How the Russia hawks have fallen … for Putin
Not that long ago the American right was militarist, love-it-or-leave-it, and rabidly anti-Communist/anti-Russia. To a comical “no more than ten to twenty million killed, tops” and “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb Iran” degree, even. Fight ’em over there so we don’t fight ’em over here. War was good business, good politics, and a resume-builder for aspiring politicans. Americans of all political stripes reflexively pulled for the underdogs facing imperialist aggression (unless we were the imperialists).
Then came the BIg Shift. Now righties are fans of authoritarians and dictators. They’ve soured on all-American democracy and have turned fascism-curious. Let Russia have Ukraine, whatevs. It’s been in the making since the 1990s.
Susan B. Glasser, Jane Mayer, and Evan Osnos take a swag in The New Yorker at explaining why American conservatives have turned fans of Vladimir Putin:
The New Yorker staff writer Andrew Marantz joins the Washington Roundtable to discuss his reporting on CPAC Hungary, where far-right political figures gathered in Budapest last year, and on why American conservatives are gravitating toward figures like Putin and Orbán. “You don’t have to be a red-string-on-a-corkboard conspiracy theorist to see the connections,” Marantz says. “In Florida, for example, Ron DeSantis’s administration has admitted when they wrote the ‘Don’t Say Gay’ bill, they were modelling it on a previous Hungarian law, which was itself modelled on a previous Russian law. So, no one’s really entirely hiding the ball here.”
Adolf Hitler’s National Socialists patterned their legal discrimination after Jim Crow laws in the U.S. So there’s been an undercurrent present for some time.
Click over and have a listen: How the American Right Came to Love Putin.
Happy Hollandaise Everyone!