When Hatred of the Left Becomes Love for Putin

There are deep ideological reasons behind conservative affinity for Russia.

Vladimir Putin gives an interview to Tucker Carlson on February 6, 2024. (Photo by Gavriil Grigorov/AFP via Getty Images.)

According to Hungarian Prime Minister Victor Orbán, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump will quickly end the war in Ukraine if he is elected, by refusing “a single penny” of aid and effectively forcing the country’s capitulation to Russia. The statement, which followed Orbán’s meeting with Trump last month, is a stark reminder of the extent to which the Trumpified GOP is becoming the anti-Ukraine party, a far cry from early bipartisan support for Ukraine’s fight against Russian aggression. And while opposition to aid to Ukraine doesn’t necessarily entail support for Vladimir Putin—common rationales include that the United States must focus on domestic problems or on the more dangerous threat from China, or that Ukraine can’t win and prolonging the war only means more death and suffering—Putin-friendly themes have been increasingly prominent on the right. At this point, pro-Putinism is no longer an undercurrent in right-wing rhetoric: it’s on the surface.

But not all Putin-friendly conservatives are the same. For some, their hatred of the American left overrides any feelings they have about Putin. Others are more ideological: they oppose the Western liberal project itself. Untangling these different strains is key to explaining why so many on today’s right embrace views that, until recently, would have gotten them branded Kremlin stooges by other conservatives.

Take former Fox News host Tucker Carlson and his recent Moscow adventure. In February, Carlson, whose content is now streamed on X and on his own website, took his role as a conduit for Kremlin propaganda to a new level with a trip to interview Putin—something that he absurdly claimed no Western journalist had “bothered” to do since the war began. (As news organizations pointed out and Putin spokesman Dmitry Peskov confirmed, many had tried; Carlson got the nod because, as Peskov made clear, the Kremlin found him more congenial.) The interview was a two-hour lovefest in which Putin and his lies went unchallenged except for some polite pushback on Evan Gershkovich, the American journalist held in Russia on phony spying charges. Then, Carlson topped this with gushy videos extolling the wonders of the Soviet-built Moscow subway and of Russian supermarkets.

Carlson reflects the dominant mode on the Trumpist right: if not actively pro-Putin, then at best anti-anti-Putin. The anti-anti-Putinists may concede that Putin is kinda bad, but only to insist that other things are far worse: Mexican drug cartels, progressive philanthropist George Soros, “the Left,” or America’s “ruling class.” Like the left-wing Soviet apologists of old, they make up faux political prisoners in America to suggest moral equivalency with the dictatorship in the Kremlin.

An article in The Federalist the day after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine starkly illustrates this mindset. Author Christopher Bedford, former head of the Daily Caller News Foundation and a prolific contributor to right-of-center media, not only bluntly stated that “a lot of us hate our elites far more than we hate some foreign dictator” but admitted finding a lot to admire in said dictator—for instance, Putin’s unapologetic defense of Russia’s “religion, culture and history,” while Western elites denigrate and apologize for theirs.

It’s hardly news by now that many American right-wingers see Putin’s Russia as the antithesis of Western “wokeness.” This is especially true with regard to sexual and gender norms: I noted the beginnings of this trend in 2013, when several right-wing groups and conservative pundits praised a Russian law censoring “propaganda” of homosexuality. Discussing the phenomenon recently in the context of the GOP’s anti-Ukraine turn, David French pointed to such examples as far-right strategist Steve Bannon’s praise for Putin’s “anti-woke” persona and Russia’s conservative gender politics, or psychologist Jordan Peterson’s suggestion that Russia’s war in Ukraine was partly self-defense against the decadence of “the pathological West.”

The idea of Russia as a bulwark of traditionalism and “anti-woke” resistance is an image the Putin regime deliberately cultivates—not only to appeal to its own population’s biases but to win friends among conservatives in the West. And many are seduced into an affinity that goes well beyond anti-anti-Putinism.

Those right-wingers nod along when Putin declares, while announcing the annexation of four Ukrainian regions, that Russia is fighting for families with “Mom and Dad” rather than “Parent No. 1” and “Parent No. 2,” or when Russia officially classifies feminism and the “LGBT movement” as “extremist.” They love the army recruitment ads that celebrate manly men, rather than “emasculated” American men. They may not have heard about Russian politicians echoing American “trad” bloggers in fretting that too many young women are going to college instead of having babies, but they know they like a cultural climate where such opinions flourish. They also happily give the Putin regime a pass on things for which they castigate the liberal “regime” in America—be it legal abortion, despite recent moves to limit and discourage it, or stringent COVID-19 lockdowns.

Yet distaste for post-1960s social and sexual liberalism doesn’t entirely explain the right’s Putin love. Some right-wing pro-Putin rhetoric indicates a far more radical rejection of liberalism, even in its more classical varieties (the liberalism of John Locke and John Stuart Mill as opposed to the progressivism of Michel Foucault or Ibram X. Kendi). Obviously, people like neo-reactionary blogger Curtis Yarvin, who fantasizes about Putin’s Russia reprising Tsarist Russia’s 19^th century role as the crusher of liberalism in Europe, are fringe cranks (though Yarvin has reputed connections to the Trumpian right). But consider the near-panegyric to Putin in a much more respectable venue: a 2017 speech by writer and Claremont Institute senior fellow Christopher Caldwell at a Hillsdale College seminar. Both Claremont and Hillsdale are intellectual hubs of Trumpist national conservatism.

Caldwell, who unabashedly hails Putin as “a hero to populist conservatives,” just as unabashedly acknowledges that the “hero” has suppressed “peaceful demonstrations” and jailed and probably murdered political opponents. Yet he asserts that “if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time.” Leaving aside dubious claims about Russia’s “flourishing” under Putin, perhaps the most revealing thing about this defense is that it openly invokes standards which predate and reject modern, Enlightenment-based beliefs about liberty, self-government, and human rights.

No less remarkably, Caldwell praises Putin’s refusal to accept “a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders”—and offers a startling analogy:

Populist conservatives see [Putin] the way progressives once saw Fidel Castro, as the one person who says he won’t submit to the world that surrounds him. You didn’t have to be a Communist to appreciate the way Castro, whatever his excesses, was carving out a space of autonomy for his country.

If Putin-friendly “populist conservatives” are the equivalent of Castro-friendly, Cold War-era progressives, that’s quite a self-own—and a self-reveal.

Much like pro-Castro leftists of yore, today’s pro-Putin rightists are fundamentally anti-American. They hate American global leadership and power. They hate American foreign policy and national security institutions—hence their eager embrace of Kremlin narratives in which the 2014 Revolution of Dignity in Ukraine, which ousted a pro-Moscow semi-authoritarian regime, was “a CIA-backed coup.” They hate, more fundamentally, 21^st century America: an America they see as corrupted by multiculturalism, “Third World” immigration, feminism, gay rights and sexual liberation—and dominated by “elites” that despise conservatives.

Of course one can criticize various aspects of modern progressive culture in America, especially in its illiberal, identity-focused incarnation. One can even agree that a progressivism which sees the Western liberal legacy as steeped in racist, sexist, homophobic and capitalist oppressions erodes our commitment to liberal democracy in the face of Putinist autocracy. But there is a vast gulf between such a critique and outright “hostility to [one’s] own government and fellow citizens,” in the words of essayist Matt Johnson—a hostility that easily turns to sympathy for America’s enemies.

What’s more, the grievance and resentment at the heart of Trumpist nationalism in America is in some ways quite similar to the mentality of Putinist nationalism in Russia: One obsesses over losing the culture war and being disrespected by the “elites”; the other, over losing the Cold War and being disrespected by the West. Perhaps this explains other similarities in the two mindsets, from the penchant for provocation and in-your-face defiance of norms to the affinity for conspiracy theories. Too many American rightists look at the Putin regime and see kindred spirits.

Cathy Young is a writer at The Bulwark, a columnist for Newsday, and a contributing editor to Reason.

---

Follow Persuasion on X, LinkedIn, and YouTube to keep up with our latest articles, podcasts, and events, as well as updates from excellent writers across our network.

And, to receive pieces like this in your inbox and support our work, subscribe below: