By Jay Nordlinger
Monday,
October 28, 2024
In
1984, Jeane Kirkpatrick was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, having
been nominated for the position by President Reagan. She was still a Democrat,
as she had always been. She would not change her party registration to
Republican until the next year, when she was out of government.
Democrat
though she was, she addressed the Republican National Convention in 1984. She
was dismayed by the direction her party had taken. She herself was essentially
a Truman Democrat. In 1948, when she was a senior in college, she decided to
back President Truman, not Henry A. Wallace, the pro-Moscow politician, and
former vice president, whom many of her classmates favored. She never looked
back.
Addressing
the Republican convention, she said that too many of her fellow Democrats had
the habit of “blaming America first” — blaming the United States for the ills
of the world, ills that were caused by others, not least the Kremlin. In recent
years, many of us have had occasion to recall that speech.
Over
and over, Republicans blame the United States for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This starts with Donald Trump. Here he is, for example, talking to the network
that styles itself “Real America’s Voice” in October 2022:
They actually taunted him, if you really look
at it. Our country, and our so-called leadership, taunted Putin. And, I would
listen—I’d say, “You know, they’re almost forcing him to go
in, with what they’re saying.”
That
“almost” was a touch of moderation.
At
the Republican convention last summer, David Sacks spoke. He is a tech investor
and a fixture in Trump’s orbit. President Biden, said Sacks, “provoked, yes,
provoked, the Russians to invade Ukraine.”
U.S.
senators say just the same, or some of them do. On X, Mike Lee (R., Utah) tweeted straightforwardly that “Biden
provoked Russia to invade Ukraine.”
Another
senator, Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.), said, “We forced this issue. We kept
forcing NATO all the way to eastern Europe, and Putin just got tired of it.”
In
many ways, today’s Right has reminded some of us conservatives of the Left of
yore. This is true both in the domestic realm and in the foreign — the realm of
foreign affairs. I will concentrate on the latter.
***
When
I was coming of age, left-wingers liked to say that the U.S. had fought the
Vietnam War at the behest of Dow Chemical and other nefarious companies. You
can imagine my reaction when, in September 2020, President Trump offered an
explanation of why “the top people in the Pentagon” were not “in love” with
him: “They want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful
companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay
happy.”
As
a rule, our military personnel like to avoid wars — to prevent them, to deter
them.
In
July 2023, Senator JD Vance (R., Ohio), later to be Trump’s running mate, said
this: “The profit motives of the defense contractors are motivating our posture
in Ukraine.” Nothing to do with an assessment of American interests, you see —
just “the profit motives of the defense contractors.”
This
is the way hippies, yippies, and Marxists used to talk. To hear the same kind
of talk from people described as “conservative Republicans” is, to some of us,
surreal.
In
that same statement, Vance went on to say, “We need to stop supporting the
Ukraine war effort.” Imagine such a framing: “the Ukraine war effort.” The
Ukrainians are fighting to save themselves from annihilation and subjugation.
They are fighting against invaders for their very existence.
Left-wingers
used to say that we were itching to start a nuclear war. Well, here is Trump,
talking about Biden in August 2023: “This guy is gonna get us into a nuclear
war. He’s gonna really do it. He’s gonna get us right into a nuclear war.” The
next August, he tweeted this, about Vice President Harris: “There will be no
future under Comrade Kamala Harris, because she will take us into a Nuclear
World War III!”
Statements
such as these are Trump’s equivalent of the “daisy ad” run against Barry
Goldwater in 1964.
I
remember the accusations against Reagan in 1980. A “nuclear cowboy,” they
called him. They also had a nickname: “Ronald Raygun.”
The
man who served as Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, is not supporting Trump
this year. Trump’s new running mate, Senator Vance, explained Pence’s position
as follows: “In reality, if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with
Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now.”
This
is the kind of slander that would have made conservative blood boil, years ago.
“Warmongers,”
they always called us. Tweeting about his Republican-convention speech, David
Sacks said, “I called out the warmongers for their provoked war.” Earlier in
the year, Senator Tuberville had tweeted, “Russia is open to a peace agreement,
while it is DC warmongers who want to prolong the war.”
Young
people will have to trust me: This is just what the Left said: that the Kremlin
was peace-loving, or peace-seeking, while American warmongers made the world
dangerous.
Liz
Cheney is backing Kamala Harris. About Cheney, Vance said, “This is a person
whose entire career has been about sending other people’s children off to fight
and die for her military conflicts.” He further said, “Blessed are the
peacemakers.”
Ah,
yes, the peacemakers. Senator Tuberville said, “We got to get peace back on
this planet.” Maybe he should talk to Putin?
The
Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán, blames “pro-war” politicians in Washington and
Brussels for increasing tension between Russia and the West. He and Trump, he
says, are “pro-peace.”
Surely,
there is no politician more “pro-war” than Vladimir Putin, that blood-drenched
warmaker. And Ukrainians wish the West could understand: There is nothing
peaceful about Russian occupation. They know, from horrifying experience.
***
In
Cold War days, we heard Kremlin propaganda from Western mouths. We still do. In
December 2023, Senator Vance said, “There are people who would cut Social
Security, throw our grandparents into poverty. Why? So that one of Zelensky’s
ministers can buy a bigger yacht?”
Never
mind that the alleged desire of entitlement reformers to impoverish
grandparents has long been a Democratic talking point: The business about the
Ukrainian president, his cabinet ministers, and yachts is straight-out Kremlin
propaganda. A BBC report was headed, “How pro-Russian ‘yacht’ propaganda
influenced U.S. debate over Ukraine aid.”
Some
Republicans are wise to this. Last April, Michael McCaul, the congressman who
heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, “I think Russian propaganda
has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a
good chunk of my party’s base.”
Mike
Turner, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, agreed with McCaul:
“We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are
anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered
on the House floor.”
Very
different from McCaul and Turner is Marjorie Taylor Greene. She, too, is a
Republican House member, sitting on the Homeland Security Committee. In March
2022, she tweeted, “NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with
powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them.” She concluded by
saying, “What the hell is going on with these #NATONazis?”
Greene
was a speaker at the Republican convention last summer.
So
was Peter Navarro, a longtime Trump adviser. Before Russia’s full-scale
invasion, he said of Ukraine, “The country itself is not really a country.”
That is exactly what Putin says, and wants others to say. The Ukrainians keep
disproving the lie, in their valiant effort to save themselves.
“The
Russians have gained far more geopolitical leverage out of the millions they’ve
spent on information warfare than the billions they have spent on the
military.” That is the judgment of Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic
studies, given to me in a podcast last January.
Yet
some people think that the propaganda — the disinformation, the storm of lies —
comes from the other side: ours. After watching an interview with Putin,
Senator Tuberville said this: “You can tell Putin is on top of his game. One
thing he said that, it really rung a bell, is, the propaganda media machine
over here, they sell anything they possibly can to go after Russia.”
My
comment at the time:
You would have expected this from a professor
at Antioch College, c. 1978. You would have expected it from Bella Abzug and
Ron Dellums. And now you get it from “conservative” Republicans, both in
politics and in the media.
In
the 1980s, Democrats had a standard response to any Republican effort to fund a
weapon or support an ally: “How many hot school lunches would that buy?”
Today’s Republicans have their equivalents.
The
border, for example. Because our southern border is porous, they say, we must
not support Ukraine (and our own interest, as many of us see it). In December
2023, JD Vance said, “In the midst of a historic border crisis, Zelensky will
come to Washington and demand that the Congress care more about his border than
our own.”
Does
the president of Ukraine demand any such thing? When Israelis, in their own war
against aggressors who wish to destroy them, ask for our support, are they
demanding that we care more about their border than our own?
It
is standard for Republicans to dismiss Putin’s assault on Ukraine as a border
dispute. When he was running for the Republican presidential nomination,
Florida governor Ron DeSantis said, “I wish the D.C. elites cared as much about
our border as they do about the Ukraine–Russia border.”
The
Heritage Foundation circulated a meme. The meme shows a woman — a mother? — in
a swimming pool, playing with a child. Meanwhile, another child, a few feet
away, is struggling in the water. Heritage labeled the woman “President Biden”
and the first child “Ukraine Border.” The second, struggling child, it labeled
“U.S. Border.”
In
August 2023, deadly fires swept over Hawaii. The Heritage Foundation circulated
two photos, side by side: one showing a peaceful, happy Kyiv and the other
showing the devastation in Hawaii. There were other pictures of Ukraine that
Heritage could have shown: body parts in Bucha, for example.
***
We
“old” conservatives often faulted the Left for “moral equivalence” — the habit
of equating the behavior of the U.S. and other democracies with the behavior of
the Soviet Union and other dictatorships. Well, you may remember what Donald
Trump said, two weeks after he was sworn in as president.
In
an interview, Bill O’Reilly said to him, “Putin is a killer.” The president
replied, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you
think our country’s so innocent?”
More
recently, two summers ago, the Biden administration condemned the Kremlin for
sentencing Alexei Navalny on “politically motivated charges.” Senator Lee
replied that the administration was treating Trump just the same way.
To
this contention, there are a hundred things to say. One of them is this:
Navalny is dead; Trump may well be reelected president in a few days.
It
is one thing to oppose U.S. aid to Ukraine — to think that such aid is not in
the American interest. It is another to sneer at the Ukrainians and their
desperate struggle to survive.
Here
is Vivek Ramaswamy, a star of the “New Right”:
Ukraine-ism is now a new religion. Kyiv is
the Vatican, Zelensky is the pope, and career politicians in both parties are
the new faithful. It’s sad that they’ll make a pilgrimage halfway around the
world while ignoring the invasion across our own southern border right here at
home.
The
tweeted opinion of Senator Lee: “Vivek Ramaswamy = badass.”
JD
Vance had a texting relationship with Charles Johnson, whom the Washington
Post describes as “a blogger and entrepreneur who has zealously promoted
right-wing conspiracy theories.” The Post obtained text
messages between the two men (presumably from Johnson himself). Here is one
from Vance to Johnson:
Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine.
Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of
the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.
Senator
Mike Lee and others have cited the reporting of Seymour Hersh, against Ukraine.
Now 87, Hersh has been a darling of the Left for most of our lives — the far
Left. I learned about him when I was young, reading National Review, which refuted and deplored him.
What
next? Strange new respect for Walter Duranty? Izzy Stone? Herbert Matthews?
“I
am a big believer that Hollywood was created by the CIA.” So said Candace
Owens, often called a “conservative influencer,” who has 5.7 million followers
on X. When I was growing up, the Left
liked to say that the CIA was behind everything — everything bad (in their
estimation). The CIA was an all-purpose bogeyman.
“Taylor
Swift is not part of a DOD psychological operation. Period.” Who said that? A
spokesman for the Pentagon. The spokesman felt obliged to issue the statement
in response to a Fox News host: who suggested that Swift, the queen of pop, was
indeed part of a psy-op.
***
In
the summer of 2017, Charles Krauthammer wrote an essay titled “The
Authoritarian Temptation.” It would prove the last essay he ever wrote. He
thought the subject was pressing. He adapted his title from Jean-François
Revel, who, in 1976, wrote The Totalitarian Temptation.
Krauthammer
noted “a curious and growing affinity for Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the
Russias.” And “this tendency,” he said, “is most pronounced on the right,” a
development no less than “head-snapping.”
“After
decades of left-wing apologists for Russia,” wrote Krauthammer, “it is now
lifelong conservatives who are asking: What’s so bad about Putin anyway?”
The
world shifts, and so do political parties, as Jeane Kirkpatrick experienced, as
so many have experienced.
In
September 2022, I wrote,
Once upon a time, Ukraine would have been a
great cause on the American right. Here is a post-Soviet republic, an escapee
from the “prison house of nations.” It is working to find its way as a free,
independent, and democratic country. It is invaded by a revanchist Russia, led
by a former KGB colonel. Russia seeks to re-subjugate Ukraine through terror.
The Kremlin is visiting atrocities on the Ukrainians that it never visited on
the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechoslovakians in 1968.
So, here is a classic case of a free and
independent country being invaded and brutalized by an expansionist
dictatorship that seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. As of old.
Also a case of a national David against an imperial Goliath.
This would have been a natural cause of
conservatives (American conservatives, forgetting their European and other
counterparts). Is it? Hardly.
Last
summer, I participated in an event at the Ukrainian Institute of America, in
New York. I had been there one other time: 25 years before, when Robert
Conquest spoke. Bill Buckley had asked me to go with him. Conquest, the
historian and man of letters, was an expert on Ukraine, and Russia. His books
include The Harvest of Sorrow, about the “terror-famine” inflicted by
Moscow on the Ukrainians, and Stalin: Breaker of Nations. Conquest
emphasized the importance of Ukraine as an independent nation.
That
was the conservative world, at least as I experienced it, not so long ago.
On
September 26, 2024, the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Harris,
spoke about Ukraine. She did so standing beside Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr
Zelensky. She said,
Putin could set his sights on Poland, the
Baltic states, and other NATO allies. We also know that other would-be
aggressors around the world are watching to see what happens in Ukraine. If
Putin is allowed to win, they will become emboldened.
That
would have been Republican talk — Republican understanding — before 2016,
essentially. Harris continued,
And history reminds us that the United States
cannot and should not isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Isolation
is not insulation. So then, the United States supports Ukraine, not out of
charity, but because it is in our strategic interest.
To
young people, the current state of our politics must seem normal. It is normal.
The Republican Party has nominated Donald Trump for president three times in a
row. But to the less young, it is abnormal, and, to some of us, dislocating.
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