SNA (Galesburg) — Most American progressives long ago made up their minds about rightwing journalist and commentator Tucker Carlson. However, his interview last week with Russian President Vladimir Putin should finally draw their attention to a fact which has already been apparent to those paying attention—Carlson has been evolving into someone whose foreign policy views now run parallel with some tenets of the anti-imperialist left, even if his conclusions have sprung from a different intellectual and moral path.

Carlson has been in the public eye since the turn of the century, first gaining prominence at CNN as the host of the debate show Crossfire, in which he represented conservative views, wearing his then-trademark bowtie, in verbal combat with the designated liberal representatives, James Carville and Paul Begala. He proceeded through stints at PBS and MSNBC but really came into his own from 2016 with his show Tucker Carlson Tonight at Fox News.

With nearly two and a half decades of conservative and rightwing television commentary behind him, there is no part of the American left that can’t find Carlson’s statements deserving of condemnation. He has credibly been accused of promoting White Nationalism, racism, sexism, and much more. Most progressives and liberals long ago switched him off and kept him off, even as he cultivated a growing audience on the political right.

But there is a reason why Carlson now stands head and shoulders above that stable of Fox News personalities with whom he once seemed interchangeable—the likes of Bill O’Reilly, Sean Hannity, Glenn Beck, Laura Ingraham, etc. Carlson, unlike these others, has been showing a capacity for intellectual growth, including a distaste for the knee-jerk partisanship which first catapulted him to public attention.

In other words, while Carlson has always raged against the left, he has developed a growing skepticism of the conventional partisan right as well. By 2022, he had started to become vocal about his disenchantment. For example, in an interview with the Will Cain Podcast that October, Carlson explained, “I always liked the United States, and I watched it change. And I watched in those changes a lot of my preconceptions get debunked. And so I changed my opinions along with the changing evidence, which I thought is what you’re supposed to do.”

He continued: “For me, the Iraq War was definitely a pivot point… I watched the place fall apart, and along with it a lot of my previous assumptions. And I came back and admitted I was completely wrong. I’m ashamed. I’ve been ashamed ever since. And what was so striking was how so few people were willing to say the same thing… That was really the beginning of my break with the conventional view of things.”

While Carlson himself struggled to define what he was becoming, it definitely included a growing antagonism toward neoconservative militarism and a loss of faith in Reaganite libertarianism, trickle-down economics, and the American ruling class in general, which he views as basically incompetent and analogous to “greedy day traders.”

“If you are running a country which purports to be a representative democracy, you should serve the majority of people,” he declared.

With views developing along these rebellious lines, Carlson was also becoming more outspoken about his complaints against what he saw as the shortcomings of management at Fox News. Within the organization, he was reportedly denouncing some executives in aggressive terms, feeling that his status as by far the top host in terms of ratings gave him a leeway that others didn’t possess. It came to a head in April last year when Fox mogul Rupert Murdoch personally authorized Carlson’s firing, sending the conservative network’s ratings into a tailspin.

Many of Carlson’s fans argue that his break with Fox News was the best thing that could have happened to him, as it has truly unleashed him to pursue his own vision as an independent internet broadcaster. Elon Musk rushed in to give Carlson a platform on X, hoping to benefit from his massive following.

It has so far been a massive success for both of them. Last week’s Putin interview is headed toward 200 million individual views, and there is little doubt that Tucker Carlson is at this moment the most influential journalist and political commentator in the world.

Both the US political establishment and the mainstream media have responded hysterically to the Putin interview, pushing out every ounce of disparagement, misdirection, and gaslighting in its formidable arsenal to contain the damage which Carlson has done to their preferred narrative on the Russia-Ukraine war.

What anti-imperial progressives ought to be cognizant of before they jump on the anti-Carlson bandwagon is that his political enemies overlap to a significant extent with our enemies. Carlson’s biggest political sin in this instance of the Putin interview is that he has directly challenged the military-industrial complex and laid himself across the tracks of the neoconservative eternal war machine.

Carlson is not a progressive and probably never will be; he is more fundamentally an American nationalist. But he is a sincere nationalist who wants to speak for the interests of ordinary blue-collar society and not for the corrupt ruling classes, with which he is now quite antagonistic.

Since US progressive political leaders made a foolish failed bet on the Biden administration and are now being dragged down along with it, it should be recognized that Tucker Carlson and his wing of the America First movement have become, in practical effect, the leading anti-imperialist force within US foreign policy circles. For all of the baggage that comes with them (and it is considerable), they are more likely to help avoid a cataclysmic World War III than the establishment liberal-neoconservative militarist coalition which is currently in charge.

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