IT BEGINS WITH HATING AMERICA:

In August, Roy Moore told an interviewer that the United States was "the focus of evil in the modern world," because "we promote a lot of very bad things," such as same-sex marriage. Told by the interviewer that Vladimir Putin makes the same argument, Moore replied, "Maybe Putin is right." The interview has resurfaced on social media. This is not a strange, discursive gaffe. Like many of Moore's controversial utterances, this is a more blunt and more extreme formulation of a recognizable strand of right-wing conservative thought.

Vladimir Putin has cultivated a role as the leader of an international far-right movement. Earlier this year, Franklin Foer detailed the ideological and geopolitical currents that allowed the Russian dictator to assume this role. "A 2013 paper from the Center for Strategic Communications, a pro-Kremlin think tank, observed that large patches of the West despised feminism and the gay-rights movement and, more generally, the progressive direction in which elites had pushed their societies," he wrote. And so Putin "could become," as the paper's title blared, 'The New World Leader of Conservatism.'"

The commonalities between Putin's conservatism and Moore's run deep. Its fixations center on the evils of Islamic radicalism and Islam in general, nonwhite immigration and the threat of "replacement," and the decline of traditional Christian morality, especially the rise of gay rights. This is the conservatism of Trump, Bannon, and Steve King rather than Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.

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