Konstantin Kisin

Feb 17, 2024

∙ Paid

In Russia, we have a saying: everything new is something old that has been sufficiently forgotten.

Far from being the first of his kind, Tucker is, in fact, one more name to add to the long list of Westerners who have been seduced by the allure of an alternative to the failures and decadence of their own societies. These people are often described as “useful idiots” but while they are certainly useful, as with Tucker, they are often intelligent, principled and courageous.

Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw visited Moscow in 1931 where, like Tucker, he was granted a 2-hour audience with Joseph Stalin which he summed up with the words: “I expected to see a Russian worker and I found a Georgian gentleman”.

One of Shaw’s main contributions to the culture of his day was to advocate for and defend one’s duty to be a sceptic. As Fintan O’Toole writes brilliantly in this article:

”He challenged his readers and audiences to burst bubbles of conventional wisdom on almost every issue imaginable…. When Shaw’s demolitions of received ideas provoked outrage and obloquy, he courageously defended his intellectual independence. He abhorred cruelty and made mincemeat of propaganda”.

How could a man so principled, courageous and eternally-questioning end up siding with the most murderous dictator of his era?

“We have to remember the power of wish fulfillment and the way Russia became for many Westerners not a place but an idea, not a mere reality but a fantasy… Shaw’s insistence on seeing the Soviet Union as the harbinger of the great socialist utopia can be explained by the disappointments of democracy…. Especially as the Great Depression took hold, parliaments and political parties seemed utterly ineffectual. Stalin’s apparent ability to move mountains and transform society with triumphant five-year plans offered an antidote to his impatience with the frustrations of democracy.”

The parallels here hardly need elaborating. Replace Stalin with Putin and Shaw with Carlson in the passages above and you need hardly change anything.

While the Woke Left hates America and the West because it sees them as the root of all evil, the Woke Right has built up powerful resentments of its own.

Where the Woke Left has systemic racism, the Woke Right has globalism and the WEF, a shadowy global elite conspiring to deprive us of our rights, civil liberties and bodily autonomy.

Stagnating wages, uncontrolled and increasingly illegal mass immigration, the housing crisis, the deliberate stoking of racial tensions, blatant anti-white, anti-male, anti-family rhetoric, the promotion of trans ideology and a whole host of other issues have turned many people from sceptics into cynics.

These frustrations, many of which are legitimate, are further exacerbated by the biggest problem of all: despite being shared by a majority of the population, attempts to address them via the democratic process appear increasingly futile.

The UK elected a “conservative” government in 2010 and voted for Brexit in 2016 in order to deal with many of these issues. The result was years of political gridlock, followed by all of these problems getting worse, not better.

In the US, the 2016 election of Donald Trump was another desperate move to deal with these concerns. “We don’t care about his obnoxious tweets,” his voters cried. “We need someone with the balls to put an end to politics as usual, stem the flow of illegal crossings at the border and halt the cultural rot eating away at America’s soul”.

But instead of waking from their stupor, America’s media and political elites did everything in their power to stop Trump from delivering on the promises he had made to his voters. They lied about him endlessly. They thwarted him at every turn. In the end, they impeached him and are now prosecuting him. And, to add insult to injury, they replaced him with a man who struggles to get through a press conference. Leaving many on the Right with the obvious question: if we can’t vote our way out of this nightmare, what good is democracy?

If democracy means decriminalising crime, rampant homelessness, weakness abroad and chaos at home, isn’t it time to look at the alternatives? The Right’s fascination with Vladimir Putin and Salvadorian President Nayib Bukele is not accidental.

While in America and Britain we sit and helplessly watch escalating levels of street violence, crime and squalor, Bukele has turned El Salvador from the most dangerous country in Latin America to the safest in the Western Hemisphere in a matter of years. How? He locked up gang members en masse, ignoring the protestations of foreign human rights organisations and domestic critics. Despite his increasingly muscular methods, he enjoys astonishing support which recently secured him another presidential term following a stunning electoral victory.

Democracy is supposed to mean government by consent. But who enjoys more consent, Joe Biden (38% approval rating), Rishi Sunak (24% approval rating) or Nayib Bukele (85% approval rating)? And, more importantly, whose country is safer, cleaner and clearer about its direction for the future?

“Tomorrow I leave this land of hope and return to our Western countries – the countries of despair,” Shaw said on leaving the USSR in 1931. Tucker might as well have said the same last week.

Like Trump before him, Tucker is not the problem. He is a symptom. And unless Western elites start listening to the people they are supposed to represent, the problem is only going to get worse. And so are the symptoms.

The smart politicians know it. The question is: will they do anything about it?

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