In Dubai, a few days after the interview, Carlson put forth a bizarre hodgepodge of assertions. He thought the architecture, food and service in Moscow was better than in any American city. Really? Moscow, outside of a small historic center, is filled with drab Soviet-era concrete buildings. And while food in Moscow can be quite good, is it better than in New York or San Francisco? You need to get out more, Tucker!
Many of his jibes were simply untrue. He praised Moscow, saying it is one of several “wonderful places to live” because, unlike the United States, Russia apparently doesn’t suffer from “rampant inflation.” But using the Russian government’s own data from last month, the country’s inflation rate was 7.4 percent, almost 2½ times that of the United States. That’s why interest rates in Russia are 16 percent, about three times higher than U.S. rates.
In a short video segment recorded in Moscow, Carlson shops at a local grocery store and marvels that groceries to feed a Russian family for a week cost perhaps a quarter as much as similar groceries would cost in the United States. This enraged him. But Russia’s per capita GDP is about $15,000, compared with America’s, which is about $76,000. Stuff costs more in rich countries than in poorer ones. Carlson should go shopping in Mexico, where his groceries would also be much cheaper. Perhaps he will gain newfound respect for the Mexican government.
Carlson also marvels at the grandeur of a subway station, contrasting Moscow’s subway favorably with New York’s. While it’s true that the Russian capital’s subways are excellent, the stations are so grand there because they were built by Joseph Stalin at huge public expense to showcase the superiority of Soviet Communism. In contrast, New York’s subways are a product of capitalism, having been built and operated through public-private partnerships of various kinds, which are more budget-conscious. It has always been true that centralized autocracies can marshal the entire resources of society to build great vanity projects. Tucker should go next to see the pyramids of Egypt and the Taj Mahal. They’re amazing.
Carlson’s entire riff about Russia is really about the United States. He said he “grew up in a country that had cities like Moscow and Abu Dhabi and Dubai and Singapore and Tokyo.” New York is one of his favorite cities, he says, but as he sees it, U.S. cities are now broken. Carlson was born in 1969, so the New York of the 1970s he so fondly remembers was in fact a city of rampant crime, riots and graffiti — a city so badly mismanaged that it nearly declared bankruptcy in 1975. A 1977 blackout became legendary for the massive looting and crime it triggered. More than 800,000 people fled the city during that decade and real estate values plummeted.
It wasn’t just New York. San Francisco during that era was seen as a hotbed of hippies, drugs, pornography and radical experimentation. The movie “Dirty Harry,” portraying out-of-control urban crime, was set in San Francisco in the 1970s. Crime rates in New York today, like across many major U.S. cities, are way down from their levels in the 1980s and 1990s.
Carlson speaks enviously of cities such as Tokyo, Singapore, Abu Dhabi and Dubai. I’ve been to all these cities many times — some of them in the past few months — and they are indeed wonderful in their own distinctive ways. But what’s striking about all of them is that they are somewhat tame and subdued, the product of authoritarian governments or conformist culture — or both.
American cities are different. They are the product of decentralization and diversity and democracy. Jane Jacobs, a great writer on urban life, always described the best cities as bottom-up systems, seemingly anarchic but organic and in the long run far superior to the abstract drawings of central planners. American cities are expressions of democracy, places where people have to negotiate differences and find ways to live together. That makes them messier and dirtier and sometimes chaotic. But perhaps that is what has made these cities so vibrant and innovative, and why they have been at the forefront in making the United States the country that leads the world in economics, technology, culture and power.
Once upon a time, American conservatives praised the United States’ organic communities, rooted in freedom and choice, built bottom-up not top-down. But the new populist right despises these cities, and that disgust is in part a rejection of modern, pluralistic democracy itself. Increasingly, they are dazzled by the clean and orderly ways of dictatorships, populist authoritarians and absolute monarchies.
After all, say what you will about Putin, he makes the subways run on time.
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