Yesterday Tucker Carlson delivered the monologue heard around the conservative world. He addresses one of the fundamental questions of our time ‐ why, when GDP is rising and America is immensely rich, are so very many of our fellow citizens dying deaths of despair? As he bluntly says, "Anyone who thinks the health of a nation can be summed up in GDP is an idiot."
He says many true things ‐ that people long for connection with each other, that we can’t separate economics and family life into distinct spheres, and that men suffer from a unique challenge in modern American life.
But he also says false things. He says that manufacturing "all but disappeared over the course of a generation." It hasn’t. He says, "increasingly, marriage is a luxury only the affluent in America can afford." Yet a healthy, faithful marriage is often the gateway to affluence. Affluence is not a prerequisite for marriage.
He casts American boys as a generation of burnouts, yet the best evidence shows that marijuana use is only on a slight uptick and is still way down from its highs in the late 1970s and early 1980s. (Some evidence even suggests its use has stabilized in recent years.)
And he talks about wealthier Americans as if they’re indifferent to the plight of their fellow Americans. Here’s Carlson: "Those very same affluent married people, the ones making virtually all the decisions in our society, are doing pretty much nothing to help the people below them get and stay married. Rich people are happy to fight malaria in Congo. But working to raise men’s wages in Dayton or Detroit? That’s crazy."