At his rally last week, Vladimir Putin entered the culture war. E.J. Dionne writes:
Vladimir Putin is sounding like someone who wants to enter the 2024 Republican presidential primaries.
“Look at what they’ve done to their own people,” he said of us Westerners. “They’re destroying family, national identity, they are abusing their children. Even pedophilia is announced as a normal thing in the West.” Never mind that Russia is a world leader in sex trafficking.
Putin didn’t stop there. In one rather convoluted passage, he came out against same-sex marriage, backed off a bit, and then doubled down:
“And they’re recognizing same-sex marriages,” he said. “That’s fine that they’re adults. They’ve got the right to live their life. And we always, we’re very tolerant about this in Russia. Nobody is trying to enter private lives of people, and we’re not going to do this.”
Well, not quite, but he pressed on: “However, we need to tell them, but look at the scriptures of any religion in the world. Everything is said in there. And one of the things is that family is a union of a man and a woman.”
Among his enemies, Putin charged, “even the sacred texts are subjected to doubt.” Also, watch out, Britain: The “Anglican Church is planning to consider the idea of a gender-neutral God,” Putin mourned. “What can you say here? Millions of people in the West understand that they are being led to spiritual destruction.”
It’s obvious that his embrace of social and religious traditionalism is aimed at winning over right-wing opinion in the democracies and splitting the traditional right.
Putin's popularity on the Right is rising:
You don’t have to watch Fox News commentators waxing warm about the Russian president to see that this strategy is working. Opposition to helping Ukraine is growing among rank-and-file Republicans.
A Pew Research survey in January found that 40 percent of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents said that the United States was providing too much help to Ukraine, up from 32 percent in the fall and 9 percent last March. A Jan. 27-Feb. 1 Washington Post/ABC News poll found 50 percent of Republicans saying that the United States was doing too much to support Ukraine, up from 18 percent in April.
Putin is very shrewd about opinion on the right end of politics — in the United States and in Western Europe, too. He is counting on a backlash against social liberalism and the idea of a “gender-neutral” God to rustle up support for ungodly aggression.
I repeat: Caveat emptor.
Image: PBS
