Why Many Republicans are Putin’s Team
The team transcends national identity. The team is Domination.
To those of us who lived through the Cold War, it may seem bizarre that some members of the Republican party are cozying up with Putin. “What about their National pride?” you might wonder. “How can they support him, even now with his indefensible war in Ukraine?”
Actually, these strange bedfellows make perfect sense when we look beyond conventional thinking.
The alignment of some Republicans with Putin shows that they are, in a very real way, on the same team — a team that transcends national identity. The team is Domination. While Trump might have led them to Putin, they stay in thrall to him because they share a set of fundamental values and world views.
My transhistorical, cross cultural research reveals four clear hallmarks of Domination Systems — which also happen to be a list of the shared values and aspirations that Putin and the Putin-loving Republicans share.
The four hallmarks of Domination Systems are:
- Top-down rule in the economy and all aspects of society, with special focus on the “traditional” (punitive, male dominated) family.
- Rigid, binary gender stereotypes, with “masculine” values such as conquest and violence ranked over “feminine” values such as caregiving and nonviolence in all persons and in social and economic policy.
- A high degree of abuse and violence, as required to impose and maintain rigid hierarchies of domination.
- Policing and censoring stories and language to make the previous three hallmarks seem inevitable, even beneficial.
It is no coincidence that these are the hallmarks of both Putin’s autocratic Russian regime and the Trumpist wing of the Republican party.
To illustrate, in 2017 Putin drastically reduced the legal penalties for family violence, so hitting a wife or child is now a lesser crime under Russian law than hitting a stranger. Similarly, in 2021, 172 House Republicans voted against the Violence Against Women Act designed to protect women from domestic violence, sexual assault, and other harassment. These same Republicans are now actively extending their conviction that parents should have absolute control of their children into efforts to control school boards, classrooms, and libraries.
Both Putin and the Republican Party (as in the platform proposed by the chair of the National Republican Senate Committee, Rick Scott), do not recognize the LGBTQ community, much less the gender nonbinary community. Instead, one of their top priorities is maintaining the rigid, binary gender stereotypes that many people today are leaving behind.
Again, none of this is coincidental. Like Hitler’s Germany and Stalin’s USSR (rightist and leftist secular Western totalitarian regimes) and the Taliban, ISIS, and Khomeini’s Iran (religious Eastern regimes), both Putin and Trump-Republicans (and their supporters) recognize the integral connection between an authoritarian, top-down, rigidly male-dominated family and an authoritarian, top-down, rigidly male-dominated state.
This takes us to the third core piece of Domination Systems: abuse and violence, which are required to impose or maintain top-down control. All domination regimes deflect anger about the problems caused by inequality to “out-groups” like immigrants, people of different skin color, or Jews, fanning and inciting violence against them. So, in Putin’s oligarchic Russia, those on top have huge fortunes. Top-down economic control is also fostered by the Republican party, as in its opposition to anti-trust policies and tax-breaks for those on top.
Neither Putin or Trumpist Republicans see anything wrong with using violence to gain or maintain power over others. Putin helped Syria’s dictator violently control his people, even providing him with chemical weapons, while Trump expressed only admiration and praise. When Putin invaded Ukraine, Trump again expressed admiration, just as he admires the “patriots” who violently attacked the US capitol and threatened to hang his own Vice President.
When Republican State Senator Wendy Rogers recently told the white nationalist America First Political Action Conference that she fantasizes about hanging her political opponents, she was operating from the same Domination playbook. So was Putin when he justified his attach on Ukraine as patriotic and anti-Nazi.
The justification of “punitive” violence, whether in families or the family of nations, goes deeper once we look at the world through the new lens of the Partnership-Domination social scale.
Consider that Republican legislators keep voting to fund punitive policies like more prisons and weapons, yet oppose investment in “human infrastructure” such as funding for caregiving and other “soft” or “feminine” activities. This disdain for the “feminine” translates into refusals to invest in caring for our natural environment and support for the continued conquest and domination of nature.
These domination mindsets deny reality and are an obstacle to meeting our enormous planetary challenges, including our economic ones. For instance, economists tell us that “human capital” is the most important capital in our post-industrial-knowledge-service age and neuroscience shows that this largely hinges on the quality of care and education young children receive.
All of which takes us to the fourth core element of Domination Systems: efforts to control the narrative through promoting false stories and policing language. Putin and Trump-Republicans support false stories about our past, present, and possibilities for our future. Both deny reality and capitalize on fear. Putin censors all information about his bloody attack on Ukraine and Trumpist Republicans deny climate change, Covid 19, and election results. The “Don’t Say Gay Bill”, recently passed by Florida’s Gov. Ron DeSantis, is another example of attempts to control reality by controlling language.
Stories that promote fear of the other are a mainstay of Domination Systems, be they rightist or leftist, Eastern or Western, religious or secular, capitalist or socialist. So in the Middle East it is Sunni versus Shia (or vice versa), in Russia it is Russians versus Ukranians, in Iran and China it is fear of the West, and for Trumpist Republicans it is fear of immigrants and just about every other “out-group.” There are only two alternatives in these stories: dominating or being dominated.
In reality, there is a partnership alternative. Evidence shows that a partnership orientation lasted for many millennia in our prehistory, and there are significant trends today toward a more equitable, less violent, gender-balanced, and sustainable world based on partnership rather than domination.
Think of the women’s rights and children’s rights movements, which are vital because neuroscience shows that what children experience and observe early on impacts nothing less than how our brains develop, and with this, how we think, feel, and act — including how we vote.
Think of the movements against intimate violence and against warfare. Think of the movement to disentangle “masculinity” from domination and violence. Think of the anti-racist movement. Think of how we are increasingly recognizing trauma as a social problem that starts in domination-oriented families and is perpetuated by the poverty inherent in domination economics, which creates artificial scarcity. Think of all that is happening to replace crumbling domination institutions with ones that promote social and economic justice.
It is time we understand that the real struggle for our future is between those who want to maintain or return to the Domination System and those who are working to build and grow Partnership Systems — starting with our most formative childhood and gender roles and relations. This requires new thinking: as Einstein said, we cannot solve problems with the same thinking that created them.
As Americans and as participants in the Partnership movement, we should be pointing out exactly what Putin and Trumpist Republicans have in common, and change the conversation to an unequivocal rejection of the Domination agenda for America — and for the world.
Riane Eisler is president of the Center for Partnership Systems and author of many books on the Partnership and Domination Systems, including The Chalice and The Blade (now in 56 US printings and 30 foreign editions) and most recently, with anthropologist Douglas Fry, of Nurturing Our Humanity (Oxford University Press, 2019).
