Ship of Fools by Tucker Carlson — review and summary

Tucker Carlson is a television journalist and political commentator who, at the time of writing Ship of Fools (2018), hosted a primetime programme on Fox News. The book is a polemic: it argues that the United States is governed by a ruling class that has abandoned the interests and values of ordinary Americans in favour of a narrow ideology of cosmopolitan liberalism, globalism, and technocratic management.

The central argument

Carlson's argument is essentially about elite insularity. His claim is that the people who run American institutions — media, finance, politics, education — have become so separated from the lived experience of most Americans that they can no longer recognise their own insularity. They understand each other. They do not understand the country.

The political consequence, in his argument, is that large numbers of voters feel unrepresented by either party and are willing to support figures who speak to their situation, even if those figures are crude or dangerous. The 2016 election, in this reading, was less about the appeal of Donald Trump than about the failure of the existing political class to be responsive to real conditions.

What is useful here

The diagnosis of elite insularity — the bubble effect, the way class clustering produces genuine blindness to conditions and concerns outside the cluster — is a real phenomenon that is documented in social science research as well as in political commentary from multiple perspectives. Carlson's account of it, though polemical, engages with some real observations.

The observation that economic dislocation produces political instability, and that this instability is not satisfactorily addressed by telling dislocated people that the data shows overall improvement, is also grounded in something real.

What is more contested

The book is a political argument and should be read as one. Carlson's attributions of motive and his specific policy prescriptions are contentious, and readers across the political spectrum will find things to disagree with in the diagnosis as well as the recommendations.

The polemical register also means that the argument is not as careful or as qualified as it could be. A more careful version of the elite insularity argument — with more attention to the complexity of how elite formation works and what the alternatives actually look like — would be a more valuable book.

Who this book is for

Ship of Fools is most useful for readers who want to understand a specific strand of American populist conservatism from an articulate insider, or who want to engage seriously with the critique of elite insularity that has become central to one side of American political debate.

It is also useful as a case study in the genre of political polemic: how the genre works, what it can and cannot do, and how to read it with appropriate critical distance.

Practical reflection prompts:

• What are the bubbles in your own social and professional life? What conditions and concerns are you likely underweighting because they are not part of your immediate experience?
• What is the difference between a genuine representation of a political grievance and a strategic deployment of it?

Bibliographic details

• Author: Tucker Carlson
• Published: 2018
• Publisher: Free Press