Why Tucker Carlson should have been less excited about his groceries

Tucker Carlson has been radicalized by a Russian supermarket. There’s a sentence you never expected to read.

As part of his tour of Moscow, the week before Putin critic Alexei Navalny “died in prison,” the firebrand commentator visited a grocery store and was stunned by the low prices. “That’s when you start to realize,” Carlson marveled:

…that ideology maybe doesn’t matter as much as you thought… Corruption… If you take people’s standard of living and you tank it through filth and crime and inflation, and they literally can’t buy the groceries they want, at that point maybe it matters less what you say or whether you’re a good person or a bad person, you’re wrecking people’s lives and their country. And that’s what our leaders have done to us, and coming to a Russian grocery store, the “heart of evil”, and seeing what things cost and how they live — it will radicalize you against our leaders.

I’m sure the prices are much lower in Russia than in the US. That said, wages are also much lower. The average monthly wage in Russia in 2023 was equivalent to about $750. In the US it was more like $5,000.

This is not a hard concept to wrap your brain around. Egypt has some of the lowest prices in the world but no one would consider it an economic paradise. Ten years ago when I first moved to Poland, where I live, I arrived with a stack of British pounds and was thrilled to learn that alcohol in Poland was at least four times cheaper than alcohol in the UK. Then I made some friends and realized that this didn’t really matter if you earned four times less. (Wages have risen now. Alas, so has the price of booze.)

As it happens, the average Russian person spends a far higher proportion of their disposable income on groceries than the average American. This has been exacerbated by conflict in Ukraine but it was true before. In 2021, according to the Moscow Times, a poll discovered that “39 percent of… respondents said they have forgone basic groceries and other essentials in the past six months because they can’t afford them.” Feeling radicalized? Me neither.

What other footage will emerge from Mr. Carlson’s tour? Will he have found a small businessman paying off an inspector and saluted their commitment to good old-fashioned gentlemen’s agreements? Will he have seen the body of a man killed by the mafia and admired that outlaw spirit which America abandoned? Will he have taken in the Moscow skyline as a body plunged unexplained from a window? “Big BASE jumpers, these Russians. You don’t get that sort of courage in America anymore.”

It’s important to be fair here. Carlson is by no means comparable to the totalitarianism tourists who visit Pyongyang and rave about the water park. It would be journalistically dishonest for someone to visit Russia and return with only horror stories. Moscow is in many ways a glorious city. Russia has grown richer, safer and less booze-sodden compared to a couple of decades ago.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with saying this. The facts are the facts. Pretending that Russia is some kind of hellhole would be downright unhelpful inasmuch as it would make it so difficult to understand why Russians haven’t dragged Putin off across Staraya Square and out of power.

But this goes both ways. Proper journalism should involve covering both the advantages and disadvantages of a place. Focusing on the former and not the latter is a first cousin of focusing on the latter and not the former. We have all heard leftists rave about the Cuban healthcare system as if the state of a nation begins and ends with the price of medical treatment. We might have hoped that right-wingers would be above that.

Many have asserted that Carlson is some kind of Putinophile. Perhaps I’m biased, as someone who finds him entertaining, but I don’t think this is true. I think he sees everything through the lens of his hatred for the American establishment. Russia, then, is of interest to the extent that it can be compared favorably to America. Had he gone to Tanzania, he would probably have talked about how much cleaner the streets of Dodoma are than the streets of Washington. Had he gone to the Antarctic, he would have noted the lack of illegal immigrants.

Granted, I’m sure there are aspects of Moscow that are better than aspects of the US. I know whose subway I would prefer to ride. Again, there is nothing wrong with saying this. It is good to be humble about the state of our nations.

But Carlson’s grocery shopping revelation is more hubristic than humble — leaping across the experiences of actual Russians, and the possibility of a moment’s thought, to short-sighted America-centric talking points. Of course, it’s only natural for him to focus on America. He is, after all, American, and has no incentive to do a deep dive into Russian economic trends. But if you’re going to bring another nation into the argument then the least you owe it is accuracy.

I hope Carlson will have more thoughtful reflections on his trip sometime. Anyways, I’m off to the pub. A couple of dollars for a beer? Marvelous.