Posted on 02/18/2024 3:40:39 PM PST by Ennis85
Aleksei Navalny has reportedly died in prison, and the timing of this tragic event for the sake of proving the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the anti-American right on the Russia question is absolutely perfect, coming on the heels of a series of humiliating videos of Tucker going to Moscow and declaring it heaven on earth. It’s one thing to just be wrong in normal and understandable ways. It’s completely different to go abroad and declare, “This poor country has food that is affordable in American dollars! They’ve developed technology to stop the shopping carts from rolling away!” Quotes don’t capture the essence of these videos. You have to actually see him sniff the chocolate cake from the MacDonald’s knockoff in Moscow as he declares the Russian version of fast food better for being free of GMOs.
Shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, I wrote an essay arguing that establishment liberals were driven by an irrational hatred of Russia. Meanwhile, one of my themes over the years is that conservatism is to a large extent an oppositional culture that is motivated by a reactive hatred of its perceived enemies. So of course, they had to go and prove I was absolutely correct, by becoming inverse caricatures of the left specifically in their attitudes towards Russia.
It’s easy to dismiss this as simple hatred for their own society borne from alienation, but I think something deeper and in a sense more logical is going on. The market skeptical right likes to mock “line goes up” ideology. It discounts GDP and corruption indexes and thinks that things like patriotism, a public acceptance of Christianity, well-defined roles for men and women, low tolerance for social deviancy, and a rejection of LGBT are actually much more important. Russia sucks by standard measures of how well a country is doing, but if there was a right-wing index of civilizational health, it would be near the top. People sometimes point out that, for example, Russia has a low church attendance rate, which means it’s not exactly a trad paradise, but that’s clearly not what anti-American right-wingers care about. If everyone in the US took their families to churches that accepted gay marriage, they wouldn’t consider that a victory. They care much more about keeping groups like gays, foreigners, and criminals in line than any kind of positive vision of people living healthy lives and forming families. Drag queens per capita is a superior measure to not only GDP, but total fertility rate.
These aesthetic preferences, like leftist economic planning, run into the hard realities of human nature. People flee to countries where GDP goes up, even if the number of drag queens is increasing at a faster rate. The anti-American right’s true enemy is therefore their fellow humans and what they want. This is naturally consistent with their growing hostility to democracy more generally. People not only vote with their feet towards “line goes up,” but they do the same at the ballot box, rewarding or punishing politicians based on economic performance. Market choices, political freedom, and freedom of migration must therefore all be restricted. Anything that allows human agency will naturally progress towards liberalism. The strongman like Putin is your only option, and if he launches a destructive war with casualties that run well into the six figures that’s at most a minor concern. Understanding right-wing anti-Americanism as misanthropic I think explains a mystery few people have noticed, which is that many in this camp cheered on the 2021 coup in Myanmar. They of course knew nothing about the country — and those who do universally find little to admire in its military — but simply had a preference for anything that restricts freedom and angers the State Department.
One might notice a bit of a contradiction in Tucker’s trip to Moscow, as on his visit to the supermarket he declared that Russian groceries were so affordable that it made you wonder whether ideology even matters. Trying to find logical coherence here is a mistake, as at other times he has said that principles like free speech are actually what is most important. What I think these kinds of blatant inconsistencies show is a lack of self-awareness. An anti-market and anti-American right that was open about its misanthropy would be able to freely admit that it cares about its aesthetic preferences more than anything, human freedom and living standards be damned. But they don’t want to bite that bullet, so need to pretend that Russia’s superior culture actually also creates a high standard of living for its people.
All of this is quite unfortunate, as I think that there are rational arguments one can make against America’s Ukraine policy. But political realities of moving towards a settlement are complicated by the fact that a portion of the right isn’t just skeptical of endless war, but has a need to believe that Russia is morally superior and deserves to do whatever it wants to Ukraine because it has fewer transsexuals. There’s a difference between wanting to work towards a peace agreement and cheering for Russian victory. A large part of the conservative movement is now in the latter camp, which is why it is more likely to demand a simple cutting of aid rather than a more focused package as part of a broader plan that takes into account political realities and tries to ensure that at the very least Ukraine can negotiate from a position of strength. When anti-war and pro-Putin sentiments are increasingly indistinguishable, the case for an open-ended commitment to Ukraine as the only realistic path forward only becomes stronger.
This guy is so delusional.
That’s right. The alphabet folks are fortunate we don’t toss them into the sea 🌊 with milestones around their necks.
What did this joker have to say about the US gov’t ignoring Gonzalo Lira as he got more and more ill, and eventually died ?
churches that accepted gay marriage = Evil Satanic Depraved Church
So of course, Hanania had to go and prove we were absolutely correct, by becoming an inverse caricature of the left specifically in their attitudes towards Woke Corporatism.
"....a portion of the right isn’t just skeptical of endless war, but has a need to believe that Russia is morally superior and deserves to do whatever it wants to Ukraine because it has fewer transsexuals."
Which will get me labelled a globohomo in ...3..2..1
I think it might be because we keep letting "Kneepads" Harris wander over to the Munich Security Conference every couple of years and ramble on about The Ukraine becoming a member of NATO.
Same with Diaper Joe, the kiddie-diddlin' schmoe, who just cr@pped his face about the same thing the other day.
BTW - did you see the video of Pelosi, the Vodka Hag, slurring out some BS at the Munich Conference? Scary.
They’re not right wing, they’re just communists.
Conservatives, on the other hand, have forever been trying to keep the movement on the straight and narrow by condemning those on the far right. We do say you can be too rightwing.
It is very frustrating when those folks are put up as an example of some conservatives in a way meant to smear all conservatives.
The latest strategery on the right, a failed one at that, is to try and label everyone to our right as actually being leftist. "Democrats are the true racists," or "Fascism is a leftist ideology" or "Nazi stands for National SOCIALIST so see there Nazis are leftists. These inanities are red meat for boomercons but fall on deaf ears among the general public.
There are bad people on the far right. They have not gone so far right that they are now left. They are not us, but the MSM will continue to hitch their wagon to ours and call us guilty by association, and our sensible principles and policies as dog whistles to less popular opinions that we supposedly secretly hold.
We will continually be mislabeled as fascists until the gravy train runs out of gravy and the libtards are forced to cede power back to the same remnant of the citizenry.
(St. Vladimir keep us in your prayers and protect us from the anarchotyranny thrust upon us by the satanic Deep State oligarchy.)
The difference between right and left is, or should be, defined as pro-freedom, pro-personal responsibility, limited government on the right, vs. tight big-government control of individuals’ choices and actions, aggregate responsibility, on the left.
Would that not put fascism (Italian or German model) on the same end of the spectrum as Communism? Both seek to control every individual to serve the State about all.
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Even when democracy reemerged, it was only the propertied males who were allowed a say.
The idea back then was that a populace was more free when they lived in an orderly, hierarchical society and were free to pursue ends that were embraced by the king, the Church, and good Christian folks in general.
The atomized freedom we have in the US would have seemed like licentiousness to the right of old leading not to freedom but to the enslavement of the populace to drink, drugs, and lechery.
Singapore might be something like the monarchies of old where strict laws keep the people in line so they can prosper in business rather than shoplifting and burgling businesses.
I don't think conservatives have ever been for freedom full stop. When we were a Christian nation we could pretend we were for freedom full stop because the vast majority of Americans used their freedom wisely. That is not the case today.
Good answer, in the context of the 18th century. I admit to having been too conditioned by the 20th century definitions.
Still and all, is it not so that the tyranny of fascism is much closer to the tyranny of communism than it is to classical liberalism?
Who was it that wrote “For form of government let fools contest; whate’er is best administered is best”?
I believe right-leaning libertarians are the inheritors of the "classical liberal" tradition but they have some very important differences with conservatives. Russell Kirk refused to work with them and referred to them as "chirping sectaries".
I used to be a libertarian after reading Atlas Shrugged but have since come to believe their ideas are too simplistic. Open borders but only if we can shut down the welfare state. Well they got one out of two. In a free market corporations should be able to purchase anything legal to buy, so they hire lobbyists and buy congressmen and we end up with the crony capitalism that libertarians despise.
They are often hoisted on their own petards.
It was Milton Friedman, was it not, who wrote that you can have open borders or welfare, but not both at the same time?
nb: It's "hoist BY his own petard". Almost nobody today knows that a petard was a kind of medieval claymore mine used for door breaching. The state of gunpowder-making at that time was such that the devices sometimes blew up their handlers.
The difference between right and left is, or should be, defined as pro-freedom, pro-personal responsibility, limited government on the right, vs. tight big-government control of individuals’ choices and actions, aggregate responsibility, on the left.
Would that not put fascism (Italian or German model) on the same end of the spectrum as Communism? Both seek to control every individual to serve the State about all.
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But the definitions of “The Right” that you have given has lost and (lost badly) over nearly the last century. We like to think that the Reagan Era was a resurgence, but when we look back it too was mostly a resurgent cultural conservatism with returns to large budget deficits and a weak agreement on border control/immigration that was largely ignored by the Left.
When you say “Pro-Freedom”, one must ask whose (and what kind) of freedom? What we’ve come to find is that protecting and pushing freedoms seems to take an awful lot of government. It’s because “Freedom” is seen my many Americans as “access to” or an “entitlement to” something. Many Americans support Obamacare (or something like it) and many support forms of anti-discrimination laws that private organizations and business must also adhere to). And finally, enough Americans supported these DEI initiatives to foist them throughout government and almost all businesses. And lets not fool ourselves. These initiatives are very much here to stay. This makes a mockery of freedom, merit, and personal responsibility. How much hardball do our Republicans leaders in Washington play to fight all the above violations of the principles you say that conservatives should have? Not much
I haven’t even mentioned the joke of a educational and judicial system that basically enables more crime and irresponsible behavior. These are all cultural issues that are not going to be solved by declaring some sort of quasi-libertarianism as the goal of modern conservatism. US culture sucks and when you combine it with a vague “religion of freedom” (where there is amazingly little common ground about what freedom should be), then all you get is land of self-absorbed people who break down into identity-groups...which is what we have now.
Maybe someone like Trump is the start of turning things around, but then again...maybe not. All this stuff about pointing fingers at the Russians is just grossly hypocritical nonsense. The author seems to be brooding that our motivations for non-intervention are because we hate the current US/Western culture. He’s partially right, but so what? Lots of conservatives don’t want to see Western culture spread to one more centimeter of foreign soil, even if that land is ruled by Count Dracula. Given what Western culture has become, I’m not sure that’s gonna change any time soon.
But I'm remembering a high school teacher who stressed the difference between "freedom" and "license" to us. Most of the last few generations (including mine) seem to think license to do any damned thing they want is freedom. No. With freedom comes responsibility. Where in Heinlein's Starship Troopers does he lay this out so well?
G'night. I need a few hours of sleep. At my age and with my infirmities I don't get much, so I have to snatch it when I can.
Thanks for the discussion.
Lots to think about there - some things to agree with, some to disagree with, and things that make you go “hmm...”
I don’t agree with the assertion about church attendance and accepting gays either, but behind it’s a great philosophical question. Is it wrong to point out that a lot of religious conservatives don’t believe that gays should be accepted by their church?
Would the Westboro Baptist Church think that their community was getting more godly or less if a church down the road was packed to the rafters every Sunday with transmen and lesbians?
Putin would be happy with 5% Sunday church attendance if it came with 100% subservience to a totalitarian Gestapo state that’s increasingly treating its president like an infallible Tsar. If Russia keeps that up for a generation, it’ll be like North Korea; a hermit state where the proles really think Mercedes and Ford motors are Russian inventions inspired by the Illustrious Leader... Like Hitler getting the credit for Volkswagen.
Not much “let them eat cake”, or even “bread and circuses”, but a whole lotta “make them eat borscht!” Really, I don’t understand how any pious American patriot can think Russia is a good model for anything except romanticising its leader, banning any display of criticism of his leadership, and terrorising its own citizens.
And as for American patriotism in relation to borders versus overseas conflicts, I invite people to read this open letter, written by an American veteran who is training Ukrainian forces.
Is he betraying the country he loves? Or is he fiercely upholding the very values upon which the United States were built?
https://twitter.com/wartranslated/status/1759295578482106674?t=rb3WHvwJ3vu6Ug4IKzHRLA&s=19
Who would have imagined 5 years ago that the conservative movement would lead the cheering for Russia?
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