Tucker Carlson, like Burke, Maistre, and Donoso, sees the political struggle as, at root, a religious struggle. And, like St. Augustine, he sees that this struggle is one of good and evil.
Two days before Tucker Carlson was ousted from the Fox News team, he gave a speech at the 50th anniversary event of the Heritage Foundation, arguably America’s most celebrated conservative public policy think tank. The speech was a remarkable example of gripping content delivered with rhetorical excellence, as he combined a reflective—almost rambling—style with acute lucidity. In his address, Carlson suggested that the political tradition which the Anglosphere largely perfected, namely that of ongoing democratic negotiation by various factions who together represent both the unity and divisions of the whole polity, was rapidly waning. Now, he claimed, politics is about good and evil.
Carlson, in the final five minutes of his speech, expressed his concern that many were still stuck in the democratic forms that belong to decades ago, which, in his opinion, simply do not exist anymore:
It might be time to start to reassess the terms we use to describe what we’re watching … The assumption was—and this is a very Anglo-American assumption—that the debates we were having were rational debates about the way to get to mutually agreed upon outcomes. So, we all want the country to be more prosperous and for people to be less oppressed, or whatever, so we’re going to argue about tax rates … but the objective is the same. So, we wrote our papers, and they wrote their papers, and may the best papers win. I don’t think that’s what we’re watching now at all, I don’t think we’re watching a debate about how to get to the best outcome. I think that’s completely wrong.
This preamble suggested that Carlson was going to say that we’ve moved out of an ‘efficiency- and productivity-based’ discourse—centred on taxation, property availability, the market, private ownership, and individual liberties—to a ‘values-based’ discourse centred on identity and morality. Such an observation marks, of course, a common emerging theme among commentators on both the Right and the Left. His address, though, took a direction that echoed Cardinal Manning’s famous remark to Hilaire Belloc that “All human conflict is ultimately theological”:
There’s no way to assess, say, the trangenderist movement with that mindset; policy papers don’t account for it at all. If you have a people who are saying, ‘I have an idea, let’s castrate the next generation, and let’s sexually mutilate children,’ that’s not a political debate. What? That has nothing to do with politics. What outcome are we desiring here? An androgenous population? Are we arguing for that? I didn’t know anyone could defend that as a positive outcome … If you say, ‘I think abortion is always bad,’ ‘Well, I think it’s sometimes necessary,’ that’s a debate I’m familiar with. But if you’re telling me that you think that abortion is a positive good, then what are you saying? Well, you’re arguing for child sacrifice … When the Treasury Secretary stands up and says, ‘You know what you could do to help the economy, you could go get an abortion,’ well that’s an Aztec principle, actually. There isn’t a society in history that didn’t practice human sacrifice. Not one. I checked… It wasn’t just the Mesoamericans. It was everybody. So, it’s like, that’s what that is.
Carlson’s observation repeats one made by another conservative at the end of the 18th century. Joseph de Maistre argued that sacrifice was the proper expression of natural religion, and human sacrifice was the religious sacrifice par excellence. Christianity, Maistre noted, hadn’t abolished human sacrifice but assumed it by recurrently offering in unbloody form the one sacrifice that supplanted all human sacrifice. If we banished the role of religion from the public square, as was witnessed in the French Revolution, Maistre thought that the impulse to sacrifice wouldn’t disappear, it would just become chaotic and frustrated, which he believed he watched play out in the Reign of Terror. Human sacrifice would continue, he argued, but now it would be offered for the benefit of an ever-expanding State, which would misidentify itself as the providential god of history. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s remark, to which Carlson referred, would have been recognised by Maistre as entirely consonant with the new religious order of the so-called ‘secular age.’ Carlson continued:
What’s the point of child sacrifice? Well, there’s no policy goal entwined with that. No, it’s a theological phenomenon. And that’s the point I’m making. None of this makes sense in conventional terms. When people, or crowds of people—or the largest crowd of people, which is the federal government, the largest human organization in human history—decide that the goal is to destroy things, destruction for its own sake, ‘let’s tear it all down,’ what you’re watching is not a political movement, it’s evil.
Carlson is going way beyond the ‘values-based’ discourse of the epoch of woke and the internet-Right. He’s saying that the trajectory of the West today cannot be understood outside the terms that come down to us from our religious inheritance. What Carlson is doing, in his own idiom, and perhaps inadvertently, is introducing St. Augustine of Hippo’s account of the political and moral drama in which we find ourselves.
According to the Augustinian account, our world was given by God to Adam as his own possession. By sinning, Adam placed himself, his dominion, and all those who share his human nature under the dominion of Satan. When Christ was shown by Satan the temporal powers of the earth and told that he could have them all if only he would worship Satan, Christ didn’t say that they weren’t in the devil’s gift. The world and all its powers are indeed the devil’s. Satan, Christ tells us, is the prince of this world, or even the “god of this world,” as Saint Paul puts it. The world, then, is under the power of evil.
Christ, however, is believed to have founded a kingdom to displace the devil’s principality, and, according to Christ’s own words, the gates of the Satanic realm will not withstand the onslaught of the Kingdom of grace. Thus, we are born onto a battlefield where good and evil contend, and we must decide in whose domain we wish to reside, and which master we will follow. As the Spanish conservative Juan Donoso Cortes put it in a letter of 1849, politics is “nothing more than determining the true spirit… of the gigantic struggle between good and evil, or in Saint Augustine’s words, between the City of God and the city of the world.”
This is the Augustinian political dualism which was eventually toppled by the Enlightenment view of individual self-authorship, in which one discovers for oneself what is good and bad—and only for oneself. In the Enlightenment paradigm, how to leave enough freedom for such self-authorship was deemed the purpose of ongoing political deliberation. But if the popularity of Carlson’s recent speech is anything to go by (which has received an average of a million views per day since it was uploaded to YouTube), we may be seeing a return of an Augustinian civil diagnosis, one that necessarily frames political discussion in theological terms. Drawing his speech to a close, Carlson only doubled-down on this thinly veiled Augustinian dualism:
If you want to know what’s evil and what’s good, what the characteristics are of those … what are their products? What do these two conditions produce? Well, good is characterised by order, calmness, tranquillity, peace (whatever you want to call it), lack of conflict, cleanliness—cleanliness is next to godliness. It’s true, it is. And evil is characterised by their opposites: violence, hate, disorder, division, disorganisation, and filth. So, if you are all in on the things that produce the latter basket of outcomes, what you’re really advocating for is evil.
This is language about political divisions to which we are simply unaccustomed. Ever since, in the mid-20th century, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott characterised conservatism as a ‘conversational political approach,’ at a theoretical level the distinction between conservatism and liberalism—at least of a ‘classical’ kind—has customarily been blurred. Conservatism certainly privileges ongoing prudence-driven conversation and deliberation above top-down impositions by unaccountable powers. The question is, though: conversation to what end?
Those who think that the political conversation which has dominated the democratic age is merely for the sake of negotiating a state of affairs that satisfies as many citizens as possible, stand very much downstream from the old liberal tradition of people like Locke and Mill. In turn, when such people call themselves ‘conservatives,’ they often mean that they’re liberals of a non-hyper-progressivist kind. But such a view of the political conversation is not how someone like Edmund Burke saw things. For him, the political conversation was conducted to determine prudentially the objective goods by which the nation’s members may flourish, both in accordance with their nature and as the concrete and historically conditioned community that they together comprise. The need for such a conversation implies that the threat of evil—whatever will thwart the moral and material flourishing of the national community—ever looms and must ever be resisted. Thus, the Augustinian political vision of a good/evil dichotomy is wholly accommodated by a genuinely conservative approach to democratic politics.
Conservatives like Burke, Maistre, and Donoso always saw the political struggle as, at root, a religious struggle that sought to secure the flourishing of their fellow countrymen against the powers of evil. For this reason, they framed their political arguments in explicitly religious terms and were all staunch establishmentarians within their own Christian traditions.
If politics is indeed much more like a daily struggle for the felicity that true religion discloses—at least in its illumination of natural virtue—then the most basic political activism must be prayer, which I suppose is why the West’s nations emerged in the Christian era as distinct liturgical polities. This may also partly explain why, as the powers of evil have reclaimed political territory, we have discovered that evil has a ritualistic life of its own, complete with a whole liturgical year, with solemnities and months of festivities, and even saints, martyrs, and a very able inquisition to boot. And if prayer is indeed the most basic form of political activity in the Augustinian paradigm, then perhaps we ought not to be surprised that Carlson ended on this very point:
I’m coming to you from the most humble and lowly theological position you can. I’m literally an Episcopalian. And even I have concluded that it might be worth taking just ten minutes out of your busy schedule to say a prayer for the future. And I hope you will.
For those who see their lives as a struggle for goodness against the powers and temptations of evil, and also intuit that there is some analogue of this struggle in the lives of nations, the return of Augustinian politics can only be a good thing. Granted, as we continue to move into the politics of good versus evil, things are likely to get a lot more divisive, but they’re also likely to be a lot more honest. And given that the Master has said, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” what did we expect?
Sebastian Morello is a lecturer, public speaker, and writer. He has published books on philosophy, religion, politics, history, and education. He lives in Bedfordshire, England, with his wife and children, and is senior editor and editorial board member of The European Conservative.
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Tucker Carlson the Augustinian
Two days before Tucker Carlson was ousted from the Fox News team, he gave a speech at the 50th anniversary event of the Heritage Foundation, arguably America’s most celebrated conservative public policy think tank. The speech was a remarkable example of gripping content delivered with rhetorical excellence, as he combined a reflective—almost rambling—style with acute lucidity. In his address, Carlson suggested that the political tradition which the Anglosphere largely perfected, namely that of ongoing democratic negotiation by various factions who together represent both the unity and divisions of the whole polity, was rapidly waning. Now, he claimed, politics is about good and evil.
Carlson, in the final five minutes of his speech, expressed his concern that many were still stuck in the democratic forms that belong to decades ago, which, in his opinion, simply do not exist anymore:
This preamble suggested that Carlson was going to say that we’ve moved out of an ‘efficiency- and productivity-based’ discourse—centred on taxation, property availability, the market, private ownership, and individual liberties—to a ‘values-based’ discourse centred on identity and morality. Such an observation marks, of course, a common emerging theme among commentators on both the Right and the Left. His address, though, took a direction that echoed Cardinal Manning’s famous remark to Hilaire Belloc that “All human conflict is ultimately theological”:
Carlson’s observation repeats one made by another conservative at the end of the 18th century. Joseph de Maistre argued that sacrifice was the proper expression of natural religion, and human sacrifice was the religious sacrifice par excellence. Christianity, Maistre noted, hadn’t abolished human sacrifice but assumed it by recurrently offering in unbloody form the one sacrifice that supplanted all human sacrifice. If we banished the role of religion from the public square, as was witnessed in the French Revolution, Maistre thought that the impulse to sacrifice wouldn’t disappear, it would just become chaotic and frustrated, which he believed he watched play out in the Reign of Terror. Human sacrifice would continue, he argued, but now it would be offered for the benefit of an ever-expanding State, which would misidentify itself as the providential god of history. Treasury Secretary Janet Yellen’s remark, to which Carlson referred, would have been recognised by Maistre as entirely consonant with the new religious order of the so-called ‘secular age.’ Carlson continued:
Carlson is going way beyond the ‘values-based’ discourse of the epoch of woke and the internet-Right. He’s saying that the trajectory of the West today cannot be understood outside the terms that come down to us from our religious inheritance. What Carlson is doing, in his own idiom, and perhaps inadvertently, is introducing St. Augustine of Hippo’s account of the political and moral drama in which we find ourselves.
According to the Augustinian account, our world was given by God to Adam as his own possession. By sinning, Adam placed himself, his dominion, and all those who share his human nature under the dominion of Satan. When Christ was shown by Satan the temporal powers of the earth and told that he could have them all if only he would worship Satan, Christ didn’t say that they weren’t in the devil’s gift. The world and all its powers are indeed the devil’s. Satan, Christ tells us, is the prince of this world, or even the “god of this world,” as Saint Paul puts it. The world, then, is under the power of evil.
Christ, however, is believed to have founded a kingdom to displace the devil’s principality, and, according to Christ’s own words, the gates of the Satanic realm will not withstand the onslaught of the Kingdom of grace. Thus, we are born onto a battlefield where good and evil contend, and we must decide in whose domain we wish to reside, and which master we will follow. As the Spanish conservative Juan Donoso Cortes put it in a letter of 1849, politics is “nothing more than determining the true spirit… of the gigantic struggle between good and evil, or in Saint Augustine’s words, between the City of God and the city of the world.”
This is the Augustinian political dualism which was eventually toppled by the Enlightenment view of individual self-authorship, in which one discovers for oneself what is good and bad—and only for oneself. In the Enlightenment paradigm, how to leave enough freedom for such self-authorship was deemed the purpose of ongoing political deliberation. But if the popularity of Carlson’s recent speech is anything to go by (which has received an average of a million views per day since it was uploaded to YouTube), we may be seeing a return of an Augustinian civil diagnosis, one that necessarily frames political discussion in theological terms. Drawing his speech to a close, Carlson only doubled-down on this thinly veiled Augustinian dualism:
This is language about political divisions to which we are simply unaccustomed. Ever since, in the mid-20th century, the philosopher Michael Oakeshott characterised conservatism as a ‘conversational political approach,’ at a theoretical level the distinction between conservatism and liberalism—at least of a ‘classical’ kind—has customarily been blurred. Conservatism certainly privileges ongoing prudence-driven conversation and deliberation above top-down impositions by unaccountable powers. The question is, though: conversation to what end?
Those who think that the political conversation which has dominated the democratic age is merely for the sake of negotiating a state of affairs that satisfies as many citizens as possible, stand very much downstream from the old liberal tradition of people like Locke and Mill. In turn, when such people call themselves ‘conservatives,’ they often mean that they’re liberals of a non-hyper-progressivist kind. But such a view of the political conversation is not how someone like Edmund Burke saw things. For him, the political conversation was conducted to determine prudentially the objective goods by which the nation’s members may flourish, both in accordance with their nature and as the concrete and historically conditioned community that they together comprise. The need for such a conversation implies that the threat of evil—whatever will thwart the moral and material flourishing of the national community—ever looms and must ever be resisted. Thus, the Augustinian political vision of a good/evil dichotomy is wholly accommodated by a genuinely conservative approach to democratic politics.
Conservatives like Burke, Maistre, and Donoso always saw the political struggle as, at root, a religious struggle that sought to secure the flourishing of their fellow countrymen against the powers of evil. For this reason, they framed their political arguments in explicitly religious terms and were all staunch establishmentarians within their own Christian traditions.
If politics is indeed much more like a daily struggle for the felicity that true religion discloses—at least in its illumination of natural virtue—then the most basic political activism must be prayer, which I suppose is why the West’s nations emerged in the Christian era as distinct liturgical polities. This may also partly explain why, as the powers of evil have reclaimed political territory, we have discovered that evil has a ritualistic life of its own, complete with a whole liturgical year, with solemnities and months of festivities, and even saints, martyrs, and a very able inquisition to boot. And if prayer is indeed the most basic form of political activity in the Augustinian paradigm, then perhaps we ought not to be surprised that Carlson ended on this very point:
For those who see their lives as a struggle for goodness against the powers and temptations of evil, and also intuit that there is some analogue of this struggle in the lives of nations, the return of Augustinian politics can only be a good thing. Granted, as we continue to move into the politics of good versus evil, things are likely to get a lot more divisive, but they’re also likely to be a lot more honest. And given that the Master has said, “I have not come to bring peace, but a sword,” what did we expect?
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