Putin and American conservatives: peas in a pod
We don’t turn back our clocks for another four months. If American conservatives could have their way, they would turn back the last half-century. Back to when America was “great” in their eyes, in MAGA’s eyes. Back to when white dominance and The Lost Cause went unquestioned. Back to before the country agreed with the Civil Rights movement’s demands for equal voting rights and civil rights for minorities. Back to the world of the Cleavers and the Nelsons. Back to when women, too, knew their places.
Nostalgia not for lost innocence but for lost dominance is what made Donald Trump so attractive to the movement that grew up around him.
Speaking recently with Amanda Marcotte, David Neiwert (“The Age of Insurrection: The Radical Right’s Assault on American Democracy“) observed that fascism and neo-fascism have “actually been present in America since at least the early 1900s.” The increasing radicalization of the right has been there for years. Trump as their charismatic leader simply exploited it, gave it a mainstream platform, Neiwert says:
I don’t think they’re capable of winning, but I think a lot of people can get hurt and I think there will be a lot of people hurt by this, including them. One thing I’ve learned about right wing extremists over 30 years of covering them is that people who get involved in these movements destroy their lives. It’s one of the most toxic forces in America. It draws people into the abyss. It ruins their family relationships, ruins their relationships in the community. A lot of the time they wind up in prison.
All to preserve (or to restore) the power structures of the last century.
That is in part why MAGA Republicans display such affinity for Vladimir Putin’s Russia. He too wishes to retain the traditional power dynamics that pertained during the last century (and prior to that). That death grip on what was destroys lives there, Fareed Zakaria writes:
I’ve been stunned by one statistic ever since I read it: A 15-year-old Russian boy today has the same life expectancy as a 15-year-old boy in Haiti. Remember, Russia is one of the world’s richest countries in terms of natural resources. And it is an urbanized, industrialized society with levels of education and literacy comparable to, and perhaps even exceeding, other European countries.
This analysis comes from an August 2022 working paper by scholar Nicholas Eberstadt, who has long studied demography. He points out that for three decades now, Russia has been depopulating. With a brief respite from 2013 to 2015, deaths have outpaced births, but he notes that this trend is one that we see in many industrialized countries.
What stands out in Russia is its mortality rate. In 2019 — before covid and the invasion of Ukraine — the World Health Organization estimated a 15-year-old boy in Russia could expect to live another 53.7 years, which was the same as in Haiti and below the life expectancy for boys his age in Yemen, Mali and South Sudan. Swiss boys around the same age could expect to live more than 13 years longer.
By multiple measures, the Russian people lag behind the rest of the 21st century.
Russia has a longstanding inferiority complex that mimics that of American Southerners. They still pick at the scabs of their defeat in the Civil War and resent seeing monuments to their romanticized insurrection finally come down. MAGA Republicans “organize discontent” over their lost social dominance that accompanied modernization and the computer age. Their resentments make Vladimir Putin a kindred spirit.
Zakaria observes:
For Putin’s regime, the West now represents forces of social, economic and political modernization that could infect Russia. In his speech as he launched the invasion of Ukraine, Putin accused the United States of seeking to destroy Russia’s traditional values and impose new ones on it which directly lead “to degradation and degeneration, because they are contrary to human nature.” For Putin, modernizing Russia would create a more active civil society, greater demands for better health care, more opportunities for ordinary citizens and a less kleptocratic state. And so he advocates a traditional Russia, which celebrates religion, traditional morality, xenophobia and strict gender conformity.
What does this all add up to? I am not sure. But it’s fair to say that Russia’s biggest problem is not that it is losing the Ukraine war but rather that it is losing the 21st century.
So are American conservatives.