Where does it come from, this Trumpy admiration for Russian President Vladimir Putin?
Is it theatrical, driven by journalistic contrarianism? Is it simply about wanting President Joe Biden to lose? Or is there something deeper and more malign going on?
I have been struck by how many self-proclaimed conservatives in the United States trot out the line that Ukraine is not a real country. Given what Ukrainians are putting themselves through for the sake of their sovereignty, that might seem an absurd proposition. Yet plenty of right-wing commentators are unashamedly pushing it.
“Spare me the performative affection for the Ukraine, a corrupt nation run by oligarchs,” said J.D. Vance, the former hillbilly-turned-Marine-turned-venture-capitalist-turned-commentator. The country, said Tucker Carlson, is a “pure client state of the United States State Department.”
This is an adaptation of Putin’s claim that Ukrainians are not a real people. In the Russian language, when you visit another country, you use the preposition “in” — except when you go to Ukraine, when you talk about being “on” Ukraine. In Putin’s eyes, the Ukrainian language is a Russian dialect and Ukrainian nationalism is a fabrication of Austrian, German, and Polish occupiers.
America’s so-called national conservatives agree that Ukraine is synthetic but believe that it was cobbled together even more recently. “Ukraine wasn’t a thing until 1989. Ukraine was created by the Russians,” said Candace Owens. “They speak Russian.”
Steve Bannon, once Hand of the King to former President Donald Trump, agrees, but he blames the Democrats. “Ukraine’s not even a country,” he has said. “It’s kind of a concept. It’s not even a country. It’s just a corrupt area that the Clintons turned into a colony where they can steal money out of.”
How can people who call themselves nationalists be so blasé about the asphyxiation of a nation whose sole offense has been to assert its independence?
There is nothing surprising about dissent on the Left, chunks of which will align with any cause, however vile, provided it is sufficiently anti-American. If H.G. Wells’s novel came true tomorrow and Martian invaders launched their spaceships at Earth, there would be a New York Times op-ed arguing that the invasion was an understandable response to former President George W. Bush’s foreign policy.
But why do people who see themselves as defenders of Western civilization line up with a despot who so obviously loathes it? Why do declared American patriots oppose their country in a crisis?
I don’t think it is performative. Apart from anything else, the base is unconvinced. Fox viewers can see an anti-American leader seeking to crush a nation whose crime was to want to adopt a more American style of government.
Part of the explanation has to do with domestic tribalism. Some commentators are so inward-looking that they have pressed the invasion into the familiar narrative of Hunter Biden’s alleged improprieties there. Trump was always strikingly warm in his attitude toward Putin, whom he infamously believed more than his own security agencies and whose invasion of Crimea he endorsed. Even as Putin’s armored columns punched their way into Ukraine last month, the former president called him “a genius.” For some conservatives, that is enough — where Trump goes, they go.
But what is it that Trump and his followers see in Putin in the first place? This is where I start to worry. For a Reagan conservative, Putin’s flaws are obvious. He does not respect elections. He believes he can make up the rules as he goes along. He defines some of his people as “traitors” and encourages others to go after them. The sole principle of his foreign policy is Machtpolitik — let the stronger take from the weaker. He has replaced multiparty pluralism with a cult of personality. He can’t tolerate criticism.
Are Trumpsters as repelled by these things as Reaganites? Considering that list in an American context, I wonder. Things have changed since the Gipper’s time. In a polarized age, people are readier to overlook the shortcomings of politicians who specialize in “owning” the other side. Instead of wanting to limit the state as a general principle, modern conservatives are happy to make use of it when it suits their ends. And whereas they used to support candidates who shared their principles, they now tend to shift their principles whenever their champion does.
How paradoxical, and in its way, how tragic. Ukrainians are fighting to establish a democracy on what they see as the American model — pluralist, law-based, and open. Yet Americans themselves are less interested in defending that model than they have been at any point in my lifetime. The likeliest explanation for the behavior of Putin’s American apologists is also the most disquieting one. They really do approve of what he is doing.
