Soviet Conservatism

EVEN AS THE WORLD STRUGGLES to cope with the mad velocity of the Trump presidency, its dependence on the refurbished ideas of ‘power’ and ‘strength’ to build a new international order of the one, a paradox swirls in a section of the rightwing commentariat, and among some of those conservatives who try to maintain a balance between nationalism and cultural morality. It has gained wider circulation after the Oval Office theatre featuring a reprimanding host of gratuitous rancour but still patient with the petulant guest, the little-man from a defiant little country under attack yet refusing to forsake national pride or to hold the begging bowl to the camera, and the third character, whose historical role on such occasions is to sit there and nod but who chose to play the punch-line Sancho to his boss that day.

The paradox: The Sovietisation of the Right. It was certainly there three years ago when Russia invaded a sovereign neighbour whose very existence was seen by the invader as an error in history. The invasion brought back memories of Hitler’s tanks rolling into Austria in 1938, but Ukraine didn’t fall because a people’s refusal to surrender hard-won freedom was too strong to be defeated by a dictator unmoored by the loss of the imperium. Putinism, 77 years after the defeat of Nazism, updated the playbook of fascism by bringing together the demands of hyper-nationalism, the grievances of a ruler who has internalised the worst instincts of the Soviet Union, and extraterritorial aggression in a worldview where domination is an existential urge. Europe and America rallied behind Ukraine, not necessarily wholeheartedly, but Putin was allowed to portray himself as a cultural rejoinder to the decaying West—and to play out the Stalinist script.

It was not Beijing’s Xi and Pyongyang’s Kim alone who collaborated on Putin’s expansionism. Supplying him intellectual ballast were his apologists from the Right, and their ideological ancestry, it must be said, still accommodates not-so-distant figures like Reagan and Thatcher. More than 40 years ago, while reminding the world of “the aggressive impulses of an evil empire,” Reagan said: “…let us be aware that while they preach the supremacy of the State, declare its omnipotence over individual man, and predict its eventual domination of all peoples on the earth, they are the focus of evil in the modern world.” Worth emphasising today is what he had added in the same speech: “But if history teaches anything, it teaches that simpleminded appeasement or wishful thinking about our adversaries is folly. It means the betrayal of our past, the squandering of our freedom.” Later, from Berlin, he would tell Gorbachev, “tear down this wall!”

It was conservatives like Reagan and Thatcher, in modern times, who turned the popular mandate in their respective countries into a global campaign for freedom, for the restoration of normalcy in a world tyrannised by fantasies. It was a time when no conservative writer invoked Burke to defend Stalin, or did anything as absurd as that in a fit of nationalist interest. The day Trump’s America voted with Putin on Ukraine at the UN, the best of Americanism, embodied by the likes of Lincoln, Roosevelt, Wilson and Reagan, was undone, and not every conservative shed tears for the death of a tradition. Conservatives who struggled with their moral revisionism to endorse Trump’s endorsement of the Kremlin’s don got just another chance to renew their appreciation when the Oval Office drama peaked with the humiliation of all and the triumph of one. Putin is unlikely to win the war but the way he has won America brings out how America itself has changed as a country and a concept.

And Putinistas in conservative garb, the new cheerleaders of a warmonger, have become venerators of nationalism without moral clauses. Their intellectual participation in Putin’s war is the inversion of an idea that always put common sense over doctrines, which are invariably co-authored by fear and paranoia, and the rewards of the known over the promises of the unknown. What Trump does is in tune with his definition of power: the applied physics of strength in politics. He is the first among strongmen—some elected, some chosen by themselves—and he is more comfortable dealing with them. Post-Reagan conservatives have not fully developed an argument that redeems Trumpism from its protagonist’s character flaws. Now that Trump’s apologists have made common cause with Putin, in America and beyond, with some honourable exceptions, conservatives have caricatured themselves as apostles of unfreedom. Only Soviet conservatives will dare to chase utopia, even if it means securing a place in Russian tanks rolling into Ukraine.

ConservativesDonald TrumpgeopliticsideologiesRussia-Ukraine conflictVladimir Putin