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This quoted part pretty much answers your question. The one political factor that was sorely missing in German in 1933, in Italy in 1922, in Spain in 1936, in Chile in 1973 etc., was a decisively large establishment right-wing party capable of drawing widespread support, even attracting large numbers of hardliner rightists, and persuasively presenting itself as a political force curbing the influence of the far left.
After Tucker Carlson’s exit from Rupert Murdoch and Paul Ryan’s Fox News, the “persuasively” part is rapidly diminishing.
Watching his interview with Ben Shapiro I came away with the opinion that Tucker Carlson has a very distinct set of policies he endorses and in favor of.
Is there a precedent for Tucker to flop between politics, or is it simply "every single media talking person lie all the time"?
A lot of us were. The events of 2014-2015 invalidated a lot of peoples' conception of libertarianism.
What exactly happened then for libertarians?
Modern progressivism molted off its libertarian-friendly aspects, demonstrating that almost all Libertarian victories over the preceding decades were fake. Libertarian advances required common knowledge that the norms they'd been establishing were durable, reliable, stable. Watching bedrock Libertarian institutions like the ACLU abruptly and undeniably abandon those norms the second it became practical to do so gut-shot the movement. Not only did thirty or forty years of gains evaporate overnight, but the hard-built common knowledge that made those gains possible was destroyed, and replaced with common knowledge that all the arguments those gains were made on were in fact lies.
Skokie worked because it appeared to be a durable principle. Opposition to McCarthyism worked because it appeared to be based on durable principles. We now know that both were merely who, whom, so neither will ever happen again in the foreseeable future. Principled Libertarianism has no constituency. It's a train people ride to their desired destination, and then get off.
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