A new column published on The Daily Wire asks a pointed question in its headline: what does Tucker Carlson actually want for America? The answer, according to the piece, is that he wants to tear down the West as it currently exists — and he is not alone.
The column, which reads more like a political essay than a traditional news report, argues that Carlson and a disparate coalition of voices on both the left and the right are united by a shared belief that America fundamentally betrayed itself at some point in its past. According to the author, this “demoralization project” is bringing together what he calls the “anti-American faction” across the political spectrum.
The shared premise: America was betrayed
The column points to Michigan Democratic Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed as an example on the left. El-Sayed, the piece notes, has argued that Black Americans have never had access to real capitalism, stating that their labor was extracted through slavery and that exclusion from capital, schools, and healthcare persists today. The Daily Wire column holds this up as evidence of a worldview that sees America as fundamentally broken at its root.
New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani is also cited, specifically for comments made during an appearance with commentator Theo Von. According to the column, Mamdani described joining the Democratic Socialists of America as a way to combat isolation and anxiety, saying it helped him feel part of something larger and gave him a sense of his place in the world.
The author seizes on these examples to ask why such figures are, in his words, so intent on destroying the country. The answer, he suggests, lies in a deeper question that Carlson and his ideological allies keep asking: Where did everything go wrong for America?
A counternarrative: things didn’t go wrong
For most Americans, the column argues, the answer is simple. America didn’t go wrong. It is a fantastic place, the envy of the world, a country of opportunity and prosperity that presides over the global order. A normal person, the author writes, would acknowledge that some things have gone wrong while many things have gone right.
He invokes G.K. Chesterton to make his point, quoting the conservative theologian’s warning that no one has the right to destroy a social institution until they have truly seen it as a historical institution. The column uses this to frame the current revolutionaries — Carlson, El-Sayed, Mamdani, and others — as people who view America as a senseless monstrosity rather than a flawed but valuable inheritance.
According to the author, the revolutionary mindset follows a consistent pattern: something bad happened in the past, most Americans don’t believe it because they’ve been lied to and infused with a false consciousness, and the goal is to awaken them by exploding the false story of the past. The villains in this narrative, he writes, are those who are doing well. If you’re succeeding, you’re an exploiter; if you’re struggling, you’re a victim.
From the Marxist left to Catholic integralists
The column goes on to argue that this pattern extends beyond the left. It points to the so-called Catholic integralists on the right, who believe the West went wrong at a specific historical juncture — the end of the Holy Roman Empire — and that the Protestant Reformation broke everything. Harvard professor Adrian Vermeule is cited as an integralist who says Catholicism ought to win and liberalism ought to lose. Another integralist, Patrick Deneen, is noted for lamenting free markets as inherently unfree and ugly.
The author pushes back hard on this, arguing that free markets and individual liberty are awesome, and that the extraordinary freedom and prosperity of the West are downstream from the Protestant Reformation. To admit that, he writes, would require admitting that Catholic universalism wasn’t working all that well historically. Instead, he says, integralists pretend that free markets enrich us materially while robbing us of our spirit and our souls.
The piece also takes a detour into the Marxist left, claiming that it has turned antisemitic and that it views Jews in both America and Israel as beneficiaries of a racist system. The author asserts that it should be no surprise that Black Lives Matter as a group stood on the same side as Hamas on October 7.
Carlson’s endgame and the revolutionary impulse
Returning to Carlson, the column asks whether his end goal is the same as that of Nikole Hannah-Jones, Adrian Vermeule, or any other revolutionary seeking to overturn the system. The author suggests that all of them tell Americans they are poor and suffering victims of billionaires and millionaires. The Catholic integralists, he writes, will say we live in a godless, unrooted, atomistic society and blame capitalism, concluding that the only cure is to discard the liberal principles of the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution and return to a new Holy Roman Empire.
The column does not offer a direct answer to its own headline question beyond this: Carlson, in the author’s view, is part of a broader revolutionary movement that rejects the American project as fundamentally illegitimate and seeks to dismantle it. Whether that is a fair characterization of Carlson’s actual goals is left for readers to decide, but the piece makes clear that its author sees a dangerous convergence between elements of the right and left that he believes are working toward the same destructive end.
The Daily Wire column is notable not for breaking new ground on Carlson’s specific policy prescriptions — it doesn’t list any — but for framing the current political moment as a battle between those who want to preserve a flawed but good America and those who want to tear it all down. It’s a familiar argument in conservative media, but the column’s inclusion of figures like El-Sayed and Mamdani alongside Carlson and Vermeule is an attempt to draw a straight line from progressive activism to right-wing anti-liberalism, all under the banner of a shared hatred for the West.
As the 2026 midterms approach and figures like El-Sayed and Mamdani gain national prominence, that framing is likely to be tested at the ballot box. For now, the column stands as a provocative answer to its own question — one that Carlson himself has not directly responded to.
Source: www.dailywire.com — https://www.dailywire.com/news/what-does-tucker-carlson-actually-want-for-america