the times | Friday April 8 2022 29
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Buy prints or signed copies of Times cartoons from our Print Gallery at timescartoons.co.uk or call 020 7711 7826Don’t assume populists will be burnt by Putin
The likes of Orban and Le Pen are proving that events in Ukraine won’t necessarily turn voters into liberal globalists
that hints at sympathy for Russia.
Josh Hawley, the Missouri senator,
has been among the most vocal of
the Republican Party’s new populist
breed. He supported Trump’s claims
of election fraud in 2020, and has
been a leading scourge of woke
authoritarianism. Before the war, he
echoed Trump’s critique of US policy,
indicating he felt Russia had been
needlessly provoked. Just days before
the invasion he called on Joe Biden
to explicitly rule out Ukrainian Nato
membership.
But since the invasion, Hawley has
been among the most vocal calling
for full US support for Ukraine,
chiding the Biden administration for
not sending enough weapons to the
embattled Volodymyr Zelensky.
The polling is clear: Republicans
overwhelmingly support doing more
for Ukraine. A Reuters-Ipsos poll in
March showed that 80 per cent of
Republican voters favoured
additional sanctions against Russia,
while 73 per cent supported sending
arms to Ukraine. In both cases there
was more support among
Republicans for such measures than
in the population as a whole.
This pivot could, it’s true, be the
start of a broader return by the right
to a more favourable view of western
liberal democracy. But don’t count on
it. American politicians like Trump
and Hawley have discovered it can
be populist to be anti-Putin, too.up for his country” (as though that
quality alone, which could apply to
everyone from Hitler to Pol Pot, is
somehow intrinsically admirable).
But they also saw in him certain
characteristics: a supposed deep
commitment to western Christian
civilisational values that have been
under threat in the past decade or so.
This was always dubious. You’d
have to have especially rose-tinted
spectacles to believe Putin’s
promotion of Russian Orthodoxyand its doctrines was anything other
than a cynical tool to advance his
nationalism.
Some conservative populists in the
US have been struggling to reconcile
the past and present. While a small
handful of provocative commentators
such as Candace Owens have openly
supported Putin, most have generally
refrained from criticising Russia, while
drawing endless attention to claims
of neo-Nazi atrocities committed by
Ukraine and casting doubt on
anything damning of Moscow.
But leading conservative
politicians, with a hunger for election
victory and an eye on polling, are
pivoting hard away from anythingBut will it? It is still quite a stretch
to think that, as voters in Europe and
the US come to understand the full
horror of Putin’s Russia, they will
look much more favourably on their
own political systems. Will
Americans and Europeans, alienated
from what they see as the West’s
malignant embrace of “woke” values,
neoliberal economics and rising
cultural authoritarianism, really
weigh their discontent against the
supposed alternative of Russian
political prisons and Ukrainian
killing fields and decide the West
isn’t so bad after all?
It seems unlikely. Populism never
really needed Putin. Of all the
strange twists politics has taken in
the past decade or so there might be
none stranger than the alignment of
a sizeable chunk of the American
conservative movement with Putin’s
Russia. That process came in part as
the far right inherited the self-
loathing anti-Americanism
instinctive to the far left in the Cold
War. Since modern progressive
America is essentially a form of
multicultural, globalising, woke
tyranny, its adversaries were more
likely to be on the right.
Putin himself and the politics they
believed he represented were also
useful as a model for American
change. Trump and others
repeatedly noted that Putin was seen
as a strong leader willing to “standI
f you thought mounting evidence
of Vladimir Putin’s war crimes
and his psychopathic thirst for
blood and conquest would have
terminal political consequences
for the populist politicians in the West
who have spent years befriending and
defending him, think again.
Viktor Orban, a long-time admirer
of Putin who has steadfastly resisted
pleas to provide more support to
Ukraine, was re-elected as prime
minister of Hungary last weekend
with an increased majority. In
France, Marine Le Pen, who last
week said Putin could “be an ally of
France again” after the war, is
making deep inroads into President
Macron’s polling lead, and could yet
pull off a startling upset in the
second round of France’s election,
which takes place two weeks after
this Sunday’s initial vote.
Other once-firm friends of Putin,
such as Matteo Salvini in Italy, Nigel
Farage in the UK and Donald Trump
in the US, have been more forcefully
distancing themselves.
But the much larger question of
whether the Putin Shock will turn
the tide against populism in the West
is very much unanswered. The
continuing, even rising popularity of
some of these Putin apologists
suggests that populist nationalism
may prove much more resilient, even
after the discrediting of the man
many of them have lauded and some
have even modelled themselves on.
Some leading thinkers had argued
that Putin’s brutality would halt the
erosion of faith in liberal democracy
that has been the defining political
feature of the last decade.
Francis Fukuyama, the American
author who wrote The End Of
History after the fall of communism
and was widely — and unfairly —
derided when the long march touniversal democracy went into
reverse in the past few years, has
written hopefully of a renewed
resurgence of liberalism, especially if
Putin loses in Ukraine. Defeat for
Russia would mark a “new birth of
freedom and get us out of our funk
about the declining state of global
democracy”, he wrote recently. “The
spirit of 1989 will live on, thanks to a
bunch of brave Ukrainians.”The far right inherited
the anti-Americanism
of the Cold War left
Leading conservatives
are pivoting away from
sympathy for Russia
Gerard
Baker@gerardtbaker