Better unwoke than woke
It’s one thing to watch a Terry Gilliam film. It’s another to live inside one. But the white, Christian-nationalist MAGA right wants to. And a child named Tucker will lead them.
Friends circulated this Gerard Baker op-ed from Monday’s Wall Street Journal mocking Tucker Carlson’s fawning, America-hating profile of life in Russia:
Why can’t we be more like Russia?
The minute you see the welcoming smiles on the faces of the kindly immigration guards, all spiffy in their shiny jackboots, at Moscow’s Sheremetyevo Airport you realize that unlike our own morally louche, spiritually decrepit cesspit, run by a corrupt and brutal regime bent on destroying its opponents, Russia is a nation united around a vision of the historic greatness of its civilization.
From state-of-the-art supermarket cart technology to a president who is youthful and vigorous, able to dilate on European history at length, the contrast couldn’t be greater with a technologically backward and collapsing U.S. in the grip of a geriatric autocrat who can’t remember what day it is.
American capitalism is corrupt and exploitative. Russia’s is well-regulated and committed to the common good. In the U.S., tech billionaires and Wall Street fat cats get rich on the surplus value their workers produce. Benevolent Russian oligarchs, cooperating with the state for the benefit of the people, are able to supply all Russians’ needs at a fraction of the exorbitant prices Americans pay. They are so successful that they create demand for hard-pressed sectors of the global economy, such as yachts, luxury London real estate and Swiss casinos.
Unlike America, Russia has firm control over its borders. Millions of migrants flow into the U.S. Russia definitely doesn’t have that problem. The system works so well that in the past two years, almost a million Russians, many of them vigorous young men of fighting age, have left the country, and Russia is pushing its borders onto the territory of grateful neighbors.
For a glimpse of this nonsense, see Jon Stewart’s send-up from Monday night.
In Baker’s view, “A large part of the American right actively embraces the moral equivalence that used to be a defining feature of self-loathing left-wing elites.”
Okay, there have always been a few. But if Baker is remembering the antiwar left of the 1960s, he would have been (checks dates) maybe eight years-old at the end of that decade. The Brit’s memories may be suspect if not manufactured.
The 1960s left’s “better red than dead” is today the right’s “better unwoke than woke,” to paraphrase Stewart. Now it’s MAGA’s turn to idealize oppressive governments and condemn their own.
But Baker is right about the American right:
In some inexplicable way, they have chosen to see the nation that nurtured them and elevated them, equipped them with opportunities half the world can only dream of, as a moral monster. They use the freedom this country gives them to denounce it, insisting it is no better than a place in which even to harbor those kinds of thoughts could get you eliminated.
The only response of all decent people to the death of Alexei Navalny, the brave critic of Vladimir Putin’s regime, in a Siberian prison camp is grief, disgust and unqualified condemnation. It is the sort of event that defines the malevolent nature of Mr. Putin’s Russia.
See Stewart’s closing remarks at the top about “decent people” like Carlson.
Don’t worry, Baker goes on to quote Newt Gingrich equating Donald Trump facing 91 indictments handed down by grand juries of his peers with Biden condemning Putin “while Democrats in four different jurisdictions try to turn President Trump into an American Navalny.”
Careful where you point that moral equivalence, pal.
Biden should be held accountable for crimes of Baker’s imagination as well as for manipulating “the levers of justice” the way Putin held Navalny to account for thought crimes. Oh, but I go too far, Baker concedes:
But, need I say this? Mr. Biden isn’t Vladimir Putin. Mr. Biden doesn’t invade neighbors on a false pretext, killing indiscriminately. He doesn’t make people who have fallen into disfavor fall from the windows of tall buildings. He doesn’t throw a foreign journalist in jail for reporting the truth about what is going on in his country. He doesn’t arrange the murder of his domestic political opponents on the soil of other countries. And he doesn’t imprison, torture and preside over the “death by sudden death” of his principal domestic critic.
Let me remind you again of just where the MAGA right wants to take this country, if not to Moscow. Here’s the leading Republican candidate for governor in North Carolina:
“Tell our enemies on the other side of the aisle that would drag this nation down into a socialist hellhole that you will only do it as you run past me laying on the ground choking on my own blood — Christian patriots of this nation will own this nation and rule this nation.”
Yeah, Putin’s Russia must look like paradise to them. Terry Gilliam couldn’t write this stuff.
● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●
For The Win, 5th Edition is ready for download. Request a copy of my free countywide GOTV planning guide at ForTheWin.us.