The Right today often sounds like the Left of yore
Editor’s Note: The below is an expanded version of an essay that appears in the December National Review.
In 1984, Jeane Kirkpatrick was the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations, having been nominated for the position by President Reagan. She was still a Democrat, as she had always been. She would not change her party registration to Republican until the next year, when she was out of government.
Democrat though she was, she addressed the Republican National Convention in 1984. She was dismayed by the direction her party had taken. She herself was essentially a Truman Democrat. In 1948, when she was a senior in college, she decided to back President Truman, not Henry A. Wallace, the pro-Moscow politician, and former vice president, whom many of her classmates favored. She never looked back.
Addressing the Republican convention, she said that too many of her fellow Democrats had the habit of “blaming America first” — blaming the United States for the ills of the world, ills that were caused by others, not least the Kremlin. In recent years, many of us have had occasion to recall that speech.
Over and over, Republicans blame the United States for Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This starts with Donald Trump. Here he is, for example, talking to the network that styles itself “Real America’s Voice” in October 2022:
They actually taunted him, if you really look at it. Our country, and our so-called leadership, taunted Putin. And, I would listen—I’d say, “You know, they’re almost forcing him to go in, with what they’re saying.”
That “almost” was a touch of moderation.
At the Republican convention last summer, David Sacks spoke. He is a tech investor and a fixture in Trump’s orbit. President Biden, said Sacks, “provoked, yes, provoked, the Russians to invade Ukraine.”
U.S. senators say just the same, or some of them do. On X, Mike Lee (R., Utah) tweeted straightforwardly that “Biden provoked Russia to invade Ukraine.”
Another senator, Tommy Tuberville (R., Ala.), said, “We forced this issue. We kept forcing NATO all the way to eastern Europe, and Putin just got tired of it.”
In many ways, today’s Right has reminded some of us conservatives of the Left of yore. This is true both in the domestic realm and in the foreign — the realm of foreign affairs. I will concentrate on the latter.
When I was coming of age, left-wingers liked to say that the U.S. had fought the Vietnam War at the behest of Dow Chemical and other nefarious companies. You can imagine my reaction when, in September 2020, President Trump offered an explanation of why “the top people in the Pentagon” were not “in love” with him: “They want to do nothing but fight wars so that all of those wonderful companies that make the bombs and make the planes and make everything else stay happy.”
As a rule, our military personnel like to avoid wars — to prevent them, to deter them.
In July 2023, Senator JD Vance (R., Ohio), later to be Trump’s running mate, said this: “The profit motives of the defense contractors are motivating our posture in Ukraine.” Nothing to do with an assessment of American interests, you see — just “the profit motives of the defense contractors.”
This is the way hippies, yippies, and Marxists used to talk. To hear the same kind of talk from people described as “conservative Republicans” is, to some of us, surreal.
In that same statement, Vance went on to say, “We need to stop supporting the Ukraine war effort.” Imagine such a framing: “the Ukraine war effort.” The Ukrainians are fighting to save themselves from annihilation and subjugation. They are fighting against invaders for their very existence.
Left-wingers used to say that we were itching to start a nuclear war. Well, here is Trump, talking about Biden in August 2023: “This guy is gonna get us into a nuclear war. He’s gonna really do it. He’s gonna get us right into a nuclear war.” The next August, he tweeted this, about Vice President Harris: “There will be no future under Comrade Kamala Harris, because she will take us into a Nuclear World War III!”
Statements such as these are Trump’s equivalent of the “daisy ad” run against Barry Goldwater in 1964.
I remember the accusations against Reagan in 1980. A “nuclear cowboy,” they called him. They also had a nickname: “Ronald Raygun.”
The man who served as Trump’s vice president, Mike Pence, is not supporting Trump this year. Trump’s new running mate, Senator Vance, explained Pence’s position as follows: “In reality, if Donald Trump wanted to start a nuclear war with Russia, Mike Pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now.”
This is the kind of slander that would have made conservative blood boil, years ago.
“Warmongers,” they always called us. Tweeting about his Republican-convention speech, David Sacks said, “I called out the warmongers for their provoked war.” Earlier in the year, Senator Tuberville had tweeted, “Russia is open to a peace agreement, while it is DC warmongers who want to prolong the war.”
Young people will have to trust me: This is just what the Left said: that the Kremlin was peace-loving, or peace-seeking, while American warmongers made the world dangerous.
Liz Cheney is backing Kamala Harris. About Cheney, Vance said, “This is a person whose entire career has been about sending other people’s children off to fight and die for her military conflicts.” He further said, “Blessed are the peacemakers.”
Ah, yes, the peacemakers. Senator Tuberville said, “We got to get peace back on this planet.” Maybe he should talk to Putin?
The Hungarian leader, Viktor Orbán, blames “pro-war” politicians in Washington and Brussels for increasing tension between Russia and the West. He and Trump, he says, are “pro-peace.”
Surely, there is no politician more “pro-war” than Vladimir Putin, that blood-drenched warmaker. And Ukrainians wish the West could understand: There is nothing peaceful about Russian occupation. They know, from horrifying experience.
In Cold War days, we heard Kremlin propaganda from Western mouths. We still do. In December 2023, Senator Vance said, “There are people who would cut Social Security, throw our grandparents into poverty. Why? So that one of Zelensky’s ministers can buy a bigger yacht?”
Never mind that the alleged desire of entitlement reformers to impoverish grandparents has long been a Democratic talking point: The business about the Ukrainian president, his cabinet ministers, and yachts is straight-out Kremlin propaganda. A BBC report was headed, “How pro-Russian ‘yacht’ propaganda influenced U.S. debate over Ukraine aid.”
Some Republicans are wise to this. Last April, Michael McCaul, the congressman who heads the House Foreign Affairs Committee, said, “I think Russian propaganda has made its way into the United States, unfortunately, and it’s infected a good chunk of my party’s base.”
Mike Turner, the chairman of the House Intelligence Committee, agreed with McCaul: “We see directly coming from Russia attempts to mask communications that are anti-Ukraine and pro-Russia messages, some of which we even hear being uttered on the House floor.”
Very different from McCaul and Turner is Marjorie Taylor Greene. She, too, is a Republican House member, sitting on the Homeland Security Committee. In March 2022, she tweeted, “NATO has been supplying the neo-Nazis in Ukraine with powerful weapons and extensive training on how to use them.” She concluded by saying, “What the hell is going on with these #NATONazis?”
Greene was a speaker at the Republican convention last summer.
So was Peter Navarro, a longtime Trump adviser. Before Russia’s full-scale invasion, he said of Ukraine, “The country itself is not really a country.” That is exactly what Putin says, and wants others to say. The Ukrainians keep disproving the lie, in their valiant effort to save themselves.
“The Russians have gained far more geopolitical leverage out of the millions they’ve spent on information warfare than the billions they have spent on the military.” That is the judgment of Phillips O’Brien, a professor of strategic studies, given to me in a podcast last January.
Yet some people think that the propaganda — the disinformation, the storm of lies — comes from the other side: ours. After watching an interview with Putin, Senator Tuberville said this: “You can tell Putin is on top of his game. One thing he said that, it really rung a bell, is, the propaganda media machine over here, they sell anything they possibly can to go after Russia.”
My comment at the time:
You would have expected this from a professor at Antioch College, c. 1978. You would have expected it from Bella Abzug and Ron Dellums. And now you get it from “conservative” Republicans, both in politics and in the media.
In the 1980s, Democrats had a standard response to any Republican effort to fund a weapon or support an ally: “How many hot school lunches would that buy?” Today’s Republicans have their equivalents.
The border, for example. Because our southern border is porous, they say, we must not support Ukraine (and our own interest, as many of us see it). In December 2023, JD Vance said, “In the midst of a historic border crisis, Zelensky will come to Washington and demand that the Congress care more about his border than our own.”
Does the president of Ukraine demand any such thing? When Israelis, in their own war against aggressors who wish to destroy them, ask for our support, are they demanding that we care more about their border than our own?
It is standard for Republicans to dismiss Putin’s assault on Ukraine as a border dispute. When he was running for the Republican presidential nomination, Florida governor Ron DeSantis said, “I wish the D.C. elites cared as much about our border as they do about the Ukraine–Russia border.”
The Heritage Foundation circulated a meme. The meme shows a woman — a mother? — in a swimming pool, playing with a child. Meanwhile, another child, a few feet away, is struggling in the water. Heritage labeled the woman “President Biden” and the first child “Ukraine Border.” The second, struggling child, it labeled “U.S. Border.”
In August 2023, deadly fires swept over Hawaii. The Heritage Foundation circulated two photos, side by side: one showing a peaceful, happy Kyiv and the other showing the devastation in Hawaii. There were other pictures of Ukraine that Heritage could have shown: body parts in Bucha, for example.
We “old” conservatives often faulted the Left for “moral equivalence” — the habit of equating the behavior of the U.S. and other democracies with the behavior of the Soviet Union and other dictatorships. Well, you may remember what Donald Trump said, two weeks after he was sworn in as president.
In an interview, Bill O’Reilly said to him, “Putin is a killer.” The president replied, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country’s so innocent?”
More recently, two summers ago, the Biden administration condemned the Kremlin for sentencing Alexei Navalny on “politically motivated charges.” Senator Lee replied that the administration was treating Trump just the same way.
To this contention, there are a hundred things to say. One of them is this: Navalny is dead; Trump may well be reelected president in a few days.
It is one thing to oppose U.S. aid to Ukraine — to think that such aid is not in the American interest. It is another to sneer at the Ukrainians and their desperate struggle to survive.
Here is Vivek Ramaswamy, a star of the “New Right”:
Ukraine-ism is now a new religion. Kyiv is the Vatican, Zelensky is the pope, and career politicians in both parties are the new faithful. It’s sad that they’ll make a pilgrimage halfway around the world while ignoring the invasion across our own southern border right here at home.
The tweeted opinion of Senator Lee: “Vivek Ramaswamy = badass.”
JD Vance had a texting relationship with Charles Johnson, whom the Washington Post describes as “a blogger and entrepreneur who has zealously promoted right-wing conspiracy theories.” The Post obtained text messages between the two men (presumably from Johnson himself). Here is one from Vance to Johnson:
Dude I won’t even take calls from Ukraine. Two very senior guys reached out to me. The head of their intel. The head of the Air Force. Bitching about F16s.
Senator Mike Lee and others have cited the reporting of Seymour Hersh, against Ukraine. Now 87, Hersh has been a darling of the Left for most of our lives — the far Left. I learned about him when I was young, reading National Review, which refuted and deplored him.
What next? Strange new respect for Walter Duranty? Izzy Stone? Herbert Matthews?
“I am a big believer that Hollywood was created by the CIA.” So said Candace Owens, often called a “conservative influencer,” who has 5.7 million followers on X. When I was growing up, the Left liked to say that the CIA was behind everything — everything bad (in their estimation). The CIA was an all-purpose bogeyman.
“Taylor Swift is not part of a DOD psychological operation. Period.” Who said that? A spokesman for the Pentagon. The spokesman felt obliged to issue the statement in response to a Fox News host: who suggested that Swift, the queen of pop, was indeed part of a psy-op.
In the summer of 2017, Charles Krauthammer wrote an essay titled “The Authoritarian Temptation.” It would prove the last essay he ever wrote. He thought the subject was pressing. He adapted his title from Jean-François Revel, who, in 1976, wrote The Totalitarian Temptation.
Krauthammer noted “a curious and growing affinity for Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the Russias.” And “this tendency,” he said, “is most pronounced on the right,” a development no less than “head-snapping.”
“After decades of left-wing apologists for Russia,” wrote Krauthammer, “it is now lifelong conservatives who are asking: What’s so bad about Putin anyway?”
The world shifts, and so do political parties, as Jeane Kirkpatrick experienced, as so many have experienced.
In September 2022, I wrote,
Once upon a time, Ukraine would have been a great cause on the American right. Here is a post-Soviet republic, an escapee from the “prison house of nations.” It is working to find its way as a free, independent, and democratic country. It is invaded by a revanchist Russia, led by a former KGB colonel. Russia seeks to re-subjugate Ukraine through terror. The Kremlin is visiting atrocities on the Ukrainians that it never visited on the Hungarians in 1956 or the Czechoslovakians in 1968.
So, here is a classic case of a free and independent country being invaded and brutalized by an expansionist dictatorship that seeks to redraw international boundaries by force. As of old. Also a case of a national David against an imperial Goliath.
This would have been a natural cause of conservatives (American conservatives, forgetting their European and other counterparts). Is it? Hardly.
Last summer, I participated in an event at the Ukrainian Institute of America, in New York. I had been there one other time: 25 years before, when Robert Conquest spoke. Bill Buckley had asked me to go with him. Conquest, the historian and man of letters, was an expert on Ukraine, and Russia. His books include The Harvest of Sorrow, about the “terror-famine” inflicted by Moscow on the Ukrainians, and Stalin: Breaker of Nations. Conquest emphasized the importance of Ukraine as an independent nation.
That was the conservative world, at least as I experienced it, not so long ago.
On September 26, 2024, the Democratic presidential nominee, Vice President Harris, spoke about Ukraine. She did so standing beside Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky. She said,
Putin could set his sights on Poland, the Baltic states, and other NATO allies. We also know that other would-be aggressors around the world are watching to see what happens in Ukraine. If Putin is allowed to win, they will become emboldened.
That would have been Republican talk — Republican understanding — before 2016, essentially. Harris continued,
And history reminds us that the United States cannot and should not isolate ourselves from the rest of the world. Isolation is not insulation. So then, the United States supports Ukraine, not out of charity, but because it is in our strategic interest.
To young people, the current state of our politics must seem normal. It is normal. The Republican Party has nominated Donald Trump for president three times in a row. But to the less young, it is abnormal, and, to some of us, dislocating.