Ship of Fools
Ratings6
Average rating3.7
“You look on in horror, helpless and desperate.
You have nowhere to go.
You’re trapped on a ship of fools.”
—From the Introduction
In Ship of Fools: How a Selfish Ruling Class is Bringing America to the Brink of Revolution, Tucker Carlson tells the truth about the new American elites, a group whose power and wealth has grown beyond imagination even as the rest of the country has withered. The people who run America now barely interact with it. They fly on their own planes, ski on their own mountains, watch sporting events far from the stands in sky boxes. They have total contempt for you.
“They view America the way a private equity firm sizes up an aging conglomerate,” Carlson writes, “as something outdated they can profit from. When it fails, they’re gone.”
In Ship of Fools, Tucker Carlson offers a blistering critique of our new overlords. Traditional liberals are gone, he writes. The patchouli-scented hand-wringers who worried about whales and defended free speech have been replaced by globalists who hide their hard-edged economic agenda behind the smokescreen of identity politics. They’ll outsource your job while lecturing you about transgender bathrooms. Left and right, Carlson says, are no longer meaningful categories in America. “The rift is between those who benefit from the status quo, and those who don’t.”
Our leaders are fools, Carlson concludes, “unaware that they are captains of a sinking ship.” But in the signature and witty style that viewers of Tucker Carlson Tonight have come to enjoy, his book answers the all-important question: How do we put the country back on course?
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Ship of Fools by Tucker Carlson
Please give a helpful vote to my Amazon review - https://www.amazon.com/gp/customer-reviews/R1FA7KO0VEKXSZ?ref=pf_ov_at_pdctrvw_srp
This is a worthwhile book for understanding the present moment.
We are in a period of cultural-political crack-up. The conventional wisdom no longer holds. People who we put into one camp or another no longer stay comfortably in their category. Things we rooted for as conservative or liberals, we now abhor.
How did this happen? How does it make sense?
For a young man, Tucker Carlson has been around the movers and shakers of Washington DC for a long time. He is also willing to depart from the conventional wisdom of his tribe to describe things as he sees them which appear to be the way things are.
I find Carlson's perspective interesting and challenging. His current position is a kind of anti-elitist populism. I've been decrying the incompetence of our elites for the last decade. The theme of elite incompetence is the main point of this book, along with the anti-democratic tendencies of our elites - both Republican and Democrat - to ignore the actual concerns of the majority of the American people.
Carlson's perspective makes for interesting reading. For example, despite the fact that Americans have never supported American immigration policies as they have existed. Republicans and Democrats have conspired against the American people for their different reasons. The result has been a populist rebellion leading to the election of Trump, but the elites in their arrogance and incompetence blame anything except their own incompetence.
Carlson's discussion of the Democrat volte face on immigration was fascinating. I had forgotten that the Democrats were the anti-immigration party. I probably never knew that Cesar Chavez sent UFW goons to the border to beat up on Mexicans who are now called “immigrants” but Chavez called “wetbacks.”
Wow!
Of course, the Republicans were no better, favoring unlimited immigration in order to lower business costs.
A theme of Carlson's book is his regret that Democrats are no longer liberals. Once they could have been relied on to stand for the middle and working class by arguing against the reduction of their income through unlimited immigration. Once they could have been counted on to argue in favor of free speech. Once they could have been counted on to demand due process in all cases.
Now, not so much, which means that they join the Republicans, who were never strong in those areas, to expand the power of the state and undermine the middle class.
Ironic.
Carlson's point seems very conservative - he wants Democrats to return to being Democrats because the country was well-served by principled disagreement, rather than by a Democrat party that appeals to feelings and views America as a problem to be handled through the replacement of its population.
This is an informative book.
I recommend it.
