Osnos)

3. Parallels with the Left: New Democratic Priorities

• Wickenden observes similarities between Carlson’s argument and the critiques long advanced by Democrats such as Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders.
• “Just think back to the 2016 election, when Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were sounding exactly this alarm.” (05:15, Wickenden)
• The Democratic field—now including figures like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—is pushing once-marginal ideas (like wealth taxes and 70% top marginal rates) into mainstream debate.

4. The “Fix It to Save It” Approach Among Capitalists

• Self-Critique from Within:
  Leading financiers like Ray Dalio, Paul Tudor Jones, and Seth Klarman have called out the current system as unjust or unsustainable, even challenging the fundamental doctrine of maximizing shareholder value.
• Quote: “Seth Klarman...said that it’s time to re-examine...the core of any company is to maximize shareholder value...this system has gone too far and needs to be reexamined if we want it to survive for another generation.” (07:58, Osnos)

5. Republican Party Dynamics

• No Elected Leaders Yet:
  While radical critiques circulate in the conservative commentariat, Osnos notes, “you don’t hear yet anybody on the right, anybody in the party, any elected officials who are making a really forceful case for this.” (09:31, Osnos)
• However, he predicts these ideas are “going to make their way from the Tucker Carlsons of the world and into the mouths of elected officials as they realize there’s a market for it.” (10:12, Osnos)

6. Democratic Policy Proposals and the 2020 Landscape

• Warren’s wealth tax, Sanders’s expanded estate tax, and Ocasio-Cortez’s call for steep marginal rates are front and center.
• Notable context: “...it didn’t take very long for economic historians to come forward and say, actually, no, [70% top rate] was a big feature of American governance for the middle of the 20th century.” (11:15, Osnos)
• Recognition, even from centrists, that focusing on “accumulated family wealth” is the new terrain.

7. Consensus on Inequality

• On both sides, there’s acknowledgment that inequality has become unsustainable.
• “Ray Dalio...calls it a national emergency...the income gap has become essentially unsustainable.” (12:11, Osnos)

8. The Political Path Forward

• Democratic Dilemma:
  Will the party galvanize its left or appeal to “the middle”?
• Moderation Dominates:
  Osnos cites Pew data: “53% of registered Democrats want the party to move at a moderate pace. 40%...want it to move more sharply to the left.” (14:52, Osnos summarized)
• “Ideas that may sound radical right now, if they are modulated to appeal to where the bulk of the party is, you could end up with some pretty serious economic reforms that are not treated as crazy.” (15:27, Osnos)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• Tucker Carlson on Market Capitalism:
  “Market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You’d have to be a fool to worship it...Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having

Transcript

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[Dorothy Wickenden]

This is the Political Scene, a weekly conversation with New Yorker writers and editors about Politics. It's Thursday, February 7th. I'm Dorothy Wickenden, executive editor of the New Yorker. In President Trump's State of the UN he boasted about what he described as the unprecedented economic boom of the past two years, the creation of millions of new jobs, rising wages for blue collar workers, and 5 million people getting off food stamps. Not all conservatives paint such a sunny picture. Fox News host Tucker Carlson recently shocked his viewers by issuing a harsh critique of both parties for pursuing policies that reward the very rich at the expense of average Americans who continue to fall behind.

[Tucker Carlson (quoted)]

We are ruled by mercenaries who feel no long term obligation to the people they rule. They're day traders.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

He went on to describe what it would take to create, as he put it, a fair, decent and cohesive country.

[Tucker Carlson (quoted)]

But first, Republican leaders will have to acknowledge that market capitalism is not a religion. Market capitalism is a tool, like a staple gun or a toaster. You'd have to be a fool to worship it. Our system was created by human beings for the benefit of human beings. We do not exist to serve markets. Just the opposite. Any economic system that weakens and destroys families is not worth having. A system like that is the enemy of a healthy society.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Evan Osnos joins me from Washington to discuss how the two parties are addressing economic inequities and how the issue is shaping the 2020 election. Evan, welcome.

[Evan Osnos]

Thanks, Dorothy.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

This week I was struck by a column in the New York Times by Thomas Edsel, who wrote about the conservative firestorm around Carlson's remark. In the course of the piece, he asked Dean Baker at the liberal center for Economic and Policy Research to respond to Carlson, and Baker said, it's a bit scary to me how much of this I agree with. So how much of an outlier is Carlson on this particular point?

[Evan Osnos]

Tucker Carlson is picking up on something in the air. I mean, I think he is. I mean, he really has been, as much as anybody, a mouthpiece for the Trump era of the Republican Party. I mean, he was for a long time, of course, he was known as being almost a cartoon of an establishment Republican, right down to the bow tie. And then he renounced the bow tie and sort of came out as a Donald Trump Republican. And now what he's doing is he is sensing that there is a real problem for the party, and that is around economic issues and particularly around a sense that there is a system in place, system today which is simply not functioning for a large portion of the American public. I mean, I was really struck when Tucker Carlson came out and said that market capitalism is not a religion. That really is, and to use his words, that really is apostasy. For the last several decades, if you were going to boil down the single most enduring and common fact of Republican ideology in it has been that market capitalism is practically a religion.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And by the way, if any Democrat.

[Evan Osnos]

Had made that comment, yeah, they would have been, you know, driven out of Washington. I mean, it's only. So I think he is not originating an idea. In fact, Tucker Carlson is sort of amplifying and picking up on something that's out there. And there's really like a growing debate, I would say, from all angles about what the future of capitalism should look like, who does it serve, how does it function. And even the idea, Dorothy, that we're using the word capitalism now as a, a subject of discussion, even that is something that didn't happen A few years ago. If you talked about capitalism as a system, it was sort of regarded as a kind of faintly political gesture. But now you're hearing about it from all over the place and that's a change.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And just think back to the 2016 election, when Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders were sounding exactly this alarm. And they were seeing even in the Democratic Party as pretty far left, kind of outrageously so. And yet now we're seeing members of the new congressional class, Alexandria Ocasio Cortez among them, the superstar of the left wing of the party, sounding the same notes. So we saw in Trump's State of the Union how he leapt in to describe Democrats in general as socialists. And this will become a big talking point. It already has. And he said, you know, America will never be a socialist country. And then right after that, his treasury secretary, Steve Mnookin, picked up on it and defended the administration's economic policies. We're not going back to socialism. So is that going to work?

[Evan Osnos]

Well, what you hear from Republicans now is that we have to fix the capitalist system in order to save it. And that is a sort of subtly different message than what you're hearing from Ocasio Cortez and from Elizabeth Warren, which is that there is this fundamental problem in the nature of capitalism.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

So what do they mean, though, when they say fix it to save it?

[Evan Osnos]

I'll give you a couple of examples. So I've been following lately some really interesting discussion that's been happening among big time investors. These are big time capitalists by their own description. People like Ray Dalio, who runs the biggest hedge fund in the world, Bridgewater, and a guy named Paul Tudor Jones, who's also a big hedge fund investor, both of them have been saying over the last couple of years, but it's really become more pronounced lately that as Dalio puts it, capitalism is not working for most people. And Paul Tudor Jones says that it's time to recognize that the system as it's functioning now is in many ways, to use his word, unjust. That's striking that they are picking up on this populism on the left and on the right, and they believe that it threatens the future of the system that they have benefited from and that they believe, and I think they genuinely do believe, and I think most people would probably agree, capitalism is probably the system that the United States will and should have going into the future. The question is, what is that going to look like? I wrote recently about somebody named Seth Klarman, who's a big investor in Boston, very well regarded guy who generally keeps his head down. And he came out with a speech in the fall in which he said that it's time to re examine the idea that the core of any company is to maximize shareholder value. I mean, that idea of maximizing shareholder value, really, which has just been absolute doctrine for companies for the last 25, 30 years, is now recognized as having contributed in a lot of ways to the wealth gap in the United States, to the soaring income of CEOs and what you have here in Seth Klarman is somebody who is one of America's most successful shareholders saying basically this system has gone too far and needs to be reexamined if we want it to survive for another generation.

[Katie Drummond]

I'm Katie Drummond. I'm Wired's Global Editorial director.

[Evan Osnos]

I'm Michael Kollory, Wired's Director of consumer Tech and culture.

[Katie Drummond]

And I'm Lauren Good. I'm a senior correspondent at Wired. And our show Uncanny Valley is about the people, power and influence of Silicon Valley. And right now, Silicon Valley and Washington have never been more intertwined. So each week we get together to talk about a big story, often at the intersection of tech and politics.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Right.

[Evan Osnos]

So whether we're talking about Trump, Coin, Doge or Elon Musk, we will always explain how these Silicon Valley forces are.

[Katie Drummond]

Affecting Washington and how they affect you. Make sure you're following Uncanny Valley in your podcast app of choice so you don't miss an episode.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

These are such big, fundamental questions about the nature of capitalism and the free market. And they are apostasies in the modern Republican Party. Aside from these people in the finance industry whom you've mentioned, do you see any of this making its way into the talking points of some members of the Republican Party?

[Evan Osnos]

Well, what you're starting to hear is traces of this coming up in the kind of commentariat, you know, the Republican thinkers. I think there's a recognition that the President's approach, which has really been to continue to try to fan fears around immigration and to try to point the finger at markets overseas at China, that there is a limit to how far that can go when voters in their daily lives are picking up the newspaper and seeing that they continues to be this extraordinary and growing wealth gap in the United States and that nothing that the party has done in the two and a half years it's been in power has addressed that. In fact, if anything, it's made it more pronounced because of tax cuts. So you don't hear yet anybody on the right, anybody in the party, any elected officials who are making a really forceful case for this. But I can promise you that this is the kind of thing that is going to make its way from the Tucker Carlson's of the world and into the mouths of elected officials as they realize there's a market for it.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And what about the ideas that are under discussion among Democrats? Sanders just recently pitched his plan to raise the estate tax on the wealthiest 0.2% of Americans. @ a time when Republicans are talking about abolishing this estate tax.

[Evan Osnos]

Well, you've got also, Elizabeth Warren has put forward what she's calling a wealth tax, which would be 2% on people with wealth over 50 million, 3% above a billion dollars. Ocasio Cortez talking about raising marginal tax rates on the highest earners to 70%, which is also.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

That is not even the highest it's been historically in America.

[Evan Osnos]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, when this first came out, people said. People gasped and said, My God, 70%. And then it didn't take very long for economic historians to come forward and say, actually, no, that was a big feature of American governance for the middle of the 20th century, when the American system was at its most prosperous. So I think for inst. The wealth tax that Elizabeth Warren has put forward is one that is not a crazy notion. It's actually been an idea that's been around in one form or another for a long time. Our colleague John Cassidy wrote a very good piece about it recently where he says, whether or not it ends up taking the form that she's put it in now, it is addressing a fundamental fact about taxation that has gone unaddressed, which is that it's not just about income, but it's actually about accumulated family wealth. And how do you deal with that?

[Dorothy Wickenden]

And that's a version, actually, of what Klarman was talking to you about in broad, broad terms about saving capitalism by addressing inequality.

[Evan Osnos]

Yes, exactly. One thing, Dorothy, that is clear is that across all of these different proposals, and on the left and on the right is a recognition that the income gap has become essentially unsustainable. Ray Dalio, who I mentioned earlier is a big hedge fund investor, calls it a national emergency. Even people who are at the highest end of the income scale recognize that inequality as it is now is unsustainable. And the question then becomes, as you process that through the political system, what comes out as viable? And that's really what a 2020 primary is for. I mean, that's what it's about. You will begin this process with each of the candidates, whether it's Warren or Cory Booker or Bernie Sanders or Sherrod Brown, whatever the lineup, Kamala Harris, whatever.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

It ends up being her own plan about, you know, a tax credit to help middle Class families.

[Evan Osnos]

Right. And you've heard her, for instance, on when it comes to things like single payer health insurance, she has moved further towards the left. She is, in theory, at least right now, is signed on to the Bernie Sanders idea that would, in effect, eliminate private insurance. Whether she ends up there at the end of this process, we don't know. But that's what the primary process is for. But it is strong, striking how the process is beginning right now at a place with ideas that would have been considered intolerable four years ago if Hillary Clinton had put forward these ideas.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Well, so this dislocation we're talking about is partly a result of policy decisions of the past 40 or 50 years, lower taxes on the wealthy, deregulation of banks and other industries and so on. But it's also the result of massive dislocating economic and cultural changes. And that's, of course, what got Trump elected and as you mentioned, by fear mongering above and beyond anything else. So do you think that the Democrats will be able to ease those fears by putting forward some of these plans that promise to address those who are falling behind?

[Evan Osnos]

I do think there is real political potential for somebody to come along, whether they're on the left or on the right, and to pick up the energy that Trump tapped into, which was this profound frustration with the nature of employment, with the inability to make any gains in terms of wages or overall family wealth for a huge portion of the United States, and to put that into a new framework that is not about pointing the finger at immigrants. It's not about saying that the world is out to get us and begins to talk about some of the underlying economic issues. There are a lot of Americans who recoil from Trump's language about immigrants and his policies, certainly, but they do respond to some of the things that he and Bernie Sanders were saying about how the system as it is now just can't go on. There was an interesting Pew poll the other day among registered Democrats, and it found that 53% of registered Democrats want the party to move at a moderate pace. 40% of Democrats, registered Democrats want it to move more sharply to the left. What that tells you is that the Democratic Party today, even, even though there is so much discussion around moving farther to the left, that it is still fundamentally looking for moderate changes. That means that ideas that may sound radical right now, if they are modulated to appeal to where the bulk of the party is, you could end up with some pretty serious economic reforms that are not treated as crazy and that.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Could win over some of the I mean, I suppose not Trump's, you know, truly hardcore, but some of the voters who voted for Barack Obama twice and then voted for Trump in 2016.

[Evan Osnos]

That's the theory. Yeah. I mean, that is the theory and it's an open question. I mean, there's a real debate among Democrats about whether the party's success hinges on galvanizing the left side of the party and making every single person come to the polls around an exciting candidate who is speaking to them, or whether it is about appealing to the middle. This is the age old question. I think what the numbers so far suggest is if you can peel off some disaffected Trump voters, you may be able to pull that off.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Okay, thanks so much, Evan. We will have you back in coming months.

[Evan Osnos]

Thanks, Dorothy.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

Evan Osnos is a staff writer and the author of Age of Ambition, Chasing Fortune, Truth and Faith in the New China. This has been the Political scene from the New Yorker. You can subscribe to this and other New Yorker podcasts by searching for the New Yorker in your podcast app and find more political analysis and commentary on new yorker.com Feel free to rate and review the political scene on Apple Podcasts. Our theme music is by Russell Gillespie. This program is produced by Alex Barron and Hannah Wilentz. For New Yorker.com I'm Dorothy Wickenden.

[David Remnick]

Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown Jackson, Newt Gingrich, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlemagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.

[Dorothy Wickenden]

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