Republicans Loved Putin Before They Loved Trump
Russia’s president was the anti-Obama
by LAURA MUTH
Since the 2016 presidential election, the American people have been subjected to a seemingly endless stream of revelations about members of Donald Trump’s campaign and administration having contact with Russia.
Now, it’s possible that some of these contacts were appropriate and professional, but the administration’s defensive response to any question isn’t exactly confidence-inspiring.
Pro tip — if you feel the need to try and recruit intelligence officials to dispute your ties to the Russian government, maybe you should actually rethink those ties.
Republican lawmakers and pundits’ responses to these revelations have been underwhelming, to say the least. The party that runs on nationalist rhetoric and paints dissidents as un-American has seemed pretty unconcerned about potential Russian interference both in the American election and in ongoing American governance.
This lack of concern is even weirder when you remember that not long ago, Russia was America’s biggest geopolitical adversary, and the hunt for communist sympathizers and spies in America upended society from the State Department to Hollywood.
So how did Republicans end up with such a blasé, or even favorable, attitude towards Russia and its authoritarian leader Vladimir Putin.
For a lot of people, the popularity of of Putin is tied directly to Trump’s ascendancy. Trump likes Putin, Republicans like Trump — or what he has done for their party’s power — so now Republicans like Putin. And for some, that’s probably true.
For others, though, an affinity for Putin goes back farther. An admiration for Putin grew among some right-wingers during the Obama years, because Putin was such a perfect foil to Pres. Barack Obama in so many ways.
Nationalist where Obama was globalist, traditionalist while Obama was progressive, hypermasculine and aggressive where Obama was reserved and therefore perceived as weak, Christian while conspiracy theories whirled about Obama’s supposed secret Muslim identity.
And perhaps most obviously, white while Obama was black.
For those on the right most infuriated and alienated by Obama’s presidency, Putin was a potent example of everything they thought a leader should be, and his Russia was a model of everything the United States could be under a true leader.
When some conservatives saw that they were losing ground in the culture wars under the Obama administration, Russia in their eyes shifted from an adversary to a refuge for “traditional values.”
LGBT rights advanced in the United States over the objections of many conservatives. Likewise, the dream of overturning Roe v. Wade became more distant under Obama. Many conservatives began to fight these battles at the state level, trying to use religious freedom arguments to block access to abortion and contraceptives and prevent implementation of the right to marriage.
But in some cases, they turned abroad to advance their ideas about homosexuality and gender roles. “Pro-family” organizations in the United States increasingly found common ground with the Russian government and the Russian Orthodox Church.
A key example is the World Congress of Families, an organization based in Illinois that “pursues a global antichoice, anti-LGBTQ agenda and seeks to promote conservative ideas regarding the traditional nuclear family,” according to social justice think tank Political Research Associates.
In 2014, WCF was set to hold a summit in Russia, billed as the “Olympics” of the antichoice movement. After Russia’s annexation of Ukraine, WCF had to lift its official endorsement of the summit. However, the event more or less went ahead as planned, and WCF was not the only U.S.-based organization with representatives in attendance.
Members of the National Organization for Marriage, Family Watch International, the Religious Freedom Coalition, the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institution and several others were also present.
WCF’s brochure for the event pointed to the disintegration of the “natural family” as the root cause of all of society’s problems, and quoted world leaders, Putin among them, on the importance of the “natural family.”
Sessions sported titles such as “Every Child a Gift: Large Families — Future of Humanity” and breakout sessions on the ex-gay movement, fighting abortion and, of course, the all-important battle against pornography.
Indeed, the links between WCF and the Russian right go back even farther, at least to 2010, when WCF’s vice president Larry Jacobs attended the “Sanctity of Motherhood” conference in Russia to try and encourage more Russian women to have children. Since then, WCF has been active in Russia, encouraging anti-gay and anti-choice legislation.
More broadly, Putin became a darling of segments of the American right when he passed his country’s anti-gay “propaganda” law. Unsurprisingly, WCF and the Catholic Family and Human Rights Institution, two attendees at the “pro-family” conference in Moscow, were among the groups voicing support for the law.
The relationship has been mutually reinforcing, with conservatives from each country providing intellectual and moral support to the other. The inspiration for starting the WCF, for example, came when founder Allan Carlson met two Russian professors while he was visiting the country back in 1995.
Their philosophical inspiration? A 19th-century Russian thinker who believed that without the moral absolutism provided by strong religious faith, humans will lose all morality and society would fall into chaos.
And WCF is just one right-wing organization with these kinds of ties to Russia. It, and others, have come to see Putin’s Russia as the new defender of Christian Western civilization, unafraid to fight for those conservative religious values against rising globalism and what defenders see as catastrophic moral relativism and decline.
Leading up to the summit in Russia, WCF communications director Don Feder wrote an article in the conservative publication The American Thinker entitled, “Putin Doesn’t Threaten Our National Security, Obama Does.” The link to the article is currently broken. However, Buzzfeed referenced this line — “Would that America had a president who cared more about our interests than in promoting globalism and the left’s social agenda.”
White nationalism and militarism
Obama was known for referencing his international family history and talking about America’s interconnectedness with the rest of the world. For those who view all international relations as a zero-sum game, an acknowledgement that our fates are entwined with others, and that we cannot simply dictate the direction of the world, is an acknowledgement that we’re losing.
The logic goes something like this — if the U.S. military is incapable of foisting our will upon the other nations of the world, this is not an indication of complexity but rather a sign that our military has become weak. And if our military has become weak, that is the fault of the leader telling us it can’t solve all our problems: Obama.
So he is accused of depleting the military, an act which “invites aggression,” according to The Daily Signal, a conservative publication. In this formulation, Russian aggression during the Obama years is actually Obama’s fault. Had he not supposedly undermined the supremacy of the U.S. military, Putin would never have dared to invade Crimea.
Putin’s aggression is then also reframed as an example of a truly strong leader acting in his country’s best interests. Unlike Obama, he does not shy away from conflict or overly concern himself with issues like international opinion. He sees an opportunity to gain something for his country and he acts.
Even before Trump’s ascension in American politics, Putin was gaining a following in the United States based on framing him in opposition to Obama. His unabashed militarism in pursuit of his objectives is a model of leadership and a form of toxic masculinity that Trump also seeks to embody.
And, in a dramatic shift from the feared Communist International of the Cold War, Russia has instead come to be seen as the leader of a “Traditionalist International” that holds special appeal for white nationalists. In addition to the “pro-family” conference held in Moscow and attended by luminaries of the anti-gay and anti-choice movements in the United States, Russia has also hosted summits of neo-Nazis and white supremacists.
One of these events was related to Putins “novorussiya,” or “new Russia,” project to create an independent, Russian-influenced state in eastern Ukraine. If you recall, Putin’s justification for his invasion there was his obligation to protect ethnic and linguistic Russians. It was a larger-scale repeat of his previous incursions into South Ossetia and Abkhazia in Georgia and Transnistria in Moldova.
Putin has garnered the admiration of Richard Spencer and David Duke, among others in the American white supremacist movement. While Obama was in office here, Putin’s Russia represented not only a bastion of conservative Christian social values, but also a great white hope for the future at a time when white supremacists had seen their race lose the highest office in the land.
A prescient columnist at the Los Angeles Times critiqued conservative admiration for Putin. “Oh, how happy they would be if they could find their own Vladimir Putin to run for president in 2016.”
Putin lite
To those who fell in love with Putin while Obama was president, Trump appeared to be man cut from the same cloth. Just as Putin didn’t bow to the pressure of international opinion, Trump didn’t care for political correctness.
Many people’s favorite thing about him was apparently that he just spoke his mind, without caring whether it would offend people. And offend people it did, because so much of what was on Trump’s mind was sexist, racist, xenophobic, Islamophobic and, in many cases, patently untrue.
But he tapped into the narrative that had made Putin popular — the need to preserve tradition and order, the idea that physical force was the only true form of strength, that white people, particularly straight men, had been unfairly hurt by globalism and any increase in rights for minorities.
He appealed to their desire for a “real man” — that is, a straight white man who does whatever he wants without consequence — to lead the country.
Of course, Trump’s image of manliness is a bit more facade than Putin’s. After all, Putin served in the KGB, while Trump managed to defer being draft five different times. While his photo ops are clearly staged, Putin does actually do jujitsu and ride horses and engage in all the manly man activities that prove his masculinity time and again in the press.
Somehow Trump has laid claim to the same brand of masculinity without actually doing many of the things that are traditionally associated with it. Bravado and bluster has carried him thus far, without having encountered any imperative to prove himself.
When he does finally face such an imperative, the results could be disastrous for Americans and people around the world.
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