In a 2017 speech at Hillsdale College, the Claremont Institute’s Christopher Caldwell declared 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.” In Caldwell’s words, Putin “is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy.”
In 2021, The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher praised a Putin speech condemning the West and said that Putin and Hungary’s Viktor Orban were “completely clear and completely correct on the society-destroying nature of wokeness and postliberal leftism.” (It should be noted that Dreher has nonetheless unequivocally condemned Putin’s invasion.) A 2022 exchange between Steve Bannon and Erik Prince, the founder of private military contractor Blackwater, was even more illustrative. Bannon hosted Prince on his podcast shortly after Putin’s invasion and proclaimed Putin “anti-woke.” Prince replied supportively that the people of Russia “still know which bathroom to use.” And Bannon kept the thought alive, asking, “How many genders are there in Russia?”
Jordan Peterson, meanwhile, went so far as to imply that Russia’s aggressive attack may have been merely self-defense against the threat of Western cultural decadence. The culture war, he mused, may be “serious enough to increase the probability that Russia, say, will be motivated to invade and potentially incapacitate Ukraine merely to keep the pathological West out of that country, which is a key part of the historically Russian sphere of influence.”
There is an old saying: The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Ideally, the phrase means that Americans set aside their domestic differences to address foreign threats to the nation. But in this hyper-polarized era, the far right gets this equation precisely backward. They are aiding Vladimir Putin because they see him, too, as opposed to their domestic enemies.
Before the war, MAGA’s combination of hostility toward Ukraine and admiration of Putin created a very particular narrative: Rugged, manly, traditional Russia was physically and spiritually stronger than the liberalizing West, and it would roll over Ukraine with only token resistance. Indeed, before the war, Ted Cruz shared a tweet in which he contrasted Russian and American military ads. The U.S. ad, he claimed, showed our military to be “woke” and “emasculated.” But the Russian ad reeked of masculine aggression. How could the West — let alone tiny Ukraine — stand against such manly men?