Parallel Lives: Tucker Carlson and Karl Lueger
Republicans are learning that it takes nasty medicine to make multiculturalism work
It requires no great leap of fantasy to see in Vienna around the turn of the 20th century a mirror image of America today. The city’s booming industry (alright, it’s not a perfect analogy) drew in workers from all around, transforming the empire’s once staid, bourgeois, mostly German administrative capital into a multiethnic metropolis. This was the dawn of the age of mass literacy, mass organisation, mass politics, and the city was gripped by a fervour for new ideas, new ways of doing things. That the twentieth century was dreamed up in the coffee houses of the Herrengasse seems in retrospect no more surprising than that the Hitlers, Trotskys, and Stalins of tomorrow are lurking behind anime avatars on America’s last great cultural export, X (formerly Twitter).
The roux in this multicultural slosh was politics, and nothing mixed the juices together like antisemitism. Where once ‘the socialism of fools’ forged bonds of unlikely solidarity between ethnic artisans and German clerks, today the Palestinian cause stitches together an equally awkward patchwork of metropolitan liberals and Mirpuri patriarchs, while in the youthful underbelly of America’s conservative movement, something closer to the old Viennese antisemitic coalition is taking shape. To understand these currents, consider the parallel lives of their two most successful exponents: Tucker Carlson, Fox News host between 2016 and 2023, and Karl Lueger, Mayor of Vienna between 1897 and 1910.
Lueger, like Carlson, struck off into politics as an establishment man walking an established path. Born into a modest background, he managed to attend the prestigious Theresianium before graduating to the University of Vienna’s equally prestigious law faculty. In 1875, he was elected to the city council as a Liberal, then a byword for haute bourgeois respectability. No grubby Bohemian corporal, ‘the good Karl’ cut a patrician figure to the ‘little people’ whom his legal practice brought him into contact with — not unlike ‘Tucker’, who studiously cultivates the air of a jovial country squire. Lueger and Carlson might have easily followed the cursus honorum to respectable mediocrity on the Vienna city council or as a DC apparatchik had not ambition pulled them down a different road, and the need to secure advantage in a competitive field caused both men to dabble in the new political ideas and techniques developing on the fringes of society. This open-mindedness often bled into cynicism — Lueger first experimented with his antisemitic rabble-rousing tactics while campaigning for his patron, the Jewish lawyer Ignaz Mandl, while Carlson’s keen attentiveness to the moods of his audiences has often come at the cost of journalistic rigour.
Periods of intense social change often appear to their contemporaries as ages of reaction and their facilitators as reactionaries, because their departure from established mores usually entails a reappraisal of older notions dismissed by mainstream opinion as mere prejudice for reasons that these supposedly enlightened individuals can often no longer articulate. What is politically salient is that this intellectual ferment creates an organic symbiosis between the intellectually inquisitive and the primitively superstitious. Carlson’s worldview springs from a milieu of online intellectuals who used the vast new horizons of information that the internet opened up to interrogate beliefs dismissed by respectable liberals as ‘conspiracy theories’. Sometimes this opens up — although it does not typically lead down — productive avenues of inquiry, as when Carlson discusses such issues ripe for revision as twentieth-century American history or the ongoing war in Ukraine. Other times it leads into a more obvious cul-de-sac, as when he talks about demons.
Antisemitism, in late nineteenth century Vienna, was ripe for this kind of revaluation, as Jewish flourishing in banking and industry brought them increasingly into the public eye, whilst mass literacy made it possible to synchronise what had been similar, but localised, prejudices, like the multiple, hotly-debated accusations of ritual murder against Jewish communities on the fringes of the empire that regularly flared up in the Austrian and Hungarian press. Political antisemitism went hand in hand with a political revival of the quintessential folk belief, Christianity — hence why Lueger called his party the Christian Social Party; a label Carlson would hardly object to in describing his own politics.
Beyond bringing together the intelligentsia and the rabble, antisemitism helped forge solidarity between Vienna’s manifold ethnic groups. This aspect of Christian Social antisemitism, largely forgotten today, was obvious to Lueger’s contemporaries: we read polite society’s verdict on the Christian Socials in Arthur Schnitzler’s first novel, The Road Into the Open, in which the party’s rise is depicted as a symptom of a wider moral malaise accompanying the closure of the bourgeois age. Schnitzler makes the nature of his game clear when he introduces his metonym for the party: the paper merchant, newspaper proprietor, and city councillor Jalaudek, a name with connotations of Slavic churlishness comically obvious to his contemporaries. There was, of course, no real Jalaudek, although Lueger’s biographer Richard Geehr records a certain Councillor Bielohlawek — another conspicuously Bohemian moniker, although this official apparently prided himself on his clear, nearly perfect German pronunciation — who spoke through the mouth of Schnitzler’s antagonist when he proclaimed that ‘we Christian Socials are Germans through and through’. It was Lueger’s masterstroke to recognise that Vienna’s Czech community took little interest in nationalist identity politics and merely wanted to be accepted by mainstream German society, and that antisemitism, by rendering the antagonisms between Christians and Jews more salient than Germans and Slavs, provided a handy formula to defuse latent ethnic tension.
Schnitzler introduces another familiar element into his sketch of the Christian Socials in the form of Josef Rosner, a young man of modest means who takes a job at Jalaudek’s newspaper. Schnitzler spares no sympathy for this whippersnapper, whom he sketches in similar terms to those in which ‘principled conservatives’ today caricature their juvenile online antagonists — he even lives with his mother, although given her humble station, it is unlikely she has a basement. Young Josef is a fin-de-siècle Viennese version of a groyper. But there is something interesting here that Schnitzler neglects. Josef, unlike his boss, is a German; had he been born a few decades earlier, he would have found an outlet for his furor politicus in national liberalism, perhaps becoming a follower of the fiery Liberal deputy Josef Kopp, who, like an Austrian Pat Buchanan, scandalised his party in the 1870s with his strident Pan-German nationalism. But the electoral demographics of fin-de-siècle Vienna were no longer those of the national liberal high noon in Kopp’s day, and after Bismarck took Großdeutschland off the table, the Austro-Germans had to resign themselves to a battle to hold onto their leading role in a multicultural empire. Thus it was that not nationalism, but Christian Socialism, became Lueger’s credo.
This, then, is the essence of Carlson’s politics. The United States today hosts no less a confusion of peoples than Vienna then, something Democratic strategists long believed would open the door to a permanent blue majority. Republicans were more circumspect; it took no political genius of Lueger’s calibre to realise that many of the newcomers aspired to fit into American society no less than the Czech artisans did. Many were devout Christians; many, like Jalaudek, owned small businesses. Where the Republicans erred was in the received wisdom that these aspirations would naturally coalesce into a politics of limited government, respect for constitutional rights, and family values; in short, conservatism. In fact, as Lueger could have taught them, it takes much nastier medicine to make multiculturalism work.
This article was written by Franz Pokorny, a Pimlico Journal contributor. Have a pitch? Send it to submissions@pimlicojournal.co.uk.
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