One truism readers may have seen here time and again is this: the right’s professions of faith in American (and their own) principles is a mile wide and an inch deep. Window dressing. The right’s belief in “a transcendant moral order,” in “defending the unchanging ground of our changing experience,” is public relations. That claim held only so long as traditional power hierarchies held, only so long as privileged social groups who believed they should be in charge remained in charge. They wil fight and die to defend that unchanging ground. Fight and die for their “freedom” to suppress others’. But never for a world in which they do not rule.
What the West is witnessing in Ukraine gives us pause, especially on the Monday after two conservative conferences in Orlando. At one, attendees cheered Vladimir Putin whose military is now advancing across Ukraine. Putin cannot abide a former key Soviet republic with a democratic system on his border standing as an example of a people who rejected authoritarian rule like his.
Ukraine may have its own hierachies its people will fight to preserve. But for now, Ukrainians’ focus is on Putin’s invading army. Internal cultural rivalries can wait for another day.
Emily Tamkin explains in the New York Times how Putin became a global celebrity for the “anti-woke” conservative. The movement once defined by its hawkishness and anti-communism has become its mirror image:
Part of this new paradigm is that foreign policy is now a partisan matter. In 2016, Prime Minister Viktor Orbán of Hungary offered an endorsement of then-candidate Donald Trump, admiration that was later returned. Mr. Putin’s Russia reportedly meddled in the American election in 2016, and the Russian president has admitted that he wanted Mr. Trump to win. Those amicable relationships trickled down to the Republican voting population, which shifted its views on Mr. Putin’s favorability, which soared from a mere 10 percent in July 2014 to 37 percent in December 2016. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll from January of this year found that 62 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents consider Vladimir Putin a stronger leader than Joe Biden.
“Strong” may be the key word here. In this construction, a strong leader is apparently one who cracks down on opposition, cultural and political, and does not concede. This idea then dovetails with right-wing ideas that liberal elites are actively corroding deeply held traditional values — including traditional gender roles. For those who spend a fair amount of airtime worrying about the emasculation of men, the kind of strength portrayed by Mr. Putin — who on Monday convened his top security officials and demanded they publicly stand and support him — is perhaps appealing.
Many of the admirers of the world’s strongmen on the American right appear to believe that the countries each of these men lead are beacons of whiteness, Christianity and conservative values. On Wednesday, conservative commentator Rod Dreher wrote, “I adamantly oppose risking the lives of boys from Louisiana and Alabama to make the Donbass safe for genderqueers and migrants.”
“Whiteness” and “Christianity” are also key words here. They stand in for tradition, not principle. The “transcendant” moral order here is one in which white, male Christians dominate the West’s culture, and women and nonconforming persons, especially racial minorities, are second class and best shut away, silent and out of sight. That’s the shriveled concept of American greatness they profess loudly and proudly on their red caps. It has nothing to do either with the Declaration or the Constitution.
The less-filtered now declare themselves (and their ignorance) openly:
Russia is neither all white nor all Christian — it is a country that encompasses several regions, religions and ethnicities. Still, it is often perceived as white. The white nationalist Richard Spencer has referred to Russia as “the sole white power in the world.” Matthew Heimbach, a founder of the Traditionalist Worker Party who was involved in the 2017 Unite the Right rally, has expressed admiration for Mr. Putin and ultranationalist European political leaders. “Russia is our biggest inspiration,” Mr. Heimbach told The Times in 2016. “I see President Putin as the leader of the free world.” As The Times reported at the time, this construction of Mr. Putin as a beacon of far-right values began with the ultra-far-right nationalists in Europe and later spread to the United States.
But, as the Washington Post opinion writer Christian Caryl wrote in 2018, just as the halcyon image American Communists had of Stalinist Russia in the early 20th century belied the truth of a brutal regime, the Russia celebrated today by conservatives is also, in some ways, a fiction.
As is their image of themselves.
Ukrainian President Zelenskyy has become an international symbol of the kind of democratic values American conservatives once told themselves they embraced, values many quickly abandoned when the “unchanging” cultural ground shifted towards genuine equality for all.
This morning, as Major Archbishop Sviatoslav Shevchuk, head of the Ukrainian Greek Catholic Church, wrote in a letter last week, Ukraine “protects European values at the cost of blood of its children.”
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