Forget Trump, it was Putin who built the ideological template for the GOP
The
media also plays its role: they would rather cover him like an ESPN announcer
extolling Tom Brady than filling airtime with colorless androids like Mitch
McConnell or Kevin McCarthy.
Trump did not achieve this status purely on his own merit. There was another, formidable, force putting its thumb on the scale in the 2016 election campaign on his behalf.
That
force’s minions even built his
pre-presidential business model, helping him out of bankruptcy. Its
enemies – Ukraine, the European Union – became trump’s enemies.
Of course, we are talking
about Vladimir Putin. Just to look at how Putin and Trump interacted when they
met speaks volumes about the body
languages of dominance and supplication. It is therefore instructive
to cut out the middleman, or stooge, and focus on the prime mover when
considering the GOP’s ideological inspiration.
Although one can find several
examples Republican-connected groups, like the Religious Right or the NRA,
eagerly becoming fellow travelers of the Kremlin, the affinities are mostly
unconscious and demonstrate a decades-long convergent evolution of beliefs
within the GOP and ruling circles in Russia.
The development of the
Russian Federation from the rubble of the USSR has mostly been a case of the
new boss being the same as the old boss. If we substitute the oligarchs for the
nomenklatura, polonium 210 for ice picks, and military threats against Ukraine
for the Ukrainian famine, we find that Russia is much like the old Soviet Union.
There’s even an ex-KGB guy running the place: shades of 1982.
But there is one crucial difference. However miserable circumstances were, the USSR labored to represent itself as working towards a better future for humanity. True communism wasn’t there yet, but the Soviet people were working to achieve a state where there was no exploitation or alienation. The shortcomings of today were the sacrifices necessary to reach utopia.
Russia under Putin makes no
such claims. His propaganda apparatus, as extensive as the USSR’s and more
sophisticated, does not aim to make the world’s people into communists. It
seeks to make them cynical. Given prevailing global attitudes, it’s a wise
move. “You think we’re bad? You’re no better, just more hypocritical,” is the
theme. As for foreign reporting about actual conditions in Russia, they’re all
just fake news from the lying media.
Russia’s foreign policy seeks less to influence foreign audiences positively than simply to create chaos abroad. Hacking, online trolling, and ransomware are part of this strategy. Calling out these actions merely elicits denials, accusations that the targets of the attacks did it to themselves, and cries of being an innocent victim of smears.
Does this sound familiar in the context of domestic politics? Once upon a time, the Republican Party actually enacted policies – damaging they may have been, but at least they were policies in traditional political terms.
Since the Tea Party hysteria of around
2010 at the latest, the GOP has ceased offering policies (beyond the very
narrow one of protecting the finances of America’s own oligarchs) and is now
solely dedicated to obstruction, publicity stunts, trolling, and clawing into
power and staying there forever.
Such laws as it enacts in the
states bear no relation to solving any public problem, be it health, safety,
transportation, or education. Their “policies” are a catalogue of complaints,
publicity-seeking, and trolling on issues like COVID, vaccines or abortion,
signaling the base, and obstruction (or effective prohibition) of any political
opposition.
The throngs who cheerfully
vote GOP are not going to benefit materially from this – nor do they expect to.
It is enough that their party tells them they are salt-of-the-earth Americans
and harasses groups they don’t like: all very much like Russian citizens who
vote for Putin’s Russia United Party and despise Alexei Navalny for the
unpatriotic crime of promising to prevent the oligarchs from ripping them
off.
Putin uses his tame courts to
disqualify inconvenient candidates like Navalny; in America, the GOP prevents
supporters for opposition candidates from voting. In case the election result
still might be too close, the Russian leader creates bogus
candidates he controls to divide the opposition. In America,
there is the GOP’s
manipulation of Kanye West. The differences in technique are mere
details.
The Kremlin’s current line is
that Navalny is an agent of the West, or even poisoned
himself to make Russia look bad. It echoes Republicans’ claim
that the January 6th insurrectionists were tourists, or FBI provocateurs, or
antifa. Under Putin, Russia is said to be a place where nothing is true
and everything is possible. In like fashion, The Republican Party is
in a protracted war with the empirical reality, leaving only endless
conspiratorial possibilities known as alternative
facts.
Airbrushing the facts extends
to history books; as George Orwell
said, “Who controls the past controls the future. Who controls the
present controls the past.” Putin has rehabilitated Stalin as a great patriot,
and those who
document Stalin’s crimes are persecuted. In the same manner,
Republicans whitewash bloody insurrection on behalf of slavery as being about
“heritage,” and seek to preserve statues honoring slaveholders and
traitors.
Just as pointing out
unpleasant truths about the Nazi-Soviet
Pact gets you prosecuted in Russia, GOP legislators now want
to make it illegal for
any teacher to "teach or incorporate into any course or class any
'divisive concept.'" That the bill illustrates what should be taught
by citing the debate between Abraham Lincoln and Frederick Douglass when
Lincoln’s opponent was Stephen Douglas only adds to the surrealism.
One could go on with these
comparisons: the false machismo of the Russian leader posing bare-chested like
Mussolini, playing hockey games with professional teams who obligingly let him
pile up goals, and so on. This play-acting dovetails with the tough-guy
affectation of Republican politicians: the supposed hillbilly cred of a Yale
graduate and Wall Streeter named J.D. Vance running for US Senate in Ohio, or
the intentional crudeness of politicians who claim to speak for the trailer
parks while groveling to their donors at $1500-a-plate fundraisers.
At this point we should ask,
where did these similarities come from? Even if the Kremlin directly influenced
a few screwballs like Dana Rohrabacher and
a handful of party operatives,
why is this behavior deeply embedded in so many Republicans, to the point where
it is now quite popular in the conservative
media-entertainment complex ? The GOP, like Putin and his
United Russia Party, are both deeply authoritarian, but why?
Corey Robin, in The Reactionary
Mind, talks of the Right’s “narrative of loss and promised
restoration.” This is true of Putin, the KGB colonel who saw the Soviet empire
collapse and called its demise “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the
century.” The threats over Ukraine are a consequence of this attitude.
We should bear in mind that
it is occurring against a backdrop of sharp demographic decline. In the past
year, Russia
experienced a population loss of nearly one million, following many
years of decrease. The economy has
also steadily dropped since 2014. Its population is now smaller than
Bangladesh and its per capita income lower than the Maldives. Male life
expectancy is also below that of Bangladesh. Does this sound familiar?
The heart of the Republican
base lives in counties that for many years have suffered population decline,
such as in Iowa. This was mostly the result of outmigration due to the lack of
good jobs, adequate health care, or educational opportunities. The 2020 census
shows the trend has accelerated, with 90 percent
of US counties that lost population in the last decade supporting Trump.
The outmigration is now
accompanied by “deaths of
despair” (suicide, drugs, etc.) among the white working class, a
phenomenon that Anne Case and Angus Deaton discovered even before the COVID
pandemic. While it is occurring all over the country, it is most severe in
rural states like West Virginia. The trend is further exacerbated by failure to
take sensible social distancing precautions or get vaccinated. Rural
Americans are dying at
twice the rate of urban dwellers. Owsley County,
KY, has a life expectancy similar to that of Russia.
Weirdly, the reaction of GOP
politicians to their own constituents’ die-off is to double down on what is
killing them, as we have seen with Florida’s Ron DeSantis and South Dakota’s
Kristi Noem. In my state of Virginia, the first act of the new governor, whose
electoral stronghold is the rural parts of the Commonwealth, was to ban urban
northern Virginia’s mask and vaccine mandates. Never mind that the protocols
were already in effect and working. His action did nothing to help the former
mining towns of southwest Virginia that voted for him, but it was a thumb in
the eye of the godless city folk.
This parallels Russia. Most
of its population loss since the beginning of the pandemic is suspected to be
considerably underreported COVID deaths on top of the traditional deaths by
suicide, misadventure, and vodka. Russia’s disinformation campaign against
Western vaccines has backfired on
its own population, making it mistrustful of vaccination. The
country’s own vaccine, Sputnik, is only a little more effective than
Republicans’ own cure-alls like horse de-wormer or Clorox.
Demographics explain why,
despite the machismo and the fascination with dominance, the deeper note is one
of bleating victimhood among Putin and his followers, and the GOP and its base.
"We have nowhere to retreat. They have taken it to the point where we
simply must tell them: ‘Stop!’” says Putin.
This strongly resembles Trump’s whining
assertion of injustice: "We don't want other leaders and other
countries laughing at us anymore, and they won't be."
Despite their endless
bellicosity, leaders like Putin, Trump, Jair Bolsonaro, or Viktor Orban are
rarely bellicose towards one another; they usually get along famously. It has often
been noted that there is probably human chemistry among
authoritarian personalities.
But they also have a solid
community of political interest. They seek to rule polities that are socially
or economically damaged, and to do that they attract aggrieved and nihilistic
followers. They remain on top by continuing to inflame existing wounds as they
steal everything that isn’t nailed down. An outbreak in self-government to
benefit the people in any one country might threaten the others by example
They have a common destiny:
they will succeed as long as the people of their countries are made to fail.
Mike Lofgren is
a former Republican congressional staff member who served on both the House and
Senate budget committees. His books include: "The Deep State: The Fall of the
Constitution and the Rise of a Shadow Government" (2016)
and "The Party is Over: How Republicans Went Crazy, Democrats Became Useless,
and the Middle Class Got Shafted" (2013).