Marjorie Taylor Greene Locks Arms with the Anti-American Left

Political realignments like the one Americans have witnessed over much of the last decade can be disorienting. But “disorienting” is too soft a word to describe Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene’s rudderless, impulsive embrace of the odiously undiscerning and only nominally pacifist organization Code Pink.

In all likelihood, Greene didn’t devote much thought to the course to which she committed herself. Code Pink opposes Western support for Ukraine’s effort to prevent Russia from conquering and subjugating its people. Greene does, too. Thus, an alliance of convenience was born. But had the congresswoman or her staff dedicated even a moment’s consideration to the implications that accompany their association with Code Pink, they might have thought twice.

Code Pink is not an anti-war group. It is an anti-Western group — specifically, an anti-American group. Indeed, it’s hard to find an anti-American regime for which the organization won’t go to bat, irrespective of that regime’s commitment to nonaggression.

Its members defended the brutal, abusive, antidemocratic regime of Venezuelan strongman Nicolás Maduro when it faced real and legitimate pressure from opposition leader Juan Guaidó, whose shadow presidency the U.S. backed after Guaidó staked a legally valid claim to the presidency. The organization has lent credence to Maduro’s narratives, backed Caracas’s nationalization of U.S.-based corporate property, and looked past the regime’s violent suppression of pro-democracy protests.

Code Pink’s founder, Medea Benjamin, beamed with pride over the role she played in arguing Iran’s case against the world — in particular, against Israel and the United States. The Iranian press was similarly effusive in its praise for Benjamin and her organization. In 2019, the mullahs’ state-run media outlets cited Benjamin’s arguments to justify Iran’s aggressive actions. After all, “the U.S. has military bases around Iran, it is Iran’s right to upgrade its defense capability,” Tehran’s propagandists asserted. What’s more, according to Benjamin, “the U.S. government was not allowed to criticize the Zionists in response to a question about the unequivocal support of the U.S. government for the Zionist regime.” Benjamin allowed herself to be used as a prop by a regime that murders gays and lesbians, oppresses women, and kills American servicemen. And she’s proud of that.

“China is not our enemy,” declared the Code Pink protesters who disrupted a congressional hearing on the threat to U.S. interests posed by Beijing earlier this year. That is not a slogan some random Bernie Sanders voters came up with in a basement; it is an institutional dictum. Code Pink’s organizational viewpoint is that, to the extent that the U.S. and the People’s Republic are engaged in a conflict at all, it is America’s fault. “From sanctions to military expansion, the US is heading towards a dangerous confrontation with China,” the organization insists. “The US believes they can win a nuclear war against China and is preparing for war.” Beijing’s mouthpieces at Xinhua couldn’t have said it any better.

And, of course, Code Pink sees Russia — a state that has, on two unprovoked occasions, invaded Ukraine with the intent to absorb its territory, ethnically cleansed the territories it has occupied, summarily executed civilians, used rape as a weapon of war, and targeted civilian population centers and critical humanitarian infrastructure with guided munitions — as the victim. At least, you can say that Code Pink is so blinkered by its oikophobia, so besotted with anti-American propaganda, so captured by the hopelessly naïve and corruptibly manipulable that its members might actually believe the bilge they regularly disgorge all over the political landscape. It’s unlikely that Greene shares their worldview. At most, Code Pink makes all the right people mad, and she finds emotional satisfaction in that sort of incandescently stupid contrarianism. Even Code Pink has enough discretion to recognize that its interests are not shared by “MAGA Republicans,” who “are not anti-war allies.”

There are surely some right-wing voters who have convinced themselves that George W. Bush’s adversaries are their adversaries, too. It’s a new political moment, after all, and the GOP is now constitutionally opposed to the exercise of American power abroad. But in aligning with the anti-American left, Greene has exposed some of the great realignment’s most objectionable traits. Accompanying the New Right’s suspicion of the projection of American power is a suspicion of America’s motives. Along with their mistrust of democracy promotion comes a hostility toward the virtues of self-rule and egalitarianism itself. The emphasis they place on the bad that American intervention in foreign affairs has done so often leads to the conclusion that maybe those misdeeds weren’t so inadvertent after all. And a myopic fixation on America as the locus of global malignancy precedes the inevitable and chauvinistic conclusion that America is, in fact, the author of most of the world’s evils.

In a sense, Greene’s heedless embrace of the enemy of her enemy has done us a service. She has exposed the most unlovely features of the realignment. But it isn’t as though the Democratic Party has abandoned its traditional suspicion of the idea that America is a force for good in the world. Instead, we’re confronted with the prospect that, uninterrupted, the realignment will produce two major parties of the same mind on the scourge of America’s malign global influence. Sadly, the Republicans who disagree with this terrible consensus have struggled to find an audience among GOP voters of late. Greene may just be a leading indicator of the direction in which the GOP is heading.