Putin and the Right’s Tough-Guy Problem

Many on America's political right continue to eagerly embrace a form of toxic masculinity where being a tough guy is all important and any form of sensitivity or introspection - much less empathy for others - is deemed aweakness.  Hence why a significant portion of the political right and their spokesmen and women laud Vladimir Putin notwithstanding the atrocities, including the murder of children, and crimes against humanity being committed at Putin's direction.  Then there are the evangelicals and Christofacists who want the male of the house to be the patriarch to whom women and children are to be subservient and obedient.  Throw in Putin's cynical empowerment of the Russian Orhodox Church, attacks on gays and blather about "family values" and these folks go into a near swoon.  It is truly sick, but some in the right even hope for a Russian victory.  A column in the New York Times looks at this sickness on the political right and how a cult of "tough guys" regardless of how reprehensible (think Trump) they may be.  Here are column highlights:

A democracy — imperfect, as all nations are, but aspiring to be part of the free world — is invaded by its much larger neighbor, a vicious dictatorship that commits mass atrocities. Defying the odds, the democracy beats back an attack most people expected to succeed in a matter of days, then holds the line and even regains ground over the months of brutal fighting that follow.

How can any American, a citizen of a nation that holds itself up as a beacon of freedom, not be rooting for Ukraine in this war?

Yet there are significant factions in U.S. politics — a small group on the left, a much more significant bloc on the right — that not only oppose Western support for Ukraine but also clearly want to see Russia win. . . . . . what lies behind right-wing support for Vladimir Putin.

Putin isn’t the only foreign autocrat America’s right likes. Viktor Orban of Hungary has become a conservative icon, a featured speaker at meetings of the Conservative Political Action Committee, which even held one of its conferences in Budapest.

conservative admiration for Orban, I’m sorry to say, makes rational sense, given the right’s goals. If you want your nation to become a bastion of white nationalism and social illiberalism, a democracy on paper but a one-party state in practice, Orban’s transformation of Hungary offers a road map. And that is, of course, what much of the modern Republican Party wants. . . . Yet Orban is not, as far as I can tell, the subject of a right-wing cult of personality. . . .

[I]t’s a fairly creepy cult at that. For example, back in 2014 a National Review columnist contrasted Putin’s bare-chested horseback riding with President Barack Obama’s “metrosexual golf get-ups.”

Until the invasion of Ukraine, Putinphilia also went hand in hand with extravagant praise for Russia’s supposed military effectiveness. Most famously, in 2021 Ted Cruz circulated a video contrasting a Russian military recruitment ad featuring a muscular man doing manly stuff with a U.S. ad highlighting the diversity of Army recruits. “Perhaps a woke, emasculated military isn’t the best idea,” Cruz declared.

What was the basis for this worship of Putinism? I’d argue that many people on the right equate being powerful with being a swaggering tough guy and sneer at anything — like intellectual openness and respect for diversity — that might interfere with the swagger. Putin was their idea of what a powerful man should look like, and Russia, with its muscleman military vision, their idea of a powerful country.

It should have been obvious from the beginning that this worldview was all wrong. National power in the modern world rests mainly on economic strength and technological capacity, not military prowess.

But then came the invasion, and it turned out that Putin’s not-woke, unemasculated Russia isn’t even very good at waging war.

Why has Russia’s military failed so spectacularly? Because modern wars aren’t won by strutting guys flexing their biceps. They’re won mainly through logistics, technology and intelligence (in both the military and the ordinary senses) — things, it turns out, that Russia does badly and Ukraine does surprisingly well.

The key to understanding right-wingers’ growing Ukraine rage is that Russia’s failures don’t just show that a leader they idolized has feet of clay. They also show that their whole tough-guy view about the nature of power is wrong. And they’re having a hard time coping.

This explains why leading Putinists in the United States keep insisting that Ukraine is actually losing. Putin is “winning the war in Ukraine,” declared Tucker Carlson on Aug. 29, just days before several Ukrainian victories. There’s still a lot of hype about a huge Russian offensive this winter; the truth, however, is that this offensive is already underway, but as one Ukrainian official put it, it has achieved so little “that not everyone even sees it.”

None of this means that Russia can’t eventually conquer Ukraine. If it does, however, it will, in part, be because America’s Putin fans force a cutoff of crucial aid. And if this happens, it will be because the U.S. right can’t stand the idea of a world in which woke doesn’t mean weak and men who pose as tough guys are actually losers.