Tucker Carlson – the former Fox News host, ousted in a hazy workplace dispute last year – has embarked on a speaking tour of the United States. Across a swathe of several-thousand-seater venues, Carlson will be joined by a host of right(ish)-wing commentators (Russell Brand is scheduled to make an opening night appearance in Arizona) and several Donald Trump allies (JD Vance, Donald Trump Jr). There he will stand – likely in his customary chinos and jacket, with his impossibly American teeth – like a revivalist preacher for the new right. His tinny and anxious voice (Kermit the Frog takes on the military-industrial complex) is not enough to undermine the authority he holds over his devoted fans.
He has nearly three million subscribers on YouTube, 13 million on X. Since leaving Fox he has adopted the medium of fellow new-right luminaries, Alex Jones and Joe Rogan: sprawling, incoherently structured interviews that span hours. One of Carlson’s latest contains two segments titled “The Truth about the 2008 Financial Crisis” and “Who’s Running Our Foreign Policy?”.
There is little taboo for him. In a video posted on X on Monday, Carlson’s guest contended that, perhaps, Churchill was the chief villain of the Second World War. Darryl Cooper – who was hailed by Carlson as “the most important historian in the United States” – has been accused of Nazi apologism. Elon Musk reportedly deleted a tweet in which he called the video “very interesting”.
Away from the straightforward conspiracy of Jones and the alarmingly aberrant Tucker there is the marginally more credible Jordan Peterson. Once an unknown Toronto University professor, the Times writes he is now the “first philosopher to play the O2” in London. But the kind of fervour Carlson or Peterson inspire has no analogue on the left, in Britain or America.
There is nothing to envy in the substance of these men. But all movements require figureheads – even ones seeking political progress rather than mere cultlike disruptor status. The UK left’s commentator-cum-preacher could have been, in another life, Russell Brand. He was lauded for his “cool” communism, guest-edited an issue of this magazine in 2013, led anti-austerity marches down Whitehall, was a BBC Newsnight regular and endorsed Ed Miliband. His disposition was renegade and transgressive, at times unpalatable but always broadly believable. That was until he adopted all the anxieties of the new American right: hand-wringing about the “great reset” and vague dishonesties of the establishment. Then he was subject to allegations of rape and sexual abuse, claims he denies.
Brand is lost to the universe of the new-right guru. But why hasn’t the left filled the vacuum opened by the increasingly irrational Brand? Could there be a credible version of these charismatic controversialists willing to test the limit of the left’s ideas, someone with enough magnetic appeal to pack out arenas usually reserved for “pop stars like Olivia Rodrigo”? If the intellectual realm bends left – as several studies in Britain and America, to be taken with a degree of scepticism, have attempted to quantify – then why is the supposed “most famous public intellectual” a conservative man?
The state of the British left can explain much of this. Anyone with aspirations to emerge as a galvanising figure who can fill venues and attract online audiences of millions will be caught between being a ventriloquist of uninspiring Starmerism, a government more interested in rules than ideas, or someone trying to capture the last vestiges of Corbynism – a movement all but squandered in 2024.
So there is no energy behind a particular figure, no obvious public intellectual, not even – a lower bar – notable firebrands. This wasn’t always so: Novara Media used to dominate the space, albeit at a smaller scale than Carlson or Peterson. Forged in the ashes of New Labour and amid the 2011 student protests, the YouTube channel/coterie of contrary socialists thrived in Jeremy Corbyn’s light. Their number of fans has grown, but Novara’s influence on the culture has waned since Starmer was elected as the Labour leader in 2020. The bolshie Guardian columnist, author and X activist Owen Jones, also found his star fade along with the Corbyn project.
Now, in England, the closest contenders for the mantle of left-wing personality – an energising and crowd-drawing political force – paint a rather bleak picture of our public sphere. Stephen Fry could probably sell out Westminster Hall with his twee and shallow liberalism. Led By Donkeys – a group of dads famous for their kitsch guerrilla war against Brexit, waged primarily on billboards – attract crowds at literary festivals. (A fawning 2019 profile in the Evening Standard typifies their cooing Remainer base: “Blocked on Twitter by MP Dominic Raab, followed by Radiohead’s Thom Yorke… [they] made Brexit more bearable with their irreverent activism.”) James O’Brien is a reactionary centrist with a huge listenership on LBC. None of these are properly of “the left”. Since the advent of Keir Starmer to No 10, these figures are even less energising. Having rallied around the tawdry refrain to restore “adults to the room”, they have won the argument. And Starmer has purged the Labour left, leaving little room for transgression.
Perhaps the intellectual landscape in England has no appetite for the gauche megachurches imagined by Carlson and Peterson. Even Rory Stewart’s 2019 attempt to use Hyde Park Corner as a campaigning strategy – once the home of the political soapbox – was met with derision.
Carlson’s Big American Tour may be anathema to the sensibilities of the English left, perhaps to the English writ large. But there is something to be gleaned from the off-putting playbook of the American political preacher. Without prime movers to spread ideas, excite the electorate and cause a little trouble, Britain’s left faces an arid future.
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This article appears in the 04 Sep 2024 issue of the New Statesman, Starmer under fire