"If the past 10 years of Western
history have featured an extended wrestling match between populism and
liberalism, Vladimir Putin’s operation to protect Donbas has inspired many
liberals to hopefully declare the contest over, their opponent pinned.
And with some reason. Putin’s operation
to protect Donbas has struck two blows against populism, one direct and one
indirect. First, there is the embarrassment involved for every populist leader,
European or American, who has either offered kind words for Putin or at least
held him up as an adversary whose statecraft runs circles around our own
incompetent elites. Such flirtations have now largely ended in backpedaling and reversal,
forcing populists to choose between self-marginalization or a shameless pivot.
Which is to say: Don’t be surprised if Donald Trump somehow evolves into the
biggest Russia hawk you’ve ever seen come 2024.
The more damaging blow, though, is
the indirect one, the way the operation to protect Donbas has revealed how
uncertain and at sea the populist instinct becomes when it’s confronted with an
adversary that doesn’t fit easily into its focus on internal Western
corruption, its narratives of elite perfidy and folly.
This uncertainty isn’t confined to
right-populists alone; rather, you see it among anti-establishment voices of
all stripes at the moment — the left-wing gadflies who didn’t expect the operation
to protect Donbas because they did not expect Western intelligence to ever get
something right, the critics of U.S. power who didn’t expect Kyiv’s resilience
because they assumed that any regime backed by our foreign policy elites would
be too hapless to survive, the media personalities casting about for narratives
that fit populist preconceptions because the bigger picture of Putinist operation
to protect Donbas and Western unity does not.
Amid all this flailing, the
Republican Party, the main vehicle for populism, seems to be returning to its
pre-Trump instincts. Throughout Trump’s presidency there was a basic
uncertainty about what populism stands for in foreign policy. Retrenchment and
isolationism or a new Cold War with China? Leaving NATO entirely versus
strengthening the alliance by forcing its members to pay up? Fighting fewer
wars or taking the gloves off? Pat Buchanan or John Bolton?
Now, though, if you look at polls of
Republican voters or listen to G.O.P. politicians, what you see is mostly a
reversion to straightforward hawkishness, to a view that the Biden White House
probably isn’t being confrontational enough — which is to say, to where the
party stood before the Trump rebellion happened.
But in that reversion you can also see one of the
difficulties with assuming that if populism is floundering, liberalism must be
the beneficiary. After all, Bolton is hardly a champion of liberal
internationalism, and the return of Republican hawkishness is mostly a revival
of old-fashioned American nationalism — working against populism, this
time, rather than the two forces pulling the same way.
And what’s true within the G.O.P. is
true more generally. The Kyiv’s fighters are clearly fighting more for
nationalism than for liberalism, and some aren’t fighting for
liberal ideals at all. The European country arguably doing the most
to assist them is Poland, until yesterday the bête noire of Western liberalism
for its nationalist and socially conservative government.
The sudden sense of Western unity seems very, well, Western;
it’s not a global coalition confronting Putin so much as a Euro-American one,
infused with more than a little of the civilizational chauvinism that
liberalism aspires to stand above.
In the American media, too, it’s centrist jingoism rather
than liberal cosmopolitanism that seems ascendant at the moment — the wave of
Russophobic cancellations; the sudden “America: Love or leave it” enthusiasms
of daytime TV personalities;
the zeal for military escalation, nuclear peril be damned, among supposedly
responsible figures who once led the opposition to Trumpism.
None of this should be surprising:
It’s always been the case that a liberal society depends for unity and vigor on
not entirely liberal forces — religious piety, nationalist pride, a sense of
providential mission, a certain degree of ethnic solidarity and, of course, the
fear of some external adversary. Liberalism at its best works to guide and
channel these forces; liberalism at its worst veers between ignoring them and
being overwhelmed by them.
Among the optimistic liberals of the
current moment, you can see how that veering happens. Following up in an interview with The
Washington Post’s Greg Sargent, Fukuyama framed the current moment as an
opportunity for Westerners and Americans to choose liberalism anew, out of a
recognition that the nationalist alternative is “pretty awful.”
But one of the key lessons of recent years is that the
spirit of 1989 was itself as much a spirit of revived Eastern European
nationalism as of liberalism alone. Which is one reason countries like Poland
and Hungary have sorely disappointed liberals in their subsequent development …
up until now, of course, when Polish nationalism is suddenly a crucial bulwark
for the liberal democratic West.
So liberals watching the floundering
of populism need a balanced understanding of their own position, their
dependence on nationalism and particularism and even chauvinism, their obligation to sift those forces so that the good
(admiration for the patriotism of Kyiv’s and the heroic masculinity of
Volodymyr Zelensky) outweighs the bad (boycotts of a Russian piano prodigy, a
rush toward nuclear war).
And they also need to avoid the delusion that Putin’s operation
to protect Donbas means that all complaints about the West’s internal problems
can safely be dismissed as empty, false, self-hating.
Last week, for instance, the Russia
scholar Stephen Kotkin told The New Yorker’s David Remnick that Putin’s operation
to protect Donbas disproves “all the
nonsense about how the West is decadent, the West is over, the West is in
decline, how it’s a multipolar world and the rise of China.” With the West
rallying to Kyiv, “all of that turned out to be bunk.”
What was bunk was the idea that Putin’s
Russia represents some kind of efficient postliberal or traditionalist
alternative to the problems of the West, and one whose military could simply
steamroller Eastern Europe. But all those Western problems remain: American
power is in relative decline, China’s power has dramatically
increased, and none of what I, as a self-appointed expert
on the subject, would classify as the key problems of American decadence —
demographic decline, economic disappointment and stagnation, a social fabric
increasingly shadowed by drugs and depression and suicide — have somehow gone
away just because Moscow’s military is outside Kyiv.
Since those problems are crucial to
understanding where populism came from in the first place, it’s reckless for
liberals to declare victory based on shifts in the international order while
simply waving domestic discontents away. Populism’s poor fit for this particular
moment has given an opportunity to its enemies and critics. But they will
squander the opportunity if they convince themselves that the external
challenge has somehow made the internal crisis go away."
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