Cold War And Culture WarBy Rod Dreher
January 26, 2022
Here’s a very, very good analysis of the US-Russia standoff over Ukraine, by Richard Hanania. Hanania says that the anti-LGBT media law in Russia is what made the American elites think of Russia as the Great Satan (that they believed Russia engineered Trump’s presidential victory only sealed the deal). People who do not deal professionally with American elites often find it hard to understand why homosexuality and transgenderism mean so much to members of that class. Hanania writes:
I think most people are going to be inherently skeptical of the idea that LGBT and identity politics more generally play such a large role in international affairs. Yet people have less trouble accepting the fact that largely symbolic culture war issues related to race, gender, and sexual orientation drive domestic politics. Foreign policy elites are from the same class that gave us the Great Awokening, and if your model of members of this class involves them being illogical and destructive fanatics on matters of identity (the correct model), you should assume that they take their attitudes with them when thinking about international affairs. Their assumptions, deepest convictions, and construction of reality shape the ways in which we discuss geopolitical issues, which most Americans have no firsthand experience with.
One may ask why bleep Riot and the Russian gay propaganda law made such a big impression in the United States when other countries like Saudi Arabia have much worse records on human rights. There are some 71 countries right now that ban homosexual relations. Russia didn’t even do that, and there is apparently a gay scene in Moscow that looks a lot like it does anywhere else in Europe.
Russian opposition to LGBT triggers American elites more than anti-gay laws and practices elsewhere because Russia is a white nation that justifies its policies based on an appeal to Christian values. Unlike a country like Hungary, it actually matters for international politics. Remember, we’re talking about the same elite that can only get excited about random attacks on Asians if they can pretend it’s white people who are doing it, and can’t be bothered to care about black people shooting each other every day but will make excuses for those who burn cities down in response to a police officer shooting a criminal in the course of an arrest. Homophobic Muslims or Africans will never inspire all that much righteous fury in these people. The template of “white conservative Christians bad” is fundamental to their worldview, and this leads to not only hostility towards Putin, but also nations like Hungary and Poland, even if the latter are uneasily accepted as friends because they were grandfathered into NATO, the alliance that is of course aimed at Russia.
While populists like Tucker Carlson and Sohrab Ahmari are uninterested in antagonizing Russia, most Republicans in Congress and in the most influential think tanks are still stuck in the 1980s. Democrats will sometimes advocate for a less aggressive stance towards Iran and China, but it has become impossible for them to do so towards Russia, the homophobic white nation that gave us Trump and destroyed our democracy.
If you pay attention, and certainly if you have been reading this blog, you know that the American elites think Hungary is second only to Russia as the Source Of All Evil. But as Hanania points out, Hungary has a much higher rating on the Freedom House democracy scale (69) than does Ukraine (60), whose sovereignty the Blob tells us we must all be prepared to go to the mat to defend against the Satanic Russians.
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Hanania is right: the culture war is the key to all of this. Yesterday I was interviewed by a couple of journalists who are trying to understand why more and more of us American conservatives are interested in, and sympathetic to, Hungary. The basic reason, I told them, is that Viktor Orban is strongly anti-woke, and unlike our own American politicians of the Right, actually cares about fighting it (and is good at it, too). The reason Tucker Carlson’s week in Budapest was so important last year is that for once American viewers were presented with an alternative view of Hungary, as opposed to the monotonous liberal — both left-liberal and right-liberal — take. In fact, I am certain that most Americans, if they ever visited Hungary, would wonder why the foreign policy and media elites hate the country so much. It’s a normal place that happens to be governed by a right-wing party that views globalism and the European Union with skepticism. And though it is not a religiously observant nation, Hungary remains, for now, culturally conservative relative to western Europe, especially on matters related to homosexuality.
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As we know, sexual liberty is the summum bonum of Western liberalism, the absolute telos. Once you grasp that, so much about the judgment of liberals becomes clear. For example, in Ontario, a school board refuses to allow critical discussion about the sexualization of children via school books, on grounds that doing so is “transphobic”. They cannot understand any opposition as rational (even if mistaken); for liberals, it’s always about HATE. The problem with this is it badly skews their judgment of the motives of their opponents. This is a very human fault; many MAGAnauts believe that any criticism of Trump can only ever be made in bad faith, the result of irrational hatred. This emotivist stance keeps them from reading the complexity of the world around them, and understanding their opposition in ways that could allow them to grapple with it (the opposition), and perhaps defeat it. The foolish sexual and racial emotivism of the leadership class of Democrats has taken the party far to the Left of most Americans (even nonwhite ones), and is setting the party up for an election disaster this fall. Because the media are of the same class, and make the same assumptions, they too have the same blind spots.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/cold-war-culture-war-russia-hungary/
