Send Out the Clowns

By Kevin D. Williamson

Thursday, March 17, 2022

 

The Russian invasion of Ukraine is not the cause of the political realignment currently under way in both Europe and the United States, but it has accelerated some aspects of that realignment and laid bare others.

 

Of course, there are winners and losers.

 

One of the winners, from a cynically political point of view, is Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky. Six months ago, he was the not-especially impressive leader of a troubled and corrupt government; today, he is positively Churchillian. You never know what people really have in them until the bombs start falling. If the Russians are successful in murdering him, as they mean to, he will at least have the politician’s consolation of dying at the height of his reputation; if he survives the war, he will disappoint, as politicians always do, but he will have the consolation of being alive.

 

The French president, Emmanuel Macron, is another winner: He currently enjoys a 97 percent chance of being reelected, as the Economist runs the numbers. His performance has been statesmanlike, but, even if it hadn’t been, he looks like a winner by default. His two main challengers are Éric Zemmour and Marine le Pen, the Boris and Natasha of the French Right, both of whom have been struggling to get on the right side of the war in Ukraine without much success. Le Pen is literally in hock to the Russians, having financed her last campaign with a Russian bank loan in a totally normal, not-at-all-weird-looking transaction, and her campaign literature features pictures of her snuggling with Vladimir Putin in the Kremlin. Zemmour is a formerly frank Putin admirer, one who has said he “dreams of a French Putin.” The poor dears: Every Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact ends in heartbreak.

 

The French center-Right has more or less disappeared, with les Républicains being in even worse disarray than their American counterparts. Even Emmanuel Macron can walk tall among the Smurfs.

 

The le Pens and Zemmours of the American right-wing media, from the Putin-positive to the merely Putin-curious, have put a pretty good stink on themselves, too. Republican political figures such as J. D. Vance — who has decided, alas, to try to be the Tucker Carlson of Senate candidates — have given voters very good reason to believe that their judgement is not to be trusted.

 

President Joe Biden is a loser in Ukraine, too. He might have been quietly thanking whatever demented deity it is who watches over politicians as Putin’s war gave him someone to blame for U.S. inflation and related economic woes, but he is surrounded by smug cretins (birds of a feather, etc.) who read their stage directions aloud, sharing with one and all their plans to deflect blame for their incompetence onto Putin. Even American voters, juvenile as they are, probably won’t fall for that. And, in any case, the American electorate is entirely capable of saying to a president, “I didn’t say it was your fault — I said I am going to blame you for it.” Happens all the time.

 

The war has produced a bull market in what I suppose we have to call neo-neo-conservatism, with Democrats and center-Left figures suddenly rediscovering the uses — and necessity — of American hard power. You won’t find a better example of this than Professor Shadi Hamid of the Brookings Institution, who in a recent conversation with Jonah Goldberg was at pains to distance himself from anything that might be called “conservative” or “Bushian,” in his words. Instead, Professor Hamid insisted, responsible liberals such as himself (1) have kept true to their principles while other elements of the Democratic coalition have descended into mad radicalism and identity politics; (2) understand that the alternative to American hegemony is Chinese hegemony or Russo-Chinese hegemony; and (3) being worldly cosmopolitans, admit that it is entirely understandable that Europeans take a different view of European refugees than they do of, say, Muslim refugees from Syria, whose culture and religion inevitably make it more difficult to assimilate them.

 

For those of you keeping score at home, Professor Hamid here has channeled (1) Ronald Reagan (“I didn’t leave the Democratic Party — the Democratic Party left me!”); (2) George W. Bush (an axis of what, now?); and, perhaps most surprising, (3) Pat Buchanan, once denounced as a vile racist for asking hypothetically whether Virginia would have an easier time assimilating 1 million English immigrants or 1 million Zulu immigrants.

 

Who would have guessed that liberal neo-paleoconservatism would be a factor in 2022? Strange things are afoot at the Brookings Institution.

 

Elsewhere, too. Putin’s war has been enough of a shock to sober up even such figures as Annalena Baerbock, the leader of Germany’s thoroughly loopy Green Party, who has taken a hard turn toward realism in her new role as foreign minister. Compared to the Biden administration’s climate envoy, former secretary of state John Kerry, the minister from the Green Party comes off like General Patton. Antony Blinken may not be the most commanding figure on the scene, but we are fortunate that John Kerry has been put out to pasture, an emeritus figure in semi-retirement. He is not the only figure who remains senseless to the demands of the times: You’ll notice that nobody is really very interested in what former secretary of state Hillary Rodham Clinton thinks about any of this — her most recent headline reads: “Hillary Clinton and Eric Adams Bond over Bubble Baths.” Thanks for that update, New York magazine. Somebody ought to point out to Mayor Adams, if he can be pried away from his rose petals and incense for a moment, that the people of Kyiv run toward their subway when seeking safety.

 

The dead have no politics, but the politics of the living matters — to the Ukrainians, to the refugees, to us, and to the future. What is at stake here is not the reputation of Jens Stoltenberg or the career of Olaf Scholz, the future of Emmanuel Macron or the past of Angela Merkel. We are seeing the emergence of the two broad coalitions whose competition will shape the rest of the 21st century, and the lines of that division run not only between countries but also through them.

 

One of the ironies is that the great figure of this episode is Volodymyr Zelensky, who was an actor on a television comedy before he was the leader of a nation in a fight for its life. Zelensky is now better-placed than any other political leader in the world to appreciate that the age of politics-as-entertainment is coming rapidly to a close.

 

The reality show is over, and realism is back.