What Tucker Carlson’s Attack on America’s Top General Reveals about What Conservatives Really Believe

Before addressing the topic above, I want to announce a change of plans. As I told folks on our Friday call, I was planning to interview Sasha Polakow-Suransky this coming Friday about his book on the relationship between Israel and apartheid South Africa. But given the Palestinian Authority’s brutal murder of one of its critics, Nizar Banat, and the subsequent protests that have broken out in the West Bank, I’ve changed course.

I want to understand why the Palestinian Authority still exists, how it operates, and what might bring it down. So my guest this Friday will be University of Richmond assistant professor Dana El Kurd, author of Polarized and Demobilized: Legacies of Authoritarianism in Palestine, which explains why “the Palestinian Authority has become increasingly authoritarian, and Palestinians ever more polarized and demobilized.” The conversation will be at our regular time, Noon ET. Subscribe and join us.

OK, back to conservatives and the military. Last Thursday night, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson said something shocking. What made his comments shocking wasn’t their viciousness. That’s Carlson’s stock in trade. It was his target: America’s highest ranking military officer.

Carlson began this way: “Mark Milley is the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. He didn’t get that job because he’s brilliant or because he’s brave or because the people who know him respect him. He is not and they definitely don’t.”

Carlson then played a clip of Milley saying, in testimony before Congress: “I want to understand white rage…What is it that called thousands of people to assault this building and try to overturn the Constitution?”

To which Carlson responded: “Hard to believe that man wears a uniform. He’s that unimpressive.”

Carlson then showed another clip, in which Milley asked: “What is wrong with understanding, having some situational understanding of the country that we are here to defend?”

After which Carlson laughed, and then said, “He’s not only a pig. He’s stupid.”

Carlson’s sentiments are not unique. His fellow Fox host, Mark Levin, recently called both Milley and his boss, Defense Secretary and former four-star general Lloyd Austin, “a joke.” Another Fox host, Laura Ingraham, suggested Milley is on the take: “He’ll do everything they tell him as long as they keep the military industrial complex flush with cash.”

The right isn’t only deriding generals. They’re scorning police officers too. The day after Carlson’s attack on General Milley, a Washington police officer named Michael Fanone met with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy. On January 6, the mob that attacked the Capitol had beaten Fanone unconscious, leading him to suffer a brain injury and a heart attack. Fanone was upset that 21 House Republicans had voted against a bill honoring his colleagues who defended the Capitol, and that Republicans in Congress had compared the mob to a nonviolent tour group. Fanone also asked McCarthy to denounce GOP claims that the FBI was secretly behind the Capitol attack.

McCarthy refused.

What makes all this intriguing is that for as long as I’ve been alive, supporting the military and police has been considered essential to what it means to be an American conservative. In 1968, Richard Nixon won the presidency on a campaign of “law and order.” One month after assuming the presidency in 1981, Ronald Reagan scolded his predecessors for not adequately honoring Vietnam veterans. “They were greeted by no parades, no bands, no waving of the flag they had so nobly served,” Reagan said, “There’s been no ‘thank you’ for their sacrifice.” He pledged to remedy that failure.

In the Trump era, conservatives repeatedly berated Black athletes who knelt during the national anthem for disrespecting the US military and accused the Black Lives Matter movement of hostility to the police. During last year’s campaign, Trump rallies sometimes featured a modified American flag, which included a blue stripe meant to honor the nation’s police. 

How then can Carlson call America’s top general “a pig,” and McCarthy rebuff a wounded police officer who merely wants Republicans to acknowledge the truth about the brutal attack he and his colleagues endured? Why aren’t conservatives calling on both Carlson and McCarthy to resign?

The answer is that every ideology contains a hierarchy of attachments. American progressives, for instance, generally support labor unions. But when police unions impede efforts to restrain police violence, most progressives turn anti-union. They support organized labor. They just support racial justice more.

One of the fascinating things about Donald Trump is that by transgressing so many principles once considered foundational to American conservatism, he has exposed its true hierarchy of values. He’s revealed that white supremacy is the American right’s only true north star.

Consider the record. Trump has violated conservatism’s emphasis on Christian morality by brazenly cheating on his wife and exhibiting a profound ignorance of the Bible. He’s violated conservatism’s reverence for unfettered capitalism by massively hiking tariffs and threatening business leaders who move jobs abroad. He’s violated conservatism’s devotion to private property by seizing thousands of acres of private land to build his wall on the Mexican border. He’s violated conservatism’s supposed attachment to balanced budgets by dramatically increasing the federal debt. He’s violated conservatism’s traditional hard line against America’s foes by embracing anti-American dictators like Kim Jong Un and Vladimir Putin. He’s challenged conservatism’s devotion to American exceptionalism by telling Bill O’Reilly, “You think our country is so innocent?” after O’Reilly said the Russian government kills its political opponents. And, like Carlson, Trump has defied American conservatism’s veneration of the US military by calling troops who died in battle “losers” and “suckers.”

Despite all this, Trump retained overwhelmingly loyalty from both conservative voters and conservative politicians. According to exit polls, Trump in 2020 won the votes of 85% of self-declared conservatives, a higher percentage than any other Republican presidential candidate since 1976 (which, according to the New York Times, is as far back as the data goes).

Some have suggested that what convinced conservatives to overlook all these ideological lapses was Trump’s support for banning abortion. Others have claimed it was his support for tax cuts and deregulation. These, they claim, are the causes conservatives care about most.

It’s true that, as president, Trump hewed closely to the conservative line on abortion, taxes, and deregulation. And there’s no doubt that these actions helped him with his conservative base. But the problem with claiming that abortion or taxes are conservatism’s north star is that Trump also did extremely well among conservatives before he became president. In 2016, he won a higher share of the conservative vote than John McCain in 2008 or Ronald Reagan in 2000, and did as well as George W. Bush in 2000—even though it wasn’t at all clear back then that Trump was reliably conservative when it came to abortion and taxes. He had, after all, been pro-choice for much of his public life. And during the 2016 campaign he had proposed raising taxes on the rich.

Conservatism’s real north star is white supremacy. From the moment Trump launched his presidential campaign in 2015 with an attack on Mexican immigrants, his most consistent refrain has been his denigration of people he doesn’t consider white. As Ta-Nehisi Coates argued in 2017, “It is often said that Trump has no real ideology, which is not true—his ideology is white supremacy, in all its truculent and sanctimonious power.”

The Carlson and McCarthy episodes illustrate the point. How can Carlson—who has never spent a day in uniform—get away with doubting the bravery of General Milley, who served three tours in Afghanistan? How can McCarthy blow off a policeman, Michael Fanone, who was beaten unconscious defending members of Congress like him? Because General Milley said the military would oppose white supremacy and Officer Fanone opposed a mob convinced that Black and brown voters had stolen the election. For Carlson and McCarthy, what matters most about Milley and Fanone isn’t their loyalty to their nation. It is their betrayal of their tribe. As race-traitors, they have forfeited their right to respect.

Given American history, this shouldn’t be surprising. Between 1860 and 1865, eleven southern states seceded and took up arms against United States military—thus provoking a war that took the lives of more than 100,000 US troops—because they feared their government might no longer ensure that Black Americans remained enslaved. In 1946, a white mob in Winnsboro, South Carolina dragged Isaac Woodard Jr., a recently discharged Black Army sergeant still wearing his uniform, from a bus and beat him until he went blind. For much of the twentieth century, Bryan Stevenson, executive director of the Alabama-based Equal Justice Initiative, has noted, wearing a military uniform not only didn’t protect Black Americans from white violence. It provoked white violence. Because, on a Black person, the uniform suggested that Americanism might supersede whiteness. 

That’s the same principle that Carlson and McCarthy fear today.

Other stuff:

Israeli Foreign Minister Yair Lapid is furious that Poland’s government is impeding Jews from regaining property stolen from them in the 1940s. Because if there’s one principle the Israeli government cherishes, it’s that refugees should have their property returned.

In The New York Times, I wrote a column about why I hate a phrase the Biden administration loves: “rules-based order.”

For Jewish Currents, I interviewed Professor Khaled Al Hroub, an expert on Palestinian Islamism, about the irony that Israel’s new government both contains an Islamist party, Ra’am, and is at war with one, Hamas.

Currents, by the way, just won a whole bunch of awards. (Another reason you should subscribe).

Middle East Eye interviewed me about my evolving views on Israel-Palestine and the debate among American Jews.

If you have time, I found both of these old debates featuring Alan Dershowitz intriguing.

1) In this 2005 showdown with his old camp counselor, Noam Chomsky, Dershowitz asks (about 1 hour and 11 minutes in) whether any country faced with a comparable external threat has ever responded with as much restraint as Israel has. Chomsky, being Chomsky, has an unusual answer. He says Nicaragua in the 1980s responded with far greater restraint when threatened by the United States.

2) In this 2017 debate with Cornel West, Dershowitz says (around 24 minutes in) that Israel can’t be a settler-colonial enterprise because the Jews were returning home. To which West replies that Liberia was a settler-colony too.

Because of July 4, next week’s newsletter will arrive on Tuesday.

Hope to see you on our Friday call,

Peter