Ukraine Silver Lining

But Mr. Putin’s savaging of Ukraine, which many of his right-wing supporters had said he would never do, has recast the Russian president more clearly as a global menace and boogeyman with ambitions of empire who is threatening nuclear war and European instability.

For many of his longtime admirers — from France to Germany and the United States to Brazil — it is something of an awkward spot. The stain of Mr. Putin’s new reputation threatens to taint his fellow travelers, too.

“It will be a decisive blow to them,” said Lucio Caracciolo, the editor of the Italian geopolitical magazine Limes, who considered Mr. Putin’s invasion an irrational, and potentially, a politically suicidal move. He said that members of the international ultraright who enjoyed a special relationship and financial support from Mr. Putin were “in serious trouble.” “They put all their eggs in the same basket,” Mr. Caracciolo said. “And the basket is collapsing.” (Source: NYT)

Let's hope so. But such a hoped-for outcome will be paid for dearly with innocent Ukrainian blood.

 

We'll see how this plays out--so many outcomes are possible--but the humanitarian disaster now unfolding in Ukraine makes it clear that Putin is a psychopathic, murdering thug. No more disguising it with propaganda, lies, and sniggering disinformation. If you've been pro-Trump, you've been pro-Putin. And if you've been pro-Trump, you too have been conned by propaganda, lies, and sniggering disinformation. In Putin we see Trump unmasked.  And so now the case should be easier to make to any Trump supporter, who isn't himself a psychopathic thug, that your support for Trumpism is the same thing as support for Putinism. It couldn't be clearer. You want Trump, freedom-loving Trump fans? Putin is what you're gonna get. Don't you see what you're trafficking with here?

 

The world's heart goes out to the people of Ukraine whose only misfortune is to live next to a country whose political system is run by a paranoidal Bond villain with delusions of grandeur. Most people understood that already, but not if you're a Trump or Tucker Carlson fan. I assume, since neither has any real convictions except what's best for them, that they will in coming weeks squirm away from Putin. But we have all that video of their sycophantic ass kissing. If they don't pay a price for that going forward, then really there's no hope for this country. 

 

This should--should--have the  same effect on the American Right that the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956 had on American Communists who still clung to a naive idealism that had long before became disconnected from reality. They recognized then that Soviet Communism was a god who failed. Will Americans on the Right recognize now that hard-right Authoritarianism is also a god that has failed?

 

Only willful delusion is possible now, and yet the question remains: how deep into delusion is the Trumpist Right? I still have hope that at least some on the Right will be sobered up by this. And I have hope that Ukrainian resistance and valor will be an inspiration for all of us who see real tyranny for what it is, and still believe that America need not succumb to it.