Decolonizing conservatism

Tucker Carlson speaks on stage during the 2024 Republican National Convention (Image credit: Leon Neal / Getty Images)

The horseshoe theory of politics is that if you go far enough left or right you wind up at almost the same place. If you're not sure of exactly what that means, you can look at the career of Tucker Carlson, who just did a highly hyped interview with Nazi apologist Darryl Cooper. You can familiarize yourself with Cooper's take on World War II — short version: All Hitler really wanted was peace with England — if you are so inclined.

But to me the interesting part is not Cooper's view of Hitler, but of Winston Churchill, whom he calls the "chief villain" of the war. Cooper is not the first amateur historian to be driven batty by Churchill. The British prime minister has long been the ultimate bête noire for the hard left. When academics talk about "decolonization," where they want to start, just like Cooper and Carlson, is almost always with taking Churchill down a peg.

Why the animus? Churchill, a complex man with his share of faults, represents the triumph of the Western tradition, which makes him a magnet for haters. We've heard the Cooper line before. It's just "Hey, hey, ho, ho, Western Civ has gotta go" with a coat of right-wing polish. The hard right watched enviously as the Left found a market for identity politics, and the conclusion of MAGA conservatives was that it looked like a good line of business.

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Of course, building up the politics of grievance and identity means tearing down historical tradition. If that's the future of the conservative movement, it's dark indeed. People before Cooper have speculated about where history could have gone if the U.S. and U.K. had minded their own business and let Germany and Russia fight it out on the continent. One was an Englishman not much liked by either the Left or Right: George Orwell. He wrote a whole novel about that kind of alternate history, which also investigates just where you get to when the ends of the horseshoe meet. He called it 1984.

Mark Gimein is a managing editor at the print edition of The Week. His work on business and culture has appeared in Bloomberg, The New Yorker, The New York Times and other outlets. A Russian immigrant, and has lived in the United States since the age of five, and now lives in Brooklyn with his wife and son.