For those who have not seen this clip of one Tucker Carlson, Trumpite pundit, mocking the appearance of President Zelenskyy in Congress, you need to, truly.
Tucker Carlson mocking applause for Zelenskyy.
How can somebody acting so childish be taken so seriously by a selection of Americans?
Beyond that, how can people actually support the Russians side of a war of aggression, based upon pure Russian Great Slavism? Fiscal worries, where genuine, are one thing. Narrow-minded, truly, but one thing. Outright supporting the swallowing of Ukraine in the name of Russian Slavic dominance, quite another.
It's the difference, for the history minded, between "supporting the British will be expensive" and thinking that Anschluß is nifty.
What the heck?
Some of this we have to dismiss as the crowd that's fallen for the grifter.
Grifters were originally associated with carnivals, and while it's an insult, it's one that we need to keep in mind implies a relationship. A grifter can't peddle his graft without an audience.
The word grifter nearly went out of circulation up until Donald Trump, but now it's come roaring back as a term frequently applied to Trump. The thing about grifters is that they don't believe their line, but the audience does.
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Is Donald J. Trump really a God-fearing Christian man of solid conservative values who seeks to Make American Great Again?
Leaving the Make American Great Again tag line, which is a line that can mean pretty much whatever you want it to, what we know about Trump really is that he's a New York businessman whose made huge sums of money and lost huge sums of money, mostly in real estate. He was a Democrat for most of his life. He's of the Vietnam War Era generation, but he didn't serve, having a deferment for shin splints that some have questioned. He has a BS in economics from the Wharton School of Business, which is generally regarded as the best business school in the United States (Secretary of State elect Chuck Gray is also a graduate of Wharton). He's been married three times, twice to Eastern European immigrants and once to beauty figure Marla Maples, whom he married shortly after she give birth to their daughter Tiffany. What can we tell from that?
Well, maybe not all that much, really. Making, and losing, a lot of money is not as hard as it sounds if you were born with a lot of money. He's certainly not lead a very Christian life in terms of personal conduct with women, but if he's a true Calvinist, which would be assuming a lot, he may figure it doesn't matter. The best evidence is that whatever he once was, he's become a narcissist who know that he can sell any line to his audience, and what he's been selling has morphed, under the Führerprinzip, is Christian Illiberal Nationalism. Do I think he's a Christian Illiberal Nationalist? Probably not really, but that's what's selling.
And that's what's selling for Fox News and Newsmax also.
So what that might tell us is that Tucker Carlson might not particularly believe a word he's saying. But it sells.
But if that's true, he's giving it the pretty hard sell.
Let's mention one thing about presentation, before we go on. Some of Trump's presentation is deeply weird, and Carlson's is as well. The clip linked in above is massively weird. An intelligent audience would have to be repulsed by it.
But, as Catholic Apologist Jimmy Akin says, "sin make you stupid". And truly it does. Much of Trump's presentation is stupid, and Tucker's, linked in above, is also. Indeed, a vast amount of the Trumpite populist right says things that are stupid, to the horror of other conservatives (such as myself) who can't fathom the wallowing in stupidity.
But wallowing they are, and like a bunch of teenage boys sitting in the back of the bus making fun of people and farting for amusement, we have a whole swath of the current GOP acting in much the same fashion. And also like such boys, as others look up and say "quit being so stupid", they feel insulted by having their stupidity pointed out and double down on it.
At some point, normally, people grow up and put away childish things. Chances are that a lot of the people who are now repeating the baloney we hear all the time will deny they ever said it. But we're not there yet.
Linking this in, Donald Trump has some sort of weird love affair with Vladimir Putin. A person can truly debate what it is, but it is there. It may be that Putin is a strong man, and he admires that. It could be that Putin, who is extremely intelligent, if extremely isolated, did a good job of reading Trump and flattered him to the extent that Trump now loves Putin.
Or it could be something more sinister.
The relationship between Trump and Putin has always been so odd, and Trump has so gone out of his way to help the Russians except when being restrained from doing so, that it's reasonable to ask if Trump is a Russian asset of some sort. We've discussed that here before.
That wouldn't make Trump's acolytes Russian assets, but they don't have to be. Whatever it is, Trump admires Putin, so he says fawning things regarding him, and nasty things about his opponents, and Trump's followers go there on the Führerprinzip and take it further. That requires, at some point, falling in love with Putin yourself and repeating Russian propaganda.
Additionally, Trump has a bit of a vested interest in seeing Ukraine go down in defeat. The Russians did hurt Hillary Clinton, aiding Trump, by getting into the DNC computers, which Trump was not responsible for but which did help. Trump himself made a public, flippant, comment regarding breaking into Democratic computers before it was known to have occurred in the 2016 campaign. And Trump's first impeachment trial prominently featured Ukraine, based on things that he asked Ukraine to do, and they didn't. There's likely no love lost between Trump and Zelenskyy, and accordingly, Trumpism is naturally aligned with Putinism.
But maybe there's more than that, and maybe that something is that Trumpites and Putin are fellow travelers.
Before Viktor Mihály Orbán became the darling of Illiberal Democrats and Trumpites, that position was occupied by Vladimir Putin.1
At one time, it was easy to forget that under Putin, Russia backslid into an autocratic state. Russia came out of the collapse of the Soviet Union as a democracy, but a troubled one. Putin pulled it away from that back into a one party state, although like a lot of one party states, it retains a theoretical legislative body. The Soviet Union had one, and so did Imperial Russia. They really aren't in control, nor are the people.
Indeed, in some ways, the Russian people are worse off, in terms of control of their own government, than they've ever been, although that's certainly debatable. Under the Czar, the Czar actually claimed title to the entire country and everything in it, and even going up into World War One he was free to actually rule by dictate, just as Putin is now. But, for all its ills, and there were a lot of them (the state of Imperial Russia going into the Great War was pathetic), the Czar was bound by a duty to the Russians and his non Russian subjects, imperfect though it was, and it was very imperfect.
Under the Soviets, as monstrous as they were, there was at least the overarching theory that they were "the people".
Putin's Russia is for what Putin thinks it should be for.
During the time period before the completely obvious descent into authocracy, when people could still pretend that Russia was democratic, or be fooled that it was, Putin began to enact a series of social laws, and engaged in certain alignments, which, if you could set aside that the country wasn't democratic, appealed to the Western political right. Putin has completely rejected the Western evolution on tolerance of homosexuality, for example. Putin has facially embraced Christianity in the form of the Russian Orthodox Church, and it has embraced him, although his real adherence to its tenants can be questioned.
The point is that a deeply conservative American political right could look to Putin, like it now looks towards Viktor Orbán as somebody who is democratic in the right way. I.e., not politically liberal and not even letting "progressisim" out of the box. I.e., somebody who can stand with the prinicpals of "National Conservatism", something we explored here earlier.2
The entire "Statement of Prinpcals" for National Conservatism, which postdates the far right's love affair with Putin, is posted below, but the real core of their swooning over Putin is in these:
* * *
Putin, like Franco in a way, sort of seemed to stand, and still does seem to stand, for a society being deeply rooted in its Christian traditions.
Indeed, as we've noted, Putin, more than any post Soviet leader, has made a public display of aligning himself with the Russian Orthodox Church. The Russian Orthodox Church has not made any concessions to "progressivism" of any kind. There are no Father James Martin, S.J. figures in the Russian Orthodox Church.
This sort of social conservatism has much broader appeal to many people than the Progressive Left can imagine. Even in highly secularized France, for instance, the government's establishment of same gender marriages brought out a massive protest in the streets of Paris. People everywhere have a strong sense that the left is dangerously and bizarrely out to sea on many issues, and part of the reaction to that is a grasping to restore a common cultural understanding of existential matters, a struggle that exists only in Western countries and frankly not elsewhere at all.
But hence the problem of the reaction. This struggle has been going on for well over a century. Most people, seemingly, are just waking up to it, in our era, now. You can argue that it's been going on since the Age of Enlightenment.
The problem here is, and always has been, the natural tendency for people in the struggle to go to the extremes. This is a problem of the left and the right.
Starting with the left, we'd note, with the collapse of the Old Order following World War One, plenty of leftists, liberals and progressives in Western countries were willing to put on blinders and believe that Communist were just Democrats with thick accents. The editors of the progressive journal, The New Republic, wrote a letter to Stalin, for instance, warning him that people seemed to be doing bad things in his name, completely oblivious to the fact that Stalin was the perpetrator of those bad things. In the late 1960s and 1970s, members of the American left were willing to pretend that Ho Chi Minh was a misunderstood democrat and always had been, which was very far from the truth. Early on, people were willing to turn a blind eye to the true political nature of Nicaragua's Daniel Ortega, before simply ignoring the country entirely.
On the right, the same story holds. Both the left and the right outside of Spain pretended that their sides were something other than what they really were, with the left pretending that the Spanish Republicans were democrats, rather than Communists. The right ignored the autocratic nature of the Nationalist, and perhaps give us the first example of what we're witnessing now. Franco never pretended to care for democracy, but he always had supporters in the West that pretended Spain was uniquely incapable of it.
Mussolini received praise at one time from none other than Winston Churchill. Plenty of right wing Republicans said nice things about Adolph Hitler.
The thing is, most people woke up when they saw that the putative champions of their positions were not what they pretended. Most America Firsters went on to support the Allied war effort. Most deluded leftists lost their admiration for Stalin when the true nature of the Soviet state really came out. Not too many leftists of the 70s run around singing the praises of Ho Chi Minh today. By the time of Francisco Franco's death in 1975, he had few fans anywhere.
But there is that time when the deluded prefer to remain deluded. Charles Lindbergh was giving speeches about abandoning the British within days of the U.S. being brought into World War Two. A handful of Congressmen and Senators remained not only isolationist, but pro fascist, even into the war itself.
Delusion has a way of making the deluded look, in the end, foolish. But usually the mass of people who followed the deluded are allowed to fade away due to their obscurity. The person who, for example, called Tom Cotton an "Anti-American Socialist" (apparently not realizing that you can be a patriotic American socialist) will, should Ukraine win and Putin fall, probably go on to recall having been all in favor of the effort.
Something, however, extremely odd is going on now and some people are falling for it. We should ask what it is.
And for those on the National Democracy track, any sort of democracy still requires democracy. It's clear in this contest, who that is.
But doees everyone in the far right even support democracy anymore?3
Footnotes:
1. As an interesting aside, it's interesting to note that only Giorgia Meloni has approached a sort of hero status with the National Conservative right, and she's the only Catholic in the group. Putin is Russian Orthodox, although his personal adherence to Orthodoxy is questionable. Orbán and the Hungarian President Katalin Éva Novák are "Reformed" Christians, as was Admiral Horthy, who perhaps may be, in some ways, their intellectual predecessor.
2. We looked at that in a post that we entitled:
Illiberal Democracy. A Manifesto?
The manifesto itself, linked into its source, stated:
Drawing on this heritage, we therefore affirm the following principles:
Hillsdale College Kirby Center
Hillsdale College Van Andel Graduate School of Government
Center for the Renewal of Culture (Croatia)
Conservative Partnership Institute
Internet Accountability Project
Conservative Partnership Institute
Election Transparency Initiative
Conservative Partnership Institute
European Conservative (Austria)
Edmund Burke Foundation (Israel)
Trinity Western University (Canada)
Edmund Burke Foundation (Israel)
Center for Immigration Studies
Jagiellonian University (Poland)
Ethics and Public Policy Center
Intercollegiate Studies Institute
Conservative Partnership Institute
Claremont Institute Center for the American Way of Life
Mathias Corvinus Collegium (Hungary)
Danube Institute (United Kingdom)
European Centre for Law and Justice (France)
3. During the 2022 election campaigns I repeatedly heard people on the far right say the age old, unthinking, "we're not a democracy, we're a republic" as if they mutually exclusive. We are, of course, a democratic republic.
But, in thinking about it, I think some on the far right truly mean that, and by that they mean that the will of the people really doesn't matter, if it can be overcome, one way or another, at the state and local level. That provides the only rational basis, I'd note, for the ongoing support of any kind for the Electoral College. Some truly mean that democratic results can, and should, be overturned through legalistic extreme measures.
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