Destabilized Saturday Edition #6

Better Russian than Democrat, Gorbachov, and Wordle and the internet

Feb 26, 2022

As Russian tanks prepared and began to roll, unprovoked, into Ukraine this week, the response of the white nationalist movement that dominates the Republican Party was predictable, but still jarring.

Acyn @Acyn

Tucker: It may be worth asking yourself… why do I hate Putin.. Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he threatened to get me fired for disagreeing with him?

Tucker Carlson, host of the most-watched show on Fox News, suggested Americans ask themselves:

Why do I hate Putin so much? Has Putin ever called me a racist? Has he ever gotten me fired for disagreeing with him? Has he shipped every middle class job in my town to Russia? Did he manufacture a worldwide pandemic that wrecked my business and kept me indoors for two years? Is he teaching my children to embrace racial discrimination? Is he making fentanyl? Is he trying to snuff out Christianity? Does he eat dogs?

The barely veiled implication, of course, is that Putin isn’t your enemy, Democrats are.

As for Trump himself, early in the week during a radio interview he said of Russia’s looming invasion:

I went in yesterday and there was a television screen, and I said, ‘This is genius,’ ” Mr. Trump said during the radio interview “Putin declares a big portion of of Ukraine, Putin declares it as independent. Oh, that’s wonderful. So, Putin is now saying, ‘It’s independent,’ a large section of Ukraine. I said, ‘How smart is that?’

Later in the week, at a fundraiser hours before the expected invasion began, he said of Putin:

I mean, he’s taking over a country for two dollars worth of sanctions. I’d say that’s pretty smart.

None of this is new, American conservatives have been fawning over foreign dictators for years now. But when an authoritarian leader rolls tanks into a sovereign democratic country and America’s two major political coalitions can’t even agree that we should be on the side of the democracy, it’s an especially stark example of the disunity here at home.1

(It’s also worth noting that by being so transgressive and insulting, Carlson succeeded in capturing significant attention, even of those who didn’t watch his show. Yes, now including us.)

My Work

The world is destabilized – “A politics that’s highly polarized around identity and ideology, and a media ecosystem that incentivizes conflict-oriented rhetoric, demonizes out-groups, and reinforces in-group identity, is a volatile combination. The two create a self-reinforcing cycle of disunity with no obvious mechanism to disrupt it.”

From Eisenhower to Trump – “Divergent positions on civil rights and racial equality triggered the realignment of the party coalitions after WWII. But, crucially, it turned out voters who were liberal on racial issues tended to be liberal on other cultural issues, as well (and the reverse was true for voters who were conservative on racial issues). As more liberal-minded people gravitated to the Democratic Party based on its embrace of racial equality, Democrats naturally became the party that more enthusiastically and universally embraced other liberation movements of the late 20th and 21st centuries, including women’s rights, gay rights, Muslim civil liberties, immigrant rights, Indigenous rights, Trans rights, and many others. That, in turn, drew in more voters who agreed with the Democratic Party’s embrace of legal and cultural equality for all people.

“And so on, in a self-reinforcing cycle.”

Going back to Carlson’s rant, it’s worth noting that his dark, threatening caricature of Democrats, like the Big Lie, builds a justification for civil violence. If a group were actually stealing elections and trying to snuff out your religion, it would be reasonable to fight back against their aggression. And if you’re told over and over that your political opponents are doing those things, eventually you’re likely to believe it.