The American political environment has grown so strange that I’ve found it hard to keep up with every outrageous utterance, every outlandish bit of polling data, every weird political provocation. According to polls of the coming presidential election, a bitter narcissist facing countless criminal charges is at least as popular as a competent president. Gun violence has reached epic proportions, but conservatives want to make guns even more readily available. As if that’s not enough to make my head explode, there’s this: the current right-wing love affair with the dictator Vladimir Putin of Russia.
For virtually my entire life, American citizens shared a bipartisan consensus that Russia was a dangerous rival — even after the Soviet Union collapsed. Republicans were more likely to hold to that view as the 21st century dawned. In a 2012 debate, then-President Barack Obama mocked his rival, Mitt Romney, for casting Russia, rather than al-Qaida, as the biggest threat to the world order. After Russia invaded Crimea in 2014, many conservatives insisted Romney was right.
Ah, but it didn’t take a decade for that view to be turned on its head. As commentators have noted, Republicans have fallen in line with their leader, Donald Trump, who has shown a strange admiration for Putin. As New York magazine pundit Jonathan Chait wrote last month, “During his time in office and after, Trump managed to create … a Republican constituency for Russia-friendly policy. … Conservatives vying to be the Trumpiest of them all have realized that supporting Russia translates in the Republican mind as a proxy for supporting Trump.”
That’s bad enough, but, unfortunately, there is more to it. It’s not clear why Trump loves Putin — he might genuinely admire a dictator who can get away with assassinating his rivals — but it is clear why some thinking reactionaries who don’t need the political boost of kowtowing to Trump admire Putin and his allies nevertheless: simple bigotry.
Take Rod Dreher, a theocrat and writer who spent months in Hungary and wrote of his deep admiration for its dictatorial president, Viktor Orban. While human rights activists have noted that democratic freedoms, including an independent judiciary and a free press, have seriously eroded under Orban’s rule, Dreher wrote glowingly about Orban’s Christianity and his keeping Hungary out of the “abyss of postliberal hedonism.” In other words, Orban has persecuted gays and lesbians. He also explicitly criticizes migrants, especially those who are not of Christian ancestry.
Putin wrote that playbook. Now that he has made a marriage of convenience with the Russian Orthodox Church, he has taken to blasting Western political standards such as support for same-sex marriage. That’s music to the ears of the American theocrats who want to ban same-sex marriage in this country.
Racism is also an important aspect of Putin’s appeal to some reactionaries. The Russian Imperial Movement, based in St. Petersburg, is dedicated to fueling white supremacy around the globe, and its leaders have reached out to white supremacists here in the United States. (No such group can remain active in Russia without Putin’s implicit approval.) White supremacist David Duke once called Russia “the key to white survival.”
While some of the Trump toadies giving a pass to Putin may not have associated him with white supremacy, Tucker Carlson certainly is aware. Since he was fired from Fox News, Carlson has been drifting closer to the explicitly racist fringe. In February, he flew to Moscow for an interview with Putin that turned out to be an airing of Putin’s anti-Ukraine and anti-democracy propaganda. Then Carlson visited a Moscow grocery and proceeded to praise its offerings as much better than those in American markets. He didn’t note that the average Russian is much poorer than the average American.
For Trumpists, facts don’t matter. Whiteness does. As the brilliant Princeton historian Eddie Glaude wrote on X (formerly Twitter):
“Russia has tapped into the central contradiction at the heart of the U.S. It isn’t the menace of communism and an assault on liberty. Russia has identified with the serpent wrapped around the legs of the table upon which the Declaration of Independence was signed.”
Cynthia Tucker won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary in 2007. She can be reached at cynthia@cynthiatucker.com.
