Tucker Carlson, Spain, and the American Perspective

Tucker Carlson was in Madrid recently, attending some of the anti-amnesty protests and sitting for an interview with La Gaceta de la Iberosfera, in which context he drew parallels between U.S. and Spanish politics, both having undergone a shift from democracy to oligarchy in recent years.

Either you’re going to have dictatorship—that’s where we’re moving—or you’re going to have some sort of mass reaction that’s going to bring us back to democracy. But we’re on a collision course. And I do think Spain leads the way. If you want to see what the next ten years in the rest of the West is going to look like, you look at Spain.

He described the protests as peaceful and not revolutionary in the sense of seeking to disrupt the functioning of institutions, but just the opposite. Tucker Carlson also praised Santiago Abascal, whom he had dinner with and spoke to while walking around Madrid. He described the VOX leader as the kind of person who changes history because he thinks in long timeframes, in generational terms.

The emphasis on democracy and patriotic civic mobilization has wide-reaching implications. The domination of Western economies by Big Tech platforms, central bank-generated inflation, and a ‘woke’ ideology reducing every identity to a consumable product are indeed opposed to popular, democratic representation. This is not so only because a large swath of society disagrees with them or because they tend to depress people’s purchasing power. It is so because society, by its nature, consists of partial associations (families, neighborhoods) that are meant to be self-administering and self-reproducing. The extraction of value and exertion of control stemming from the current Big Tech/central bank nexus precisely works against the ability of persons, families, neighborhoods—all the way up to nations—to administer and reproduce themselves.

The Spanish situation may also be of interest to American commentators because it is the result of a mainstream Left that became anti-national, so to speak, earlier than that of other Western countries (with the mainstream Right serving as loyal opposition; a mere rearguard and escape valve for social frustration). The Spanish Left also became reliant on a thoroughly negative account of its country’s history, invoking the ‘Black Legend’ in order to justify hostility against traditional institutions and identity. Today, an oikophobic approach to history is the norm across many countries. 

There is truth, then, to Carlson’s observation that Spain is ahead of the curve in some respects.

Beyond this, Spain’s current turmoil is occurring in the context of a certain change of orientation in sectors of the American Right vis-à-vis Spanish geopolitical ambitions. This is, in part, the fruit of the realization that a sense of shared Christian and, specifically, Iberian civilizational legacy would help counter the pro-Russian Sao Paulo Forum and Grupo Puebla’s near-hegemony in Central and South America.Of course, how a successful civic revolt translates geopolitically will depend on who happens to be in the White House when the squatter currently holed up in the Moncloa (Spain’s Prime Ministerial residence) is finally evicted.