Tucker Carlson bares his fangs

Tucker bares his fangs on the wrong side of history
What do the mobs want? That is the question.

AS part of the more cultured layer of the bourgeoisie's official "conservative section" (as opposed to "liberal", even though they are all conservative and reactionary, superficial differences depending on the issues and the misdirection necessary according to their pre-assigned roles)—Fox News host Tucker Carlson is now, consistent with his media platform's reactionary political posture, sputtering a great deal of vitriol at the apparently outrageous notion of "defunding the police".  Alternatively painting the protesters as a somewhat enigmatic "mob" and "rioters" (also a loaded word), in terms of their fuzzy goals, he's nonetheless on firmer ground when he argues the protesters are also evidently being used by the Democrats and their legion of shills to attack Trump. It's all about Trump, says Tucker. "The most privileged in our society are using the most desperate in our society to seize power from everyone else." Well, about that he may be right, partially right, that is, since no one can fully control social explosions of this kind at this incipient stage. Steer, maybe. Control, not that easy. But time may give the edge to the Democrats and their machinations, since spontaneism, that is, leaderless and non-clearly programmatic revolts, have a painfully short life. The relatively easy dissolution of Occupy reminds us of that, if nothing else. 

In the recent past, Tucker has been a voice of contrarian reason among rightwing yahoos, "outlefting" the pseudo left on various occasions (which is fairly easy when there is no real left at all or merely a caravan of phonies, opportunists and cowards marching under the misnomered Democrat label) so this time, when push comes to shove, either because he has stretched the leash too far, or out of genuine conviction, he's touting a line that is regrettably consistent with what his bosses and public expect. If so, that is not to be celebrated since Carlson reaches a working class  audience that needs and deserves a rational, honest, and nuanced analysis of what the current popular outburst is all about.

For an educated man, Tucker seems to forget that something as socially critical as the state's repressive forces may need re-examination from time to time, and history demonstrates that this does happen in almost all societies, "advanced" and industrialised as is typical of "the West", as well as in those still mired in structural poverty. This has been true ever since Louis XIV created the first urban police force to maintain order in Paris, a development assisted by the installation of street lights, gaining his city the famous appellation of Ville Lumière. Further, it is also axiomatic that, at any given time, the tasks assigned to the police in a capitalo-feudal society, protection of big private property (the foremost function), the containment and neutralisation of crime, etc., and the rules and judicial definitions by which it executes these functions, will all be set by the ruling class, which naturally, with some variations according to culture and history,  will always establish priorities guaranteeing its own survival and the extension of its enormous and stifling privileges. It's also noteworthy that the size of the police and its authorised behaviour will reflect the degree of actual equality and effective social justice existing in society, and most crucially, the level of fear of the people among the ruling elites, and the overall direction the ruling class wishes to take society to maintain and enlarge its enormous advantages. 

The American "nation state" has been defunct as an organic entity for some time, the precise date of its demise subject to debate, maybe it took to its deathbed right at the end of WW2, or perhaps much earlier, by the end of the Civil War, when America had already successfully flexed its imperial muscles against weaker nations (Ulysses Grant himself wrote he had been revolted by the cowardice and injustice implicit in the War against Mexico, in which he participated) but it is clear a monstrous parasite, the amoral and therefore sociopathic transnational corporate empire, has been in command for a very long time. Many Marxists, on the most tenuous margin of America's consciousness had warned about this over the years, But such reality has become more clear and irrefutable as American power diminishes and the habitual corruption, obscene violence, and inequality engendered by capitalism, turn increasingly inward, making the capitalist metropolis, ironically, more like its long victimised periphery. Yea, as Malcolm X and other revolutionaries predicted, the chickens are indeed coming home to roost and a severe awakening is bound to happen, nay, it is happening already, as witness the multiracial crowds marching in the wake of George Floyd's cold-blooded murder in broad social media daylight. 

Let's backtrack for a moment now and observe that, as even conservatives have often proclaimed, a just society is a peaceful society, and that, to quote Napoleon, you can do many things with bayonets, but not sit on them. This means that a regime based on force, however, dissimulated, is a regime whose instability—let alone inherent illegitimacy— will require constant and probably rising levels of violence to deter challenges, but which, in the end, will fall no matter how cleverly the folks at the top of the power pyramid play their devious cards. A society exhibiting grotesque levels of social, economic and political inequality is a society that requires a very large—indeed a bloated—police force to keep the masses at bay. In excruciating poverty, as any reader of Sociology 101 will tell you, not to mention institutionalised poverty aggravated by pervasive racism, crime will fester, as deviancy and a general disregard for the law will necessarily approach the norm. We don't need complicated statistics to show that crimes of violence and crimes against property, the most feared by all strata, are almost always faithful correlates of the socioeconomic condition of the population in question. Thus, ask any cop, how much violent crime they have to deal with in affluent neighborhoods. While invisible, white collar crime and antisocial offences of a bewildering sort inherent in the ruling class and their hirelings may be off the charts in those communities, the richest the worst, visible crime is practically nil. We should add that the systemic violence and constant theft that defines capitalist labour relations is also well kept under a luxuriant blanket of pervasive distraction and lies, the widely administered tranquilising soma for the clueless millions. In sum, in a society where equality prevails, justice will likely prevail, too, and democracy will flourish. The police role will be small and may tend to wither in time. This is obviously not America these days, or perhaps ever, so, as the injustices mount, the police keeps growing in numbers and militarisation tactics and mentality. 

Is there an exception then to the rule that the sheer size of a police force betrays the level of inequality and non-democracy existing in a society? The answer is yes, and that applies to nations suffering from foreign meddling in their affairs, with the object of, as it is clinically put these days, regime change. Revolutions, for example, usually create large police forces, but the origin of the phenomenon is not in the revolutionary DNA (as the right ceaselessly proclaims) but in the vicious, unrelenting efforts of the counter-revolutionaries and their powerful foreign allies to destroy the revolution and restore the unjust status quo ante. Something that normally opens the door to a bloodbath. From the French Revolution on down, to the Russian, Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Cuban, Chilean, Nicaraguan and now Iranian and Venezuelan revolutions, to mention but the most notable, this has been the case, the irrefutable record, even if several of these nations have come up with their own way of defending the revolution from internal and external enemies, by using peoples' militias, for example, instead of a more conventional security architecture.  

Which begs the question, could the historically biggest dispenser of criminal "meddling" in the modern world, by far the US empire, itself be the target now of some "foreign" induced social turmoil? The Democrats, to their eternal damnation, and for purely partisan, short-term and disgusting ends, have peddled this view for years, ever since Trump ascended to the throne, but the evidence has been sparse, tangential and evidently fabricated. In the current clime of turmoil and confusion, vermin like Obama advisor Susan Rice—a black American, mind you—and her warmongering allies have not wasted a moment to suggest the disturbances are the product of Russian interference in our affairs, which, like Russiagate, is as ridiculous and cynical a charge as it gets, none of which prevents this scum from reaching millions of clueless souls in Democrat media like MSNBC, CNN, etc, and its associated social media. 

For his part, and quite predictably, given his signature lack of finesse, Trump has wasted no time either, proclaiming that the disturbances are not so much a product of deeply entrenched repugnant inequities in the American system, but surely the work of foreign provocateurs, or terrorists, like "Antifa".  

Both parties—Trump and the venal and devious Democrats— conveniently assume a primary lie, an insultingly condescending lie, or, rather a cascade of lies to make tis fly: that (a) domestic conditions are so peaceful and filled with justice and equanimity that people need a foreign agitator to alert them to their own oppression. By this logic, any social outburst can be ascribed not to the ruling class that created and enforces such disgusting conditions, but to evil "outside agitators"; (b) that the American people—preternaturally stupid or gullible— will blindly follow a foreign version of US reality they can barely recognise, risking life and limb in pursuit of a rectification they don't need. 

So, Tucker, you may be damn right about the cynicism of the Democrats and their feigned loyalty to Blacks and the oppressed in general, but you must look more deeply into the roots and manifestations of social violence before issuing blanket condemnations that can only inflame further the threat presented by Trump's penchant for brute force to restore "law and order", a law and order regime of oligarchic dominance that has squandered its legitimacy and the trust of the people after more than a century of repeated betrayals. 

Maybe you can still inject a modicum of truth in your narrative, and explain to the Fox audience that the people's anger is justified, and that only a government of corporate tyrants can justify the kind of police currently in place all over America. Clearly, both have to be extensively reconfigured before America can look again in the mirror without disgust.