One saying that defines these times is an old one: "When you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression." That is the undercurrent of this era of racial backlash, as phony Men of the People seize on white Americans' accurate perception that the power dynamics in the country are shifting in a fundamental way to organize a last stand for the traditional order of things. The traditional order does not include true racial equality.

The foremost, of course, is one Donald Trump, who launched his political career by suggesting that the first black president—a potent symbol of these shifting dynamics—was not American at all, and thus illegitimate. He ran as a negation of the first black presidency, embodying the notion that even the most mediocre white man can do the same job as someone who's extremely qualified and black.

Michael S. Schwartz Getty Images

Another in this mold is Tucker Carlson, the Fox News host who has, at some points in his frenetic career, ripped cynical performance punditry. Now he epitomizes the form. Tucker and his brother, Buckley, are stepsons of an heiress to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. He was, literally, a Bowtie Republican. Yet he has lately transformed himself into a champion of the everyman—and the Daily Stormer's favorite pundit. Yes, the neo-Nazi website featured Carlson in 265 different articles between November 2016 and November 2018, compared to just 27 mentions for Trump BFF Sean Hannity. Andrew Anglin, the site's founder, has called Tucker Carlson Tonight "basically 'Daily Stormer: The Show,'" and called Carlson "literally our greatest ally."

The question of whether Carlson himself is racist is not the issue. To paraphrase Florida gubernatorial candidate Andrew Gillum, Nazis love what he's saying on TV. Carlson presents crimes committed by undocumented immigrants as representative of the larger group, a textbook example of propaganda. He has suggested immigration makes the United States "dirtier." He has continually attacked the idea that diversity is a strength for America. That last one manifested once again Wednesday night in a monologue attacking Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams' defense of "identity politics."

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Carlson kicked off with some Fox News boilerplate, dismissing Abrams' State of the Union rebuttal on the basis it "wasn't much" and she "mostly talked about herself." Needless to say, this was not accurate. But then Carlson really dove into it, citing Abrams' claims in a recent Foreign Affairs essay that "by embracing identity...Americans will become more likely to grow as one."

CARLSON: Ponder that for a second: The less we have in common, the more united we will be. Is that true? Well, of course not. It's absurd. Even Stacey Abrams doesn't really believe it. Nobody does.

That last part is entirely accurate: Abrams does not believe that, because it's not what she said. It is a straw man Carlson set up so he could set it on fire. Embracing our diverse identities as Americans—African-Americans, Irish-Americans, Mexican-Americans, Indian-Americans—does not equate to declaring we have nothing in common. In fact, nobody likes tracing their roots quite like white people do to the Mayflower. The American experiment is an ongoing project to unite people from any and all backgrounds under the principles of free speech and association, the universal right to vote, equality before the law, the rule of law, and the more vague notion that if you come here, work hard, and play by the rules, you can make a better life for yourself—or at least your children.

Stacey Abrams delivers the State of the Union rebuttal Tuesday. The Washington Post Getty Images

What Abrams and others who emphasize identity are saying is that the American system—historically and in the present—is denying them the full rights of citizenship because of their identities. Because of their identities, they face challenges in America that white Americans like Carlson and his viewers do not, and in order to address those inequities, we must acknowledge that Americans come from different backgrounds and are treated differently because of it. If we can grapple with this reality and enshrine true equality and justice for these groups in practice, it will begin to heal these wounds and make the country stronger and more united.

But that misrepresentation was crucial to Carlson's pivot in the monologue, in which he turned to suggesting Abrams is an agent trying to sow division in society. He accurately characterized her assessment of our society's historically powerful (white men who controlled politics and the distribution of resources) and the powerless (women and people of color, who had no say in the matter). But then he jumped to that old conclusion: that Abrams is not just fighting for equality, but for an "overthrow" of the traditional order, which Carlson—with no little cunning—hints could be violent.

CARLSON: She says these people—these unnamed people—are responsible for the suffering of everyone else, and we need to overthrow them. She uses the language of violence and war to describe what must come next: "Politics is the most effective method of revolt." Revolt. People get hurt in revolts. That's the nature of revolts.

Ah yes, and we've come to the White Fear potion of the evening.

Donald Trump, a man familiar with the power of White Anxiety. BRENDAN SMIALOWSKI Getty Images

Amazingly, Carlson completely ignores the first part of the quote and focuses only on the last word. Abrams is explicitly calling for political remedies to these inequities and injustices—that is, a non-violent, small-D democratic approach. Carlson's point only works if you take one word entirely literally and devoid of context. Abrams's signature issue is voting rights: making sure all people, particularly people of color, have access to the ballot box. But Carlson recasts her as Robespierre to pump up the blood pressure of his aging Caucasian viewership. Like all Fox News' offerings, this casts White America as the true victim, the constituency truly under threat from all these calls for equality.

CARLSON: Demagoguery like this would make a certain kind of sense if your only interest was in winning elections and you didn't care what happened afterward. That's where Democrats are right now.

This is, frankly, shameless. The Republican Party is universally behind an actual demagogue who spreads propaganda about immigrants and black-on-white crime, who said a federal judge from Indiana couldn't rule fairly on his case because he was of Mexican descent, and whose administration has embarked on an extensive campaign to roll back policies designed to protect people of color from discrimination.

One such discrimination campaign is the Republican Party's extended war on voting rights. Republicans have used the statistically insignificant issue of in-person voter fraud to craft voter-ID policies that disproportionately impact people of color. Some leaders have said the quiet parts out loud, declaring these instruments for Republicans to win elections. In North Carolina, legislators requested data on when and where African-American citizens vote to target which policies, like early voting, to roll back. A federal court found North Carolina's gerrymandered maps sought to target black voters with "surgical precision," trying to pack them into a few districts and spread the rest of the votes out over other districts so they would have as little weight as possible.

Stacey Abrams Emma McIntyre Getty Images

Again, this is the issue championed by Abrams, who narrowly lost an election to Brian Kemp that was marred by voter suppression—not least because Kemp, then the secretary of state, refused to recuse himself from overseeing his own election. And the effect is to allow Republicans to maintain power through undemocratic means and rule as a minority party, rather than attempt to appeal to the growing share of the country that is not their core constituency of older white people.

Yet somehow, not content with casting himself and his viewers as the victims, Carlson pushed the idea that they—the vast majority of whom are Republican supporters of Donald Trump—are the ones truly calling for racial unity.

CARLSON: The Democratic Party is a highly unstable collection of interest groups, many of them with radically different interests and goals. It's not a natural coalition. There's no reason all of these groups should be voting for the same candidates in the every election. The only way to keep a fractious group like this together is by inventing a common enemy that everyone can oppose: "You're one of us if you hate these people."

Now, this often works in the short term: it worked for Democrats in the Jim Crow South for about 100 years, and that's why they still do it. The problem is that "these people," these "dominant groups" as Stacey Abrams says, aren't some foreign invader from a faraway land. They're your countrymen. You're not supposed to hate them, or hurt them, or revolt against them. They is us. We're all in this together. We're all Americans. That's the important thing.

Wow. There's a lot to unpack here, not least the Dinesh D'Souza callback about Jim Crow Democrats, which historians like Kevin Kruse have fumigated more than once. Also, the nature of a revolt—a revolution—is that it's an attempt to strip power from your countrymen who are holding it.

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Last night, Tucker Carlson opened his show by saying immigration makes America “poorer, and dirtier, and more divided."



An offensive, dehumanizing and racist statement.



That segment ended with an ad from @pacificlife. pic.twitter.com/ryjauzYloq — jordan (@JordanUhl) December 14, 2018

But again, that's not what Abrams is calling for: she wants everyone to enjoy the full rights of citizenship, which the Republican Party is actively denying them through voter suppression. Republicans are doing this because granting people full voting rights would likely change the power dynamics in our society. Republicans fairly explicitly sought to suppress Native American voters in North Dakota last year. They also want to strip women of the right to get an abortion, and they deny there are gender inequities in the workplace. These groups have formed a coalition because they have correctly identified that the other major American political party is diametrically opposed to their interests. You don't need to hate someone to oppose them, though surely many Democrats do hate Republicans. For its many faults, the Democratic Party is a far better representation of their interests, so they tend to vote for Democrats.

But then there was the final flourish.

CARLSON: They think they can win the next election by telling Americans they must hate their neighbors for the color of their skin. It's possible this will work one more time, but then what happens, after the election? ... No election is worth the hatred and division of identity politics."

Again, Abrams is not calling for this. But Donald Trump is what happens when you try to tip the scales in elections and play on racial resentment to win—then, when you get in there through a quirk of the electoral system, it's the dog who caught the car.

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More to the point, Trumpism is identity politics. It's identity politics for white people. The defining characteristic of Trump voters is not that they are economically anxious, it's that they're white. They have correctly identified that the demographics of the country are changing such that soon the white majority will not be able to exercise hegemonic power over the laws that govern how we live and the policies dictating how resources are distributed. Their and the Republican Party's response is not to reach out to, say, Hispanic voters—as the party once planned to—but to embrace a politics of white identity that sustains itself by lashing out at The Other and entrenching its power through undemocratic means.

Carlson is a vital cog in this machine, painting the picture of white victimhood each night as part of an ensemble of right-wing Picassos. Stacey Abrams is a convenient foil, but she is not fighting to subjugate Carlson or his viewers. She wants everyone to have the same rights—and, to a lesser extent, opportunities—that they do. It's just that when you've always had those rights and no one else has, they get to feel like privileges. People like their privileges.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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