Curio · The Hedgehog Review | Russia’s War, and Ours
If Russia did not exist, we would have to invent it. Not Russia the would-be great power, now self-exposed as a pitiful hulk, bristling with 4,500 nuclear warheads, humiliated by a smaller neighbor it thought to conquer quickly, competent chiefly at destroying cities, terrorizing civilians, and pulling the world toward genuine catastrophe. No: rather, Russia the self-designated champion of international social conservatism, the paladin of Orthodox Christianity, doing battle against hegemonic Western liberal secularism and decadence. Or, if you like, Russia the scourge of America’s neoliberal empire, pushed to the wall by a remorseless capitalist West, now finally pushing back on behalf of the oppressed of the world.
It is these latter Russias that have for many years proved most congenial to culture warriors in America. The populist right has been more obvious in its use of Russia. It has seen in Vladimir Putin something like what Donald Trump saw: a patriot, a man’s man who stands against the Davos–Hollywood–Silicon Valley axis, who is showing the world what national sovereignty looks like, who uses the state to safeguard traditional morality, not dismantle it. If Putin supports like-minded parties and politicians in other countries, even our own, so what? He has made Russia into the world’s bulwark against what Francis Fukuyama called, a generation ago, the universal and homogeneous state. He fights.
Less recognized, but as important, has been the attraction of Russia to some on the progressive left, in this case because of Moscow’s gleeful defiance of the American Empire. The United States has hundreds of overseas military bases. It controls the international institutions that propel the merciless global economy, enrich American capitalists, and keep everyone else down. It bullies any that cross it. Just ask Cuba, Venezuela, or Iran. Russia is one of the leading forces standing against the United States, supporting its victims and working for a multipolar world. That is why Washington has sought to undermine Russia at every turn, particularly by pushing NATO right up to Russia’s western border.
We have here a case study of the so-called horseshoe theory of ideology, in which left and right bend away from the center so far and so symmetrically that they nearly meet, each borrowing ideas from the other even as one eyes the other warily across the narrow gap. That American political center that both hate, meanwhile, takes the opposite view of Russia. For Joe Biden and the Democratic Party’s leadership, Putin’s regime is the font of the racial, ethnic, and gender phobias of our day, the international nerve center of reaction. The center-left tends to exaggerate Russia’s reach and competence, seeing Putin as an omnicompetent wirepuller who secured Donald Trump’s 2016 victory and probably controlled him while he was in office. Liberals who previously seldom had a kind word to say about the CIA or FBI abruptly discovered the virtues of vast secretive federal agencies that investigated Kremlin influence. Anything that could possibly damage Biden’s campaign in 2020, such as his son Hunter’s errant laptop computer, must be written off as mischief-making by the Russian intelligence service.