The Republican love affair with Putin

This isn’t just about Putin avid supporter and the well-known professional liar, Tucker Carlson. It’s broader than just that Fox News freak show. It is about Republican Christian authoritarianism generally. Salon writes in an opinion piece:

Don’t be fooled: The GOP love affair with Putin is worse than it looks

Never mind the opinion polls and the Republican posturing. When the right sees Putin, they want what he's got.

That story of laughter and death and numbness [in Vietnam war architect Robert McNamara] applies to America's current situation as well. Former Trump White House press secretary Stephanie Grisham recently told “The View” that Donald Trump wanted the power to kill with impunity. In explaining why Trump both admired and feared Vladimir Putin she said:

“I think he was afraid of him. I think that the man intimidated him. Because Putin is a scary man, just frankly, I think he was afraid of him…. I also think he admired him greatly. I think he wanted to be able to kill whoever spoke out against him. So I think it was a lot of that. In my experience with him, he loved the dictators, he loved the people who could kill anyone, including the press.”

A healthy society would have been stunned, disgusted, terrified and moved to action by Grisham's confession. The evident fact that Trump is a sociopath would have been the subject of extensive news coverage. If America were a healthy society, we would have an ongoing “national conversation” about the peril the country experienced from Trump, his Republican-fascist allies and their movement — danger that has only grown stronger.

A healthy society would now ask: How can we prevent another Donald Trump, another fascistic, sadistic demagogue, from ever coming to power?

What does it say about American society that Donald Trump and his cabal of coup plotters and other enemies of democracy and freedom have not been punished? That they are plotting in public how overthrow American democracy and return Trump to power without fear of punishment or other negative consequences? And that Trump still has many tens of millions of followers — many of whom are potentially willing to engage in acts of violence, and perhaps even die, at his command? What does that say about a country and a people?

What was the response to Grisham's comments about Donald Trump’s desire to commit murder? Silence and indifference. Neither the media nor the American people seem to care. They have become desensitized to what not long ago would have been judged unconscionable.

America is a pathocracy. The masses take their cues from corrupted elites. Malignant normality is the new normal. Political deviance has been normalized. The Age of Trump constantly offers further proof that a sick and broken society can accept just about anything, no matter how surreal and grotesque.

Fascism thrives in such societies. But the poison could not have spread so quickly if the soil and foundations were not toxic to begin with.

The essential question must be this: Who are the specific objects of ideation and worship for Donald Trump, the other American neofascists and their followers?

The most prominent example, of course, is Vladimir Putin. The American people and the world should not be swayed and bamboozled by the Republican Party and its propagandists, who are now trying to claim that they are diehard Cold Warriors, forever united against Putin and his aggression.

Today's Republican voters and other Trumpists are part of a political cult. They follow, uncritically, whatever directives and various signals are sent to them by Donald Trump, Fox News, the white right-wing evangelical churches and the larger right-wing echo chamber.

Public opinion polls taken before the invasion of Ukraine show that Republicans view Vladimir Putin as a better leader than Joe Biden. That is no coincidence. It is publicly known that Putin and Russia's intelligence agencies have been engaged in a long-term influence campaign designed to manipulate (and manage) the Republican Party, its leaders, the right-wing news media and their public.

Putin is an authoritarian and a demagogue. He is anti-human, anti-freedom and anti-democracy. He stands against the future and human progress and pluralism. To many of his admirers in America and the West, he is a leader of “White Christianity.” Putin has persecuted and imperiled the LGBTQ community, and is hostile to women's rights and women's equality. He kills and imprisons journalists, and is doing his best to silence free speech.

Putin's Russia is a plutocracy and a kleptocracy controlled by an oligarchic elite of white men. He uses secret police and other enforcers to terrorize any person or group he deems to be the enemy. Republicans in the U.S., and many of their allies and followers, want to exercise that kind of power in America.

In a new essay at the Boston Review, Bethany Moreton elaborates:

“Why would a group of ultra-nationalist Americans celebrate the invasion of a U.S. ally by someone both the left and right have largely understood to be an enemy of freedom? 

In fact, though, the U.S. right wing has long cultivated ties with Russia. Some of these are self-evident quid-pro-quo affairs: The “sweeping and systematic” campaigns of election interference authorized by Putin in support of a Trump victory in 2016 and 2020; Trump's attempt to leverage Congressionally allocated aid to Ukraine for political dirt on the Biden family; the confessed Russian agent who infiltrated the National Rifle Association and the National Prayer Breakfast in a bid to develop informal channels of influence on the Republican Party. 

More broadly, however, U.S. conservative evangelicals have developed strong symbolic and institutional ties with the Russian Orthodox Church. In recent years, these have dovetailed with white racist fantasies of Russia as an ethnically pure land of traditional religion and gender roles, symbolized by the bare-chested kleptocrat on horseback, Vladimir Putin…. 

At the much broader level of institutionalized ambitions to “dominion”[1], the Russian partnership has proved invigorating to the American right's overlapping agendas of white supremacy, masculine authority, and anti-democratic Christian authority. If Putin's cooperation with the Moscow Patriarchate is a model for emulation, American theocrats are telling us what they seek here at home. We would be foolish not to take them at their word.”

In total, the Republican fascists and the larger “conservative movement” have shown themselves to be Putin’s puppets. (emphasis added)

What a refreshing bit of reasoned clarity. It sounds like I wrote it! Salon is channeling Germaine. Will miracles never cease?

Question: Is Salon channeling Germaine or is it vice versa, or neither?

Footnote: 

1. Dominion theology (also known as dominionism): a group of Christian political ideologies that seek to institute a nation governed by Christians based on their understandings of biblical law. Extents of rule and ways of achieving governing authority are varied. For example, dominion theology can include theonomy, but does not necessarily involve advocating Mosaic Law as the basis of government. The label is applied primarily toward groups of Christians in the United States.

Prominent adherents of these ideologies are Calvinist Christian reconstructionism, Roman Catholic integralism, Charismatic and Pentecostal Kingdom Now theology, New Apostolic Reformation, and perhaps others not identified here. Most of the contemporary movements labeled dominion theology arose in the 1970s from religious movements asserting aspects of Christian nationalism.

An example of dominionism in reformed theology is Christian reconstructionism, which originated with the teachings of R. J. Rushdoony in the 1960s and 1970s. Rushdoony's theology focuses on theonomy (the rule of the Law of God), a belief that all of society should be ordered according to the laws that governed the Israelites in the Old Testament.

Catholic integralism has been characterized as a form of dominionist theology. Antonio Spadaro and Marcelo Figueroa have stated that Catholic integralists have entered into a non-traditional ecumenical alliance with Protestant reconstructionists who share “the same desire for religious influence in the political sphere.” Likewise, in the National Catholic Reporter, Joshua J. McElwee stated that Catholic integralists, along with their Protestant counterparts, wish to achieve the goal of establishing a “theocratic type of state.”

THESE PEOPLE WANT CHRISTIAN SHARIA, 

NOT THE US CONSTITUTION! 

Rushdoony propaganda: Christian dominion is not dictatorial,  

instead: “We try to meet human needs in the Lord,

we try in every way to be faithful to God by fulfilling

his law word, love is the fulfilling of the law, 

it is putting the love of God into force .... 

the love of man is manifested by being faithful to God”

(How about that for crackpot reasoning?)

According to current Christian nationalist dogma, God’s law word 

that Christian elites want backed by the force of real law enforced by 

real police and real courts include:  

Abortion is murder

God chose White males to dominate over all others

Homosexual sex is sin 

Women are to obey men

The White race is has dominion over all other races

Anglo-European culture has domination over all other cultures 

(e.g., put up a Christmas tree or else)

Open discrimination in commerce, employment and everything else 

against non-Christians and the LGBQT community, 

both of whom are profoundly sinful

Adulterers and sodomites are to be put to death by stoning

Church and state are the same

(e.g., give God, i.e., us, control of your tax dollars, all of ’em)

Plus other Old Testament commands as revealed by 

authoritarian Christian elites