Are Conservatives Demoralized?

This week, Tucker Carlson spoke at Turning Point USA’s big event in Tampa, Florida. There — without naming President Donald Trump — he unleashed on the Trump administration, suggesting that they were covering up a child sex trafficking ring and denigrating Trump’s victories thus far. “If you deny people what they actually want long enough and instead substitute things you claim they should want, like bombing Iran … or you spend all day telling me that it’s so important that boys not play on girls’ soccer teams or whatever. I agree,” Carlson stated. “But I don’t know, it kinda feels like you’re feeding me appetizers. At some point, I want to look around and see a better country. I want to see a country I recognize. I don’t want to see people sleeping on the sidewalk. I don’t want to see people ODing on drugs. I want to know where those drugs are coming from. Why can’t you stop it? You’ve got the U.S. military. Don’t you have Seal Team Six? What are they doing today? Are you going to give me another segment about how impressive the U.S. military is? Why aren’t they employed to make my country better? Why are my cities disgusting?”

Now, there’s essentially no logic to this rant.

Trump’s bombing of Iran’s nuclear facilities — warned against by Carlson, who claimed they would lead to World War III — were a massively successful and historic American foreign policy move, devastating Iran’s nuclear program at the cost of zero American casualties; Trump’s commitment to ending the epidemic of transgender mutilation and propaganda, particularly targeting kids, is one of the signal developments on social policy over the past several decades; Trump’s passage of the One Big Beautiful Bill is a legislative feat of true legerdemain; and Trump’s border crackdown has cut illegal immigration to near zero.

Carlson’s preferred issues — issues like homelessness and drug overdose — are deeply important, of course. But those are typically handled at the local and state level. What’s more, would Carlson truly support the use of Seal Team Six in Mexico, or American troops in Mexico more broadly? What would his strategy be for deploying the American military across the country to combat the scourge of fentanyl or to clean up the streets? And what, precisely, is the connection between these problems and his crusade to provide softball interviews for foreign leaders who despise the United States (Vladimir Putin of Russia and Masoud Pezeshkian of Iran)?

And herein lies the problem of much of the online media ecosystem: It is designed not at asking real questions — questions designed to elicit answers and solutions — but at positing unfalsifiable theories. Those theories may be fun to consider, but when they end with a sense of impotent rage — as all unfalsifiable theories tend to — they simply demoralize.

And the last six months, for conservatives, should have been anything but demoralizing. In fact, they haven’t been: 53% of Republicans say that Trump is doing a better job than expected, along with another 37% who say that he is doing as expected; only 10% of Republicans say Trump is doing a worse job than expected.

All of which raises an important question: Is there a disconnect between the online media ecosystem and most Americans? The answer would seem to be yes. The online media ecosystem, with its incentivization toward clickbait and wave-riding, is not an accurate gauge of what Americans think of the world. And Americans — particularly those of us who spend an inordinate amount of time consuming information online — ought to keep that disconnect in mind. Because otherwise, the ouroboros of demoralization will continue to grow stronger and stronger. And a demoralized conservative movement is bad for America and bad for the world.

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