Alexander Kazakov/Kremlin Pool Photo via AP
Russian President Vladimir Putin listens to Alexey Likhachev, director general of Russian state nuclear corporation Rosatom, during a meeting in Moscow, August 14, 2023.
It’s been more than three decades since Pat Buchanan first set the Republican Party on the road to MAGA-ism. His declaration of a culture war against liberalism and modernity, which was the subject of his speech to the 1992 Republican Convention—the only memorable speech to emerge from that conclave, and by far the most impactful—sounded most of the themes that virtually every Republican invokes today. Feminists, gays, abortion—it was all there, awaiting only the Republicans’ subsequent realization that electoral victories were an iffy proposition if they went up against the Democrats on economic issues, thereby rendering the culture wars the more promising course.
Buchanan—raised in a household that cheered on Francisco Franco’s fascists during the Spanish Civil War—also was the first major GOPnik of his generation to celebrate the rise of right-wing culture warriors in distant lands. Nearly two decades ago, his columns began singing the praises of Vladimir Putin for inveighing against gays, feminists, and liberals. Buchanan was Tucker Carlson avant la lettre.
Still, I doubt even the redoubtable Pat could have predicted how closely today’s Republican Party and Russia’s Putin regime would become aligned. This week, Russia convened a conference in Moscow with a host of developing nations, including Djibouti, Cambodia, Pakistan, and Myanmar, which followed another such gathering with sub-Saharan African nations. At both, Russia sought to position itself as their champion against the U.S.-dominated West.
The common cause it rolled out, however, sounded nothing like anything that Marx or Lenin ever championed. Far from calling for workers of the world to unite, it was pure right-wing culture-war mishegas. In a speech to this week’s gathering, Sergei Naryshkin, the head of Russia’s foreign intelligence agency, said, “Man is created in the image and likeness of God, but Westerners seek to replace him with all sorts of transgender people … Indeed, for a physically and spiritually healthy person, it’s unpleasant and sometimes even scary to arrive in Europe, given how many different kinds of perversions have bred there.”
Sounds just like a MAGA Republican talking about Brooklyn, no? The Putin coalition, after all—not just thugs on the take, but also those Russians who find a home in the bigotry of the Russian Orthodox Church and whose worldview comes filtered by state-run television—is essentially the same as Trump’s once we substitute right-wing Protestant evangelicalism for Russian Orthodoxy and Fox News for Putin’s neo-Pravda. As Putin’s war is killing off many thousands of his countrymen, of course, his coalition may be shrinking, but how much that matters in the absence of democratic control is an open question.
That said, both MAGA and MRGA effectively belong to the same International, though it’s not clear if we should call it the Nationalist International or the Orthodox International or the Homophobic International or the Misogynistic International or the Autocratic International or the Blood-and-Soil International or the Anti-Liberal or Anti-Democratic International. Maybe we should just call it the Buchanan International, though for all I know, Pat may prefer to name it after Franco.
