Henry Wallace, Tucker Carlson, and the Return of the Russia Dupe

A new biography sheds light on a recurring temptation.

For a certain kind of radical social critic, there is an irresistible urge to look abroad for proof that your vision of a better world is possible. This was the story of Henry Wallace, a one-term vice-president under Franklin Roosevelt and briefly the intellectual and emotional leader of the American left. It is also the story of a contemporary, very different kind of social critic: Tucker Carlson, the right-wing commentator and possible future candidate for high office.

Wallace is the subject of journalist Benn Steil’s new biography, The World That Wasn’t: Henry Wallace and the Fate of the American Century. In some obvious ways, Wallace was Carlson’s antithesis: an idealist whose goal was to change the world rather than get rich on television and who never abandoned his lofty view of human nature and possibility.

But Wallace developed a fascination with Soviet communism, both during his time in the Roosevelt administration and after, that has interesting parallels with Carlson’s attachment to Putin-era Russia. While he was not paid or controlled directly by communists, or even a communist himself, Wallace frequently echoed their arguments and excused their crimes; as these excuses made him anathema to his former allies, he drew tighter into the arms of his friends in Moscow.

Wallace reached the height of his influence after leaving government. Democrats replaced him as vice-president in 1944 (correctly anticipating that Roosevelt wouldn’t live through his fourth term and deeming Wallace too flaky for the job) in favor of Harry Truman. Roosevelt and Truman kept Wallace on as Commerce secretary, believing they needed his support to prevent a liberal revolt. After Wallace persisted in criticizing Truman’s Cold War policies, such as the Berlin Airlift, the Marshall Plan, and aid to Greece and Turkey, Truman eventually fired him in 1946. Freed from any political fetters, Wallace denounced Truman, briefly served as titular editor of The New Republic (during one of its doctrinaire left-wing periods), and eventually ran for president on the Progressive Party line in 1948.

Wallace’s attacks on Truman’s emerging Cold War policy eerily anticipate the arguments made today by Russia defenders like Carlson. Wallace depicted all Soviet actions, however aggressive, as a defensive response to feared or actual threats by the West. He insisted that any steps to contain Russia, even merely aiding its targets, would lead to direct war, that Russia was too strong to be successfully deterred, and that any aid to countries threatened by Russia would bankrupt the United States.

Wallace also came to believe Russia had a brilliant model of domestic economics that had lessons for the West. While he didn’t totally deny Stalin’s brutality, he considered it the necessary cost of social progress. (Or as Carlson put it not long ago, “leadership requires killing people.”) Wallace went along on a propaganda trip in 1944 in which Soviet authorities staged elaborate scenes of high culture and prosperity with trained actors who had been threatened not to reveal anything to their credulous visitor. Carlson similarly depicted Putin’s Russia as a haven of order, cleanliness, prosperity, and stable prices.

Wallace, also like Carlson, had ambitions of historic scale. He believed he could transform the Democratic Party by articulating opposition to its leadership. Either by winning as a third-party candidate in 1948 or precipitating the Democrats’ defeat as a spoiler, he believed he could reveal the party’s bankruptcy and lead the people to take control of it from the bosses. Wallace remains a hero today in segments of the left that still believe the Democrats could have become a true populist workers/peace party if only they had followed him.

Carlson’s position as a right-wing populist critic of the Republican Party bears a somewhat similar trajectory. He has positioned himself as the spokesman for Republicans who believe their party has been led by globalist elites who sold out the common man, for whom Carlson claims to speak.

Even the characterological differences between the two men turn out, upon inspection, to be smaller than they may appear. If Carlson were truly motivated by no more than fame and greed, he would have found a way to stay in the Murdoch family’s good graces and retain his lucrative prime-time perch. And if Wallace had been deeply honest, he would have fessed up about matters like his 1930s infatuation with Nicholas Roerich, a Russian émigré mystic whose cult Wallace joined, and his secret 1940s correspondence with Stalin, with whom he choreographed a planned interview designed to position Wallace as a western peace leader.

Messianic overconfidence can do terrible things to a man’s ethics. Wallace, at least, eventually drew up the humility to admit the Soviets had duped him. Carlson does not seem to have the character ever to offer such a humbling confession. He seems more the type to dismiss the evidence of his own complicity with evil with his trademark hyena laugh.