Who’s Against The West?Liberal commentators read too much into Western populists' unwillingness to wage war with Russia.
By SOHRAB AHMARI
MARCH 15, 2022
The ruling-class talking point du jour is that Russia’s war in Ukraine has dealt a crushing blow to Western populists. The populists, according to this view, tied their fate to Vladimir Putin’s: whether by praising him, calling for more genial relations with Moscow, turning a blind eye to Kremlin depravities, or some combination of the above. Now that Putin has launched a failed invasion of Ukraine—failed according to Twitter and feverish media wish-casters, at least—his populist fan club is also tainted by his cruelty and incompetence. Ergo, “populists are losing this war,” as a headline in UnHerd put it.
It’s pure poppycock, but before I explain why, let’s briefly pause to note the sheer grotesqueness of this ideological posturing at this moment. Amid the carnage wrought in Ukraine by Moscow’s aggression, the suffering of ordinary Russians under Western sanctions, and the anxiety that grips Europe as a whole, the liberal establishment sees fit to cashier misery into point-scoring against their domestic political opponents. This is the business we’ve chosen, you might say, and fair enough—but then kindly stop whinging about civility, decency, and unity.
As to the charge itself, it is built on a foundation of deliberate misunderstandings, misdirections, and outright slanders. While some of the criticisms might apply to some populists, they don’t apply to others. Yet the liberal columnists’ underhanded tactic is to barrage all populists with all the charges, to see what sticks. There are different versions of this, offered variously by William Galston in the Wall Street Journal opinion pages, Eric Kaufmann in the aforementioned UnHerd piece, and Francis Fukuyama and Janan Ganesh in essays for the Financial Times.
Let’s attempt to unpack three of the main strands:
One charge is that Western populists fetishized Putin as an emblem of strongman confidence and now must “own” the logistical setbacks and military snafus dogging the Russian army on its path to conquest.
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Source:
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/whos-against-the-west/
