RESOLVING THE LEDGER
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Tucker Carlson speaks at his Live Tour at the Desert Diamond Arena in Phoenix, Arizona, on Oct. 31, 2024. —Chip Somodevilla—Getty Images
Tucker Carlson has shared a manifesto outlining the 10 characteristics that he believes America should have, about a month after he floated the idea of launching a new political party.
Carlson, a former Trump loyalist, said in June that he was turning his back on the Republican Party. Soon after those remarks, Carlson told the Columbia Journalism Review that he was “going to help build a third party,” adding that “there should be a good-faith effort to figure out what benefits the country.” In a livestream on Wednesday, the conservative commentator didn’t explicitly announce a new party, but he shared 10 “goals” for America.
“We thought it’d be useful just to set down the goals of whatever comes next,” Carlson said. “Hopefully, it’s better than what we have. But we know it’ll be different from what we have because what we have literally doesn’t work.”
The livestream comes after Carlson over the weekend met with a number of other right-wing figures who have recently—and vocally—broken with Trump and the Republican Party. Marjorie Taylor Greene, who resigned from Congress in January after a very public falling out with the President, shared a photo of the gathering on X.
“We said no more foreign wars and we meant it and supported Donald Trump because he made that promise,” Greene said in her post. “But he’s betrayed us all. Our commitment is America First for all Americans, right, left, and center. The movement has begun.”
Here’s what Carlson laid out in his manifesto, and what experts think about the likelihood of a potential new third party succeeding in U.S. elections.
What are the 10 points in Carlson’s manifesto?
“The very first thing America should be,” Carlson said, “is fair.”
He next asserted in his second point that America needs to be “sovereign, ”meaning “free from outside influence—the right to make decisions on your nation’s behalf or your own behalf without being told what to do,” he said.
“When your nation is not sovereign, of course it leads to things like the Iran war, which you do under bribery or threat or both by Israel, which is exactly what happened,” Carlson alleged.
Carlson has publicly criticized President Donald Trump over the decision to join Israel in launching the military strikes against Iran that started the war. Trump has denied that Israel pressured the U.S. into the conflict.
In his livestream on Wednesday, Carlson went on to say that the third thing the U.S. should be is “productive,” by which he said he meant that the country should reinvest in sectors like farming, rather than in surveillance systems and weapons.
The fourth trait he said the country should have was “beautiful;” he criticized graffiti, public drug use, and violent crime.
The fifth characteristic was “healthy;” he applauded Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s for prioritizing “better food” for the country.
The sixth he discussed was “honest;” he argued that government officials who lie to the public should face penalties.
The seventh characteristic that Carlson laid out was “optimistic;” he urged citizens to have more children.
The eighth was “wise.”
The ninth was “decent;” he said that the U.S. should be “prohuman, in favor of people,” and criticized the Trump Administration’s rebranding of the Department of Defense to the Department of War.
“The idea that there is a Department of War is itself an assault on decency because what is the point of war? It’s to defend yourself,” Carlson said. “Only an indecent country wages wars if it doesn’t have to. And the only reason ever to wage war to kill people is to defend yourself. That’s why it was always called the Defense Department.”
Carlson described the final characteristic he outlined as “maybe the most important thing that this country needs to be,” which is “united.” He said “the very first” way to adhere to this goal is to “stop mass migration into the United States.”
What is the likelihood of a third party succeeding in U.S. elections?
America runs on a two-party system, meaning that two parties dominate politics in the country: the Democratic Party and the Republican Party. No third party has been able to significantly break through that system in recent history.
Political experts tell TIME that it would be very tough for a third party, like the one Carlson has suggested he might create, to succeed in the U.S. Eric Schickler, a professor of political science at the University of California, Berkeley, says that, because the electoral system is generally stacked in favor of the two parties, the “big challenge for a third party” is that it usually falls into the role of “spoiler”—for instance, if Carlson were to launch a third party, Republicans would likely argue that supporting his party would split the vote among conservative voters, leading to a situation where a Democratic candidate could win an election instead.
“That kind of argument just makes it hard, especially in a period where the parties are so polarized, where, for most voters, even if they don’t like either party, they really dislike one party a lot more,” Schickler says. “In that context, it’s a lot harder for a third party to find a way to situate itself.”
Schickler says it’s more likely that a third party would put pressure on one of the two major parties that it’s more politically aligned with to appeal to dissatisfied voters, rather than to actually run candidates that get elected.
Nolan McCarty, a professor of politics and public affairs at Princeton University, agrees. If Carlson launches a third party, and it generates enough traction, then that might force the Republican Party to accommodate some of those candidates’ platforms to regain the favor of conservative voters, McCarty says.
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