Robert Reich. (photo: unknown)
readersupportednews.orgRobert Reich
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Robert Reich's Substack
28 March 22
It's not just that they're all authoritarians. Their culture wars have similar agendas.
In a speech on
Friday delivered from his office in the Kremlin, Putin criticized the
West’s “cancel culture” which, he charged, is “canceling” Russia -- “an
entire thousand-year-old country, our people.” It was the third time in
recent months Putin has blasted the so-called “cancel culture.”
Which is exactly what Trump, Tucker Carlson, and the GOP have blasted for several years.
"The goal of cancel culture is to make decent Americans live in fear
of being fired, expelled, shamed, humiliated and driven from society as
we know it," Trump said as he accepted his party's nomination at the Republican National Convention in 2020.
Tucker Carlson, one of Fox News’s most prominent personalities, has
charged that liberals have been trying to cancel everything from Space Jam to the Fourth of July.
Putin’s fixation on transgender and gay people has also been echoed
on the American right. Republican state bills aimed at limiting LGBTQ
rights or discussion in schools are soaring. Last fall — months before
Texas Republican Governor Greg Abbott threatened to criminalize parents who give their transgender children gender-affirming care — Putin argued that teaching children about different gender identities was “on the verge of a crime against humanity.”
Then there’s admiration for Putin himself. Just before Putin ordered a full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Trump deemed him
"savvy," "genius," and "smart” for “taking over a country, literally, a
vast, vast, location, a great piece of land with a lot of people, and
just walking right in.”
On his Fox News program Carlson asked, rhetorically, “why do I hate
Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to
get me fired for disagreeing with him?” But Carlson called Ukraine “an obedient puppet of the Biden State Department,” and suggests Putin’s invasion was nothing more than a “border dispute.”
Putin’s lies and the lies coming from America’s extreme right are
mutually reenforcing. Carlson’s Fox News segments show up in Russian
propaganda. And when the American site “Infowars” resurrected an unfounded Russian claim that the United States funded biological weapons labs in Ukraine, Putin repeated the Infowars story.
To conclude from all of this that authoritarians think alike is to
miss a deeper truth. Putin, Trump, Carlson, and a growing number of
rightwing commentators and activists have been promoting much the same
narrative — for much the same reason.
Remember, Putin was put into power by a Russian oligarchy made
fabulously rich by siphoning off the wealth of the former Soviet Union.
Likewise, Trump and the radical right in America have been bankrolled by
an American oligarchy — Rupert Murdoch, Charles Koch, Rebekah Mercer
(daughter of hedge fund tycoon Robert Mercer), Blackstone CEO Stephen
Schwarzman, and other billionaires.
What do these two sets of oligarchs get in return? Strongmen divert
the public’s attention away from the oligarchs’ hijacking of their
economies toward cultural fears of being overwhelmed by the “other.”
Putin’s MO has been to fuel Russian ethnic pride and nationalism. The
Trump-Carlson-radical right’s MO has been to fuel white American
nationalism.
In both cases, strongmen and their allies have mythologized a
“superior” culture (replete with creation stories of blood ties,
motherlands, and religion) supposedly endangered by decadent forces
intent on attacking and overwhelming it.
To Putin, the decadent force is the West. As he put it
Friday, “domestic culture at all times protected the identity of
Russia,” which “accepted all the best and creative, but rejected the
deceitful and fleeting, that which destroyed continuity of our spiritual
values, moral principles and historical memory.” Hence, a mythic
justification for taking Ukraine back from a seductive but inferior
Western culture that threatens to overwhelm it and Russia.
The Trump-Carlson-white nationalist narrative is similar: America’s
dominant white Christian culture is endangered by Black people,
immigrants, and coastal elites who threaten to overwhelm it.
The culture wars now being orchestrated by the Republican Party
against transgender people, gay people, poor women seeking abortions,
and schools that teach about sex and America’s history of racism, emerge
from the same narrative as Putin’s culture war against a “decadent” West filled with “sociocultural disturbances.” As does the right’s claim that “secularists” have, in the words of former Trump Attorney General William Barr, mounted “an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.”
These tropes have served to distract attention from the systemic
economic looting that oligarchs have been undertaking, leaving most
people poor and anxious. Which is why the grievances that Putin, Trump,
Carlson, and the GOP use are unremittingly cultural; they are never
economic, never about class, and most assuredly not about the predations
of the super-rich.
Reduced to basics, today’s oligarchs and strongmen (along with their
mouthpieces and lackeys) are trying to justify their wealth and power by
attacking liberal values that have shaped the West, beginning with the
enlightenment of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries – the values
of tolerance, openness, democracy, self-government, equal rights, and
the rule of law. These values are incompatible with a society of
oligarchs and strongmen.
Ultimately, the oligarchs and strongmen will lose. Putin won’t
succeed in subduing Ukraine, Trump won’t be reelected president, and
Carlson and his ilk won’t persuade Americans to give up on American
ideals. But the culture wars won’t end anytime soon because so much
wealth and power have consolidated at the top of America, Russia, and
elsewhere around the world that anti-liberal forces have risen to
justify it.
