Why hatred of America is usually hatred of humanity
Feb 16, 2024
Aleksei Navalny has reportedly died in prison, and the timing of this tragic event for the sake of proving the moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the anti-American right on the Russia question is absolutely perfect, coming on the heels of a series of humiliating videos of Tucker going to Moscow and declaring it heaven on earth. It’s one thing to just be wrong in normal and understandable ways. It’s completely different to go abroad and declare, “This poor country has food that is affordable in American dollars! They’ve developed technology to stop the shopping carts from rolling away!” Quotes don’t capture the essence of these videos. You have to actually see him sniff the chocolate cake from the MacDonalds knockoff in Moscow as he declares the Russian version of fast food better for being free of GMOs.
Shortly before the invasion of Ukraine, I wrote an essay arguing that establishment liberals were driven by an irrational hatred of Russia. Meanwhile, one of my themes over the years is that conservatism is to a large extent an oppositional culture that is motivated by a reactive hatred of its perceived enemies. So of course, they had to go and prove I was absolutely correct, by becoming inverse caricatures of the left specifically in their attitudes towards Russia.
It’s easy to dismiss this as simple hatred for their own society borne from alienation, but I think something deeper and in a sense more logical is going on. The market skeptical right likes to mock “line goes up” ideology. It discounts GDP and corruption indexes and thinks that things like patriotism, a public acceptance of Christianity, well-defined roles for men and women, low tolerance for social deviancy, and a rejection of LGBT are actually much more important. Russia sucks by standard measures of how well a country is doing, but if there was a right-wing index of civilizational health, it would be near the top. People sometimes point out that, for example, Russia has a low church attendance rate, which means it’s not exactly a trad paradise, but that’s clearly not what anti-American right-wingers care about. If everyone in the US took their families to churches that accepted gay marriage, they wouldn’t consider that a victory. They care much more about keeping groups like gays, foreigners, and criminals in line than any kind of positive vision of people living healthy lives and forming families. Drag queens per capita is a superior measure to not only GDP, but total fertility rate.
