World reaction to Russian President Vladimir Putin’s invasion of Ukraine — ahem, “special military operation” — means statements from Putin and the Kremlin get prominent play in the news lately. Aside from his invoking his nuclear arsenal to intimidate the rest of Europe, what’s particularly unnerving is how hard it has become to tell which way the right-wing propaganda is flowing. Is it from Russia to the U.S. or vice versa?
Putin and Putin fanboy Donald Trump are sounding a lot alike these days.
Russia being “cancelled,” for example. Granted, the first reference I spotted was George Takei wondering aloud after the assault began how long it would take the American right to complain that “Russia is being canceled” (Feb. 28). Not long.
Tyler Cowen, economist and director of George Mason University’s Mercatus Center, a libertarian think tank, weighed in with a Washington Post op-ed, “Cancel Culture Against Russians Is the New McCarthyism” the next morning (March 1). By that evening, Monica Crowley was parroting it back to Jesse Watters on Fox News.
The next morning, the head of Russian foreign intelligence had latched on.
By Wednesday, March 16, even as his forces attacked apartment buildings in Ukraine, refugees fled, and children died, Putin compared the West to Nazi Germany and claimed it is “trying to ‘cancel’ Russia by banning ‘Russian music, culture and literature.’”
Putin’s whine sounds so much like the American right that the two become indistinguishable. At the Conservative Political Action Conference on Feb. 26, Trump complained that if he only announced he would not run again in 2024, “the persecution would stop immediately.” Democrats and the media would move on “to the next victim.” Other speakers complained they had been “cancelled.” Polling just before the invasion showed more support for Putin among Republican than for Joe Biden, the U.S. president.
Putin’s grievance, especially, does not have to make sense except to him, Yale historian Timothy Snyder told Ezra Klein in discussing his 2018 book, “The Road to Unfreedom.” Putin’s recent speeches and writing reflect a “desperate effort” at explaining himself and his reasons for invading Ukraine. Putin “has this tone of the person who is sitting next to you at the bar and who knows everything,” Snyder says. “When, in fact, what’s going on is quite loopy.”
In Putin’s mind, the “only way to repair the world, to heal the world, to bring all the pieces back together is for there to be a certain kind of Russia,” Snyder explains:
I think Russian national identity is extremely confused and you can understand the need for Ukraine as a kind of shortcut, as a kind of way of resolving all these problems. Because you can say, well, I mean, this is a kind of dumb analogy, but you can say, well, the only problem with my life is I don’t have somebody else, you know? But anybody who says that is probably incorrect. And what Putin is saying — if we kind of reduce all the philosophical stuff down to a very simple proposition, he’s saying, Russia is not itself without Ukraine.
But if you’re not capable of being yourself without attacking and absorbing, violently, someone else, some other country, the real question might be about you, the real question might be about how you see the world, how you’re living in the world. So I think there’s a serious problem with Russian national identity.
Putin possesses a mystical (and ahistorical) vision of lost unity between Russia and Ukraine. One Russia with one leader, and “none of this messy business about counting votes. There’s none of this messy business about people having different opinions.” No messy union of separate republics attempted in the last century. Never mind that there was never one Russia, one civic nation with any sense of itself as such. Just a former empire that spans 11 time zones and multiple cultures, not all Christian and Caucasian.
Putin “is beginning from the premise that the world is wrecked and, therefore,” Snyder explains, “we need charismatic acts of violence to generate the sort of healing and unity.” If that sounds uncomfortably like the “tree of liberty” reasoning of the MAGA and U.S. militia movements, it should.
Where words fail to persuade, says Snyder, the fascists’ way for cutting through the confusion is “a transformative act of violence” that will “speak for itself.”
Like that’s the thing which actually makes sense, right? That’s the thing that makes sense of the world. So I do think there’s a connection here between a deep commitment to something, which can’t actually be explained, but which can be acted upon. And I think this is another reason why when we reason about Putin, we shouldn’t be reasoning from our own premises.
We should at least start from where he’s starting from. Because there is a logic here. You know, the logic is cutting through the confusion, undoing the fragmentation. I may not be able to think it all through, but I’m going to show you that I can act it all through. The world may not be the way I describe. I may not be able to gather up in my paragraphs, but I can gather it up in my paratroopers. I can make it make sense. Watch me make it make sense.
“Make Russia Great Again” would fit on a red cap. That helps explain the affinity of the American right for Putin’s aggrieved strong-man act.
Here in the U.S., our right wing operates increasingly along the same premise. A country once great is broken. There was once something called America that stood for freedom, a certain kind for a certain kind of people. If it cannot be fixed through the “messy business about counting votes,” maybe fixing the vote is justified. (Accuse adversaries of doing it while doing it yourself.) And if that fails, perhaps a transformative act of violence like that attempted on Jan. 6, 2021.
Do they imagine one leader who, “by way of his clear decisions and actions, asserts, embodies, creates this unity on the scale of a nation.”
We, the rest of us, should stop accepting the right’s invocation of freedom without probing what they mean by it. Freedom for whom? Freedom for what? What do the people confidently expounding beside us at the bar actually mean by it?
For all the America iconography on display at Trump rallies and trucker protests, one begins to suspect that the “philosophy” behind them resembles Putin’s mystical vision of restoring a Russia that never was. How does the American right envision a “a more perfect union”? Is their vision backward-looking like Putin’s or forward-looking like the framers’?
Please, do go on.
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