In times past, Ukraine would have been a great cause of American conservatives. What about now?
An uncomfortable topic, for many of us. I mean, the one I have indicated in my heading: “Ukraine and the Right.” By “the Right,” I mean the American Right, i.e., the Republican Party, the conservative movement, etc.
Steve Bannon and his confreres speak of “Conservatism, Inc.,” or “Conservative, Inc.” I think they mean Reaganites and other fossils. Yet some of us think of Bannon et al. — Trump World — as Conservative, Inc. (though it is painful to cede the word “conservative” to the Bannonites).
Said Bannon, “Every member of Conservative, Inc., that backs this Ukraine war is a simp. Is a simp. It’s a disgrace.”
“Simp”? I have consulted Merriam-Webster: “a foolish or stupid person.”
Talking to Bannon, J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for Senate in Ohio, said, “I gotta be honest with you, I don’t really care what happens to Ukraine one way or another.”
Once upon a time, Ukraine would have been a great cause on the American right. Here is a post-Soviet republic, an escapee from the “prison house of nations.” It is working to find its way as a free, independent, and democratic country. It is invaded by a revanchist Russia, led by a former KGB colonel. Russia seeks to re-subjugate Ukraine through terror. The Kremlin is visiting atrocities on the Ukrainians that it never visited on the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechoslovakians in 1968.
So, here is a classic case of a free and independent country being invaded and brutalized by an expansionist dictatorship that seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. As of old. Also a case of a national David against an imperial Goliath.
This would have been a natural cause of conservatives (American conservatives, forgetting their European and other counterparts). Is it? Hardly.
Instructive is an article from Defense One, published last week: “Conservative Groups Urging Lawmakers To Vote ‘No’ On More Ukraine Aid.” Last May, Heritage Action put out a release saying “Ukraine Aid Package Puts America Last.”
Today, “America First” is a slogan of the American Right. The America First movement started in September 1940, a year after the Nazis and the Soviets invaded Poland, thereby starting World War II. America Firsters were a mixture of genuine isolationists and genuine Nazi sympathizers. The notion of “America First” was discredited for decades after. An odor emitted from it.
Then came Patrick J. Buchanan and his presidential campaigns of the 1990s. He revived the slogan “America First.” In 2016, Donald Trump embraced it, followed by the Right at large. Last year saw the founding of the America First Policy Institute.
Consider a tweet from two days ago, issued by the communications director of Heritage Action:
Heritage president @KevinRobertsTX recalls volunteering for Pat Buchanan’s ‘92 campaign: “My people knew what time it was before the rest of the country even knew it was ticking.”
This is one way of knowing which way the wind is blowing (blowing on the American right, that is). There are many ways.
Some voices on the right are outright pro-Putin and anti-Ukraine. More numerous, I would say, are the anti-anti-Putin voices, and the Ukraine-resentful ones. You see this a lot in the Republican media.
Survey the conservative, or Republican, or rightist, media landscape. Survey the comments sections!
Unshy, as usual, is Marjorie Taylor Greene, the Republican congresswoman from Georgia. She may be an eccentric in Congress — but she no doubt speaks for a great many, who adore her, and thrill to her. She is also a very popular campaigner with GOP candidates around the country (Vance, for one; Doug Mastriano in Pennsylvania, for another).
Last March, Greene tweeted,
. . . NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them.
What the hell is going with these #NATONazis?
In June, she said, “We should pull out of NATO.”
The next month, speaking to a church audience, she said the Democrats want war in Ukraine. “Why? Because Russia, Russia, Russia, right? They’re always the enemy and the bad guy to Joe Biden and the Democrats.”
Have you seen what Russian forces have done to the Ukrainians? The mass murder, the mass rape, the mass deportation, and so on? Anyone with a conscience knows who the enemy or the bad guy is.
Speaking with a podcaster called “Cat Turd,” Greene provided a classic expression of the America First mindset:
I am completely against funding this proxy war with nuclear Russia and Ukraine. I think we should be caring about our country. Of course, no one supports what happens there, everybody feels sorry for the Ukrainian people and all that, but you know what, our country matters, so to me, I’m not concerned at all about Ukraine. I’m concerned about America.
About the connection between Ukraine and the U.S. interest, would anyone have told Marjorie Taylor Greene? Would she have gleaned it from any of the media she consumes? What does Cat Turd have to say?
“Zelensky is a thug,” said another Republican congressman, Madison Cawthorn, from North Carolina. He was referring to the Ukrainian president, Volodymyr Zelensky. “Remember that the Ukrainian government is incredibly corrupt and is incredibly evil and has been pushing woke ideologies.”
Where would the congressman have picked up such things? From the media he consumes, of course. “You are what you eat,” goes an old saying. I have a corollary: “You are the media you consume.”
Candace Owens, of the Daily Wire, said, “President Zelensky is a very bad character who is working with globalists against the interests of his own people.” Peter Navarro, the Trump adviser, said of Ukraine, “The country itself is not really a country.” That is straight Kremlin propaganda.
And it has been disproven, bracingly, stirringly, by Ukrainians.
PHOTOS: Russian-Ukraine Conflict
Rob Portman, the senator from Ohio, is a holdover from the bad old days, a relic of the Republican Party that was. He will leave the Senate in January. Portman is the Republican co-chairman of the Senate Ukraine Caucus. (The Democratic co-chairman is Dick Durbin of Illinois.)
Last Sunday, Portman tweeted,
If we give the Ukrainians the weapons they need, they can win this war. Ukraine’s bold counteroffensive has shown that fact for the entire world to see.
As I mentioned earlier, the GOP’s choice to replace Portman in the Senate is J.D. Vance. In the switch from Portman to Vance, you can see the trajectory of the GOP, and of the Right at large. Many cheer this, of course, and some don’t. Regardless, it is a neat illustration.
Portman has endorsed Vance for Senate. That is another neat illustration — a sign of which way the wind has blown.
A question: Who would receive the warmer greeting at CPAC? The Russian strongman, Vladimir Putin, or the Ukrainian president, Zelensky? Are you sure of the answer? Unsure?
Ronald Reagan used to be a hero of CPAC, with his ringing calls for freedom and democracy. This is the man who inspired the National Endowment for Democracy. The man who knew an evil empire when he saw one, and spoke out about it.
Which politicians are admired by the Right today? Trump, yes. And in Europe: Nigel Farage, the Le Pens, Matteo Salvini, Viktor Orbán (a recent headliner at CPAC), and so on. All of these people are Putin-friendly at a minimum; some, such as Salvini, have formally allied with him.
Sympathy for strongmen is an ever-present temptation, in various quarters. The last piece that Charles Krauthammer ever wrote, I believe, was “The Authoritarian Temptation.” It appears in The Point of It All, a Krauthammer compilation. Krauthammer wrote the piece in the summer of 2017, alarmed by what he was seeing — a change under way on the American right.
In calling his piece “The Authoritarian Temptation,” Krauthammer was adapting the title of a book by Jean-François Revel, published in 1976: The Totalitarian Temptation.
Wrote Krauthammer,
In what would have been unimaginable 25 years ago, mature Western democracies are experiencing a surge of ethno-nationalism, a blood-and-soil patriotism tinged with xenophobia, a weariness with parliamentary dysfunction and an attraction — still only an attraction, not yet a commitment — to strongman rule.
He went on,
Its most conspicuous symptom is a curious and growing affinity for Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the Russias. Remarkably, this tendency is most pronounced on the right. The reversal is head-snapping.
It was head-snapping. Many of us are used to it now, or almost used to it.
More Krauthammer:
Today, some on the right have begun to profess a certain admiration of and attraction to Putin and his brand of Russian authoritarianism.
The result is jarring. After decades of left-wing apologists for Russia, it is now lifelong conservatives who are asking: What’s so bad about Putin anyway? . . .
Sure he emasculated the political opposition, shut down independent media and regularly kills political opponents and journalists. But he’s got omelets to make. Moreover, as President Trump said when asked about the killings, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?”
Moral equivalence so shocking, emanating from the elected leader of the United States, is not to be ignored.
(About Trump and dictators, a whole book can be written, and I wrote a substantial piece in October 2020, here.)
You can tell when people have a cause — when their heart and mind are in something. When they regard something as important. What are politicians talking about? What are writers writing about? That tells you what they regard as important; that tells you what their causes are.
I know some flaming Reaganites — or people who once were — who don’t utter a peep about Ukraine. They don’t oppose Ukraine or support Putin. But they keep quiet, mumbling the minimum, when they have to. Why is this so?
Well, why doesn’t Governor Ron DeSantis say whether the 2020 presidential election was legitimate? Why doesn’t he say whether he received a booster shot for the coronavirus? Is it because his supporters wouldn’t like the answers? I suspect so.
Another reason that Republicans, some of them, are uncharacteristically quiet about Ukraine is that a Democrat is president — so American support of Ukraine looks Democratic (as well as democratic). Some Republicans, I have noticed, can’t decide whether Biden has done too little for Ukraine or too much. They’re in a bind.
There is a lot more to say about this topic. Books will be written about the transformation of the American Right in the second and third decades of the 21st century. A few already have been. There ought to be a chapter on Ukraine.
The Ukraine war is a tremendously important battle — a battle in a wider war, between freedom and dictatorship, independence and empire, the rule of law and the rule of raw strength, or aggression. Yes, a terribly important battle. And where a person stands, matters.