Why Are Republicans Siding With Russia?

Because Putinism is catnip to a new breed of American losers.

There’s been a lot of anger this week over Fox News’s born-again populist, Tucker Carlson, going all in on attacking NATO and siding with Russia at the very moment that Russian President Vladimir Putin is massing a gigantic military force on Ukraine’s border. But Carlson, this century’s Vladimir Pozner, has long been a Putin apologist. He’s just throwing off any last pretenses of whose side he’s on in the ongoing global contest between democracy and authoritarianism. (Spoiler: It’s not democracy.)

More important is that you can now find other Republicans and conservative pundits who feel the same way about Russia, part of a Putinphilia that began among white-nationalist GOP primitives but has now spread (like white nationalism itself) to the rest of the party. As a former Republican and unapologetic Cold Warrior—who then argued for closer relations with Russia until Putin made cooperation impossible—I think this is among the most grievous and disgusting changes in a party that, whatever its other sins, was once steadfast in asserting America’s place as the leader of the democratic nations of the world.

Why did it happen?

Some of it, I suppose, we could dismiss as uninformed rubes merely aping Donald Trump’s reverence of the Russian president. Trump, as we’ve all cringed at seeing, has a creepy, man-crush attraction to authoritarian rulers, and so his cult follows suit. (In case you think I’m exaggerating, Trump is still going on about his “love letters” from Kim Jong Un. Imagine, just for a moment, the pictures Republicans would paint if Joe Biden said he was exchanging love letters with, say, the current leader of Iran. Better yet, put it out of your mind immediately.)

But that’s not enough to explain the attachment to Putin among both GOP elites and the kind of local guys who wear “I’d rather be a Russian than a Democrat” T-shirts at Trump rallies.

There are some obvious clues: The Republicans have functionally become a xenophobic, white-nationalist, nominally Christian party, and Putin—a xenophobic, Russian-nationalist, nominally Christian dictator—looks like a perfect model for the future. There will be no gay singers with beards and evening gowns touring Russia on Putin’s watch, by God, and if a Russian-style dictatorship is what it takes to protect Nebraska and New Hampshire from the vegan, Muslim, drag-queen, race-theorist onslaught, then so be it.

Also, the GOP knows that in its current incarnation, its goose is cooked as a true majority party. Putin and other autocrats offer blueprints for oligarchic rule of big, fractious countries. (Bonus: They show you can do this while still letting small coteries of men get insanely rich. Guys like Carlson have to love that.) Putin has proved that nationalist appeals, combined with electoral fraud and selective use of the prison system, can keep a tight cabal in power for a long time.

But I think it’s more than that.

Yes, Putin is the model of modern authoritarian, a Mafia boss who has built an empire on money and murder. But his story, for the Republicans, is inspiring in another way.

Putin, even more than Trump, was a loser who became a winner. Here was this homely mediocrity, a drab and hangdog figure who never rose to a significant rank even in his own country, a man of no account who nonetheless today, 20 years after being handed the Russian presidency, is one of the richest and most powerful people in the world. His jowls and rubbery cheeks have somehow firmed up, he’s ditched his wife, and he’s allegedly taken up with a younger girlfriend. He rides around shirtless on horses, scores hockey goals against professionals, and probably wrestles bears in front of his cabinet just to prove he can do it.

He is every loser’s image of a winner. And that, for a party that has now almost explicitly branded itself as the party of angry losers, is an irresistible story.

Of course, this whole shtick, the Caddyshack plot of the slobs getting even with the snobs, was supposed to be Trump’s selling point, too. Hopeful fans painted Trump’s head onto Rocky’s body and waited for him to burn the castles of those snotty elites and their “urban” (read: Black) allies.

Except that Trump turned out to be a loser. A whiny, pouty loser, a nincompoop who botched a coup, lost the House and the Senate and the White House, and then turned his fire on his own guys out of sheer spite. The Trump cult sticks with him because it has to, but it’s been difficult to keep thinking of Trump as the hero-warrior who will restore the lost dignity to the manly men of Real America when all he does is crash weddings and hold court as the Drama Queen in Chief.

A lost and insecure party needs a hero. Putin, a nemesis to American Democrats and small-d democrats everywhere, is perfect.

I realize it sounds strange, as we struggle with the GOP for the future of American democracy, to describe the Republicans as a party of losers looking for a new Big Daddy. After all, if Mike Pence hadn’t burped up some loyalty to the Constitution like a case of acid reflux at the last minute, we might now still be in the midst of a failed election. (That’s what it may look like the next time, as my Atlantic colleague George Packer warned recently.)

But who is the GOP today? The hearty yeomen and stout freeholders of Real America who see the future with clear eyes and courage? Not by a long shot. Today’s Republicans are people who care nothing about the future, or about deficits or taxes or national defense, but instead seem to be motivated mostly by an itching sense of inferiority, burdened by resentment and constantly afraid that someone might be looking down on them.

And that includes their leaders and pundit class. What’s left of American conservatism is rife with anxious mediocrities like Carlson (who was canned from other shows on CNN and MSNBC earlier in his career), along with a slew of people who know that their political and public careers could never have been willed into existence without Trump’s preexisting star power and media reach. (And Carlson is among the best of them; he’s practically Edward R. Murrow next to guys like Dan Bongino and Seb Gorka.)

Meanwhile, the national Republican Party no longer has “leaders” in any sense of the word. GOP elected officials are now largely cowards and weirdos. In theory, Kevin McCarthy is poised to become the speaker of the House, but he is terrified of people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, a figure who would have been laughed out of politics even a decade ago. Sure, there are a few hapless stalwarts like Mitt Romney, a man who was once nominated by his party for the presidency and is now dodging hecklers in Utah. When Adam Kinzinger retires, Liz Cheney will be a House GOP caucus of one—if she’s not primaried out of Congress.

The truth is that when Greene says that she and people like her are “not the fringe, but the base” of the GOP, the problem isn’t that she’s wrong; it’s that she’s right.

This means that the Republicans, in a stunning turnabout from an earlier time, now define themselves from top to bottom as losers, an embattled minority in an endless cycle of cultural struggle. They have banded together not because of policies or beliefs or even a decline in their standard of living, but because they feel cheated out of the attention and deference that they feel is their due and that is not being paid to them by the rest of society. They’re a vacuous, mostly middle-class collection of people addicted to Fox News and the internet who can’t even explain why they’re so pissed off without resorting to conspiracies or relying on misinformation.

This, by the way, makes these American rightists much like their counterparts in places like Italy and the United Kingdom. As the British writer Simon Kuper noted in 2020, it is not the dispossessed poor but the “comfortably off populist voter” who is the main force behind Trump, Brexit, and Italy’s Lega, movements led by immensely rich men who claim to be acting on behalf of the common folk.

There is a terrible shamefulness to all of this, and that, I think, is why some Republicans and their aligned pundits are now looking for a strongman, a political father figure whom they can admire and whose decisiveness and macho heroics will quell their fears and self-doubt. These Putin-admiring right-wingers want to see themselves as the Warriors, and they want you to see them that way, too. But when they look in the mirror, all they see are the Orphans. And that smarts.

It’s too long a story for a newsletter to explain how a party once characterized by Ronald Reagan’s almost otherworldly optimism became a mob without ideas and without leaders. A big part of it is about racism and demographic change. A study of the January 6 rioters, for example, found that the most common predictor of those arrested was not job status or education, but whether they came from an area that had experienced a decline in white population.

There are a lot of other factors at work here, but in any case the net effect of this sea change in the party is that the GOP, despite holding a majority of national offices as recently as five years ago, is now a group defined by its own sense of weakness and a proud attachment to its self-image as defiant underdogs.

That’s why Putin is catnip to them: The institutional GOP is a claque of terrified weaklings “leading” a party of elected cretins who are surfing on the support of resentful and insecure voters, and Putin is an obvious role model. As for GOP voters, Putin is a winner, unlike the boob they bet on in 2016 and 2020. Sure, he’s an avowed enemy of the United States and everything we once stood for, but he’s white, Christian, militaristic, and proud. For people whose identity is now bound up in grievance and fear, what’s not to love?

And if Putin doesn’t work out—if, say, he starts a world war—well, there’s always Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, the Putin-Lite who is the new darling of the American right.

Speaking of World War III, we’ll talk about that next week.

Sorry. I promise we’ll have some fun stuff, too.