In a 2017 speech at Hillsdale School, the Claremont Institute’s Christopher Caldwell declared that if “we have been to make use of conventional measures to know leaders that contain the protection of borders and nationwide flourishing, Putin would depend because the preeminent statesman of our time.” In Caldwell’s phrases, Putin “not the president of a feminist NGO. He isn’t a transgender rights activist. He isn’t an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and ship slide exhibits about inexperienced power.”
In 2021, American Conservative Rod Dreher praised a Putin speech condemning the West, saying that Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban have been “completely clear and completely appropriate in regards to the socially damaging nature of vigilantism and the postliberal left.” (It ought to be famous that Dreher has however unequivocally condemned Putin’s invasion.) An change in 2022 between Steve Bannon and Erik Prince, the founding father of the non-public army contractor Blackwater, was much more illustrative. Bannon hosted Prince on his podcast shortly after Putin’s invasion and known as Putin “anti-woke.” Prince responded supportively that the folks of Russia “nonetheless know which lavatory to make use of.” And Bannon saved the thought alive, asking, “What number of genders are there in Russia?”
Jordan Peterson, in the meantime, went as far as to counsel that Russia’s aggressive assaults might have been mere self-defense towards the specter of Western cultural decadence. The tradition conflict, he believed, could also be “extreme sufficient to extend the probability that Russia, for instance, will probably be motivated to invade and doubtlessly cripple Ukraine merely to maintain the pathological West out of this nation, which is a central a part of the historic Russian sphere of affect.”
There’s an outdated saying: The enemy of my enemy is my buddy. Ideally, the phrase implies that People put their nationwide variations apart to deal with international threats to the nation. However on this hyper-polarized period, the far proper has this equation precisely backwards. They assist Vladimir Putin as a result of additionally they see him versus their home enemies.
Earlier than the conflict, MAGA’s mixture of hostility to Ukraine and admiration for Putin created a really particular narrative: sturdy, manly, conventional Russia was bodily and spiritually stronger than the liberalizing West, and it could roll over Ukraine with solely symbolic resistance. Really, earlier than the conflict, Ted Cruz shared a tweet through which he contrasted Russian and American army advertisements. The US advert, he claimed, confirmed that our army was “woke up” and “emasculated”. However the Russian advert reeked of masculine aggression. How may the West – not to mention little Ukraine – stand towards such manly males?