ANNALS OF POLITICS: RULING-CLASS RULES

How to thrive in the power élite—while declaring it your enemy.

- EVAN OSNOS

As a young man in the nineteen-eighties, Tucker Swanson McNear Carlson set out to claim his stake in the establishment. His access to money and influence started at home. His stepmother, Patricia, was an heir to the Swanson frozen-food fortune. His father, Dick, was a California TV anchor who became a Washington fixture after a stint in the Reagan Administration. For fortunate clans like the Carlsons, it was “A Wonderful Time,” to borrow the title of a volume of contemporaneous portraits of “the life of America’s elite,” which included “the Cabots sailing off Boston’s North Shore, and Barry Goldwater on the range in Arizona.”

As a teen-ager, Carlson attended St. George’s School, beside the ocean in Rhode Island, one of sixteen American prep schools that the sociologist E. Digby Baltzell described as “differentiating the upper classes from the rest of the population.” Carlson dated (and later married) the headmaster’s daughter. His college applications were rejected, but the headmaster exerted influence at his own alma mater, Trinity College, and Carlson was admitted. He did not excel there; he went on to earn what he described as a “string of Ds.” After college, he applied to the C.I.A., and when he was rejected there, too, his father offered some rueful advice: “You should consider journalism. They’ll take anybody.” Soon, Carlson was writing for the Policy Review, a periodical published by the Heritage Foundation, followed by The Weekly Standard, Esquire, and New York, while also becoming the youngest anchor on CNN.