Here is a sad indicator of how crazy the Republican Party has become: Pat Buchanan, the former Nixon speechwriter, thinks the Russian dictator Vladimir Putin in on to something.
Putin’s approval rating, after 17 years in power, exceeds that of any rival Western leader. But while his impressive strides toward making Russia great again explain why he is revered at home and in the Russian diaspora, what explains Putin’s appeal in the West, despite a press that is every bit as savage as President Trump’s?
Answer: Putin stands against the Western progressive vision of what mankind’s future ought to be. Years ago, he aligned himself with traditionalists, nationalists and populists of the West, and against what they had come to despise in their own decadent civilization.
What they abhorred, Putin abhorred. He is a God-and-country Russian patriot. He rejects the New World Order established at the Cold War’s end by the United States. Putin puts Russia first.
And in defying the Americans he speaks for those millions of Europeans who wish to restore their national identities and recapture their lost sovereignty from the supranational European Union. Putin also stands against the progressive moral relativism of a Western elite that has cut its Christian roots to embrace secularism and hedonism.
Though Buchanan’s admiration for Putin is grievously misplaced, he probably is right that America’s evangelicals, who overwhelmingly supported Trump, would prefer a strongman to the discomfiting rigors of democracy. To these people, it appears, better to have a flesh-and-blood strongman who tells them what to do than an Invisible Friend who tells them what to do.
Buchanan is rejecting adulthood, the entire Enlightenment project — as evangelicals have. Seriously: It’s a sad ol’ day when Republican headliners are Russia apologists.