IDENTITARIANS OF A FEATHER:

[E]ven in the face of true evil, the stubborn idiocy of the culture war's principal champions appears impenetrable. Unable to view the world through any other lens than the culture war of their own making, activist-pundits both on the Left and Right scramble to make the reality of a square peg fit into the round hole of their ideological myopia. The resulting nonsense would have made even the fictional propagandists of George Orwell's 1984 proud: it is not Putin who is at fault for his own invasion of Ukraine, but the "warmongering" Western powers that supported Ukraine's right to national sovereignty; it is not the dictator Putin who is hell-bent on totalitarianism, but liberal Western globalists advocating for free trade and collective defence; our own politicians and media cannot be trusted, but Putin (and Tucker Carlson) apparently tells it like it is. Or, as Orwell's fictional totalitarians put it: "War is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength."

Despite their ritualistic play at ideological arch-enmity, the hard Left and the populist Right are remarkably unified in their prevarication or even open support for Putin. But perhaps we shouldn't have been surprised. Just like the still-sane majority was never divided over the things that truly matter, the ideological fringe-dwellers always agreed on the most important issues, too--but in all the wrong ways. The real argument of the culture war was never between the hard Left and the populist Right. The real argument was about whether the Western world is something we ought to cherish, value, and fight for. The culture warriors' attitude to Putin shows us what we perhaps knew all along--they think the West belongs on the scrap heap of history.

The hard Left, to their credit, have at least always been honest about this. In their monomaniacal view of the world, the West is uniquely violent, exploitative, racist, and hell-bent on imperial domination. So much so that there is hardly any unfortunate event in modern history that they cannot explain with the West's wickedness. The sacrifices made to defeat Hitler or end slavery are quickly forgotten. So, no wonder the UK's Jeremy Corbyn still blames NATO for Putin's invasion and the Democratic Socialists of America implore the US government to stop supplying Ukraine's military with the weapons it needs to fight the Russians--conveniently ignoring the Ukrainian democratic socialists' direct appeals to the US to do so. Oliver Stone recently tweeted "some Sherlock Holmes clues to what's really going on in Bucha," linking to Russian propaganda articles claiming the massacre was faked by Ukrainian forces. So much for the Left's solidarity with the victims.

Of course, many on the hard Left still claim to be opposed to Putin and support Ukraine, but their ideological blinders quickly lead them into a land of absurdities. Many leftists across Europe beat their chests about the importance of humanitarian aid for Ukraine, while they still vehemently oppose supporting the country with more weapons. Since they clearly don't think Ukraine is worth defending, perhaps the aid they talk of can be delivered with the help of the Russian army. And in the US, Ilhan Omar achieved an improbable feat of simultaneously claiming that she "support[s] giving Ukraine the resources it needs to defend its people" and also saying that giving Ukraine the weapons they asked for would be "likely disastrous." Did she imagine Ukraine might do better with a large shipment of pink knitted pussy hats?

The reason for such absurdities is that the hard Left thinks the only good the West might really hope to do is retreat entirely from the world stage and rid it from its permanently nefarious influence. Never mind that the power vacuum would be filled by Xi Jinping's China and Putin's Russia. The eminent British historian Tom Holland might also point out something else the leftists are quick to forget: the very values by which they judge the West as distinctively evil are themselves uniquely Western. You cannot reject Western values without also rejecting anti-racism, anti-slavery, social justice, or anti-imperialism.

The supposedly "conservative" populist Right is trickier because its members claim to be the most unadulterated defenders of Western values, patriotism, tradition, and cultural inheritance. Their fanboying of Putin prior to his invasion, mindless parroting of Kremlin propaganda, and limp-wristed prevarication after he launched his war reveal just how much of a sham this always was. Instead of a robust defence of the West, we get self-described American "conservatives" such as Candace Owens arguing that Putin's invasion isn't a big deal because "Ukraine wasn't a thing until 1989," Tucker Carlson being so effective at making Putin's case that his monologues get featured on Russian state TV, and Ted Cruz complaining the US military is "emasculated" compared to Russia's. In Europe, populists like Farage and Le Pen are desperately trying to make everyone forget their years of warm words for Putin. Meanwhile, the Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orbán has refused to let military aid for Ukraine pass through Hungary and used his election victory as an opportunity to describe Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelensky as one of his "opponents."

The reality, of course, is that the populist Right was never interested in the West's values or intellectual tradition--because this is the very tradition they hate: liberal universalism, individual liberty, freedom of speech, democracy, freedom of religion. The populist Right is interested in the idea of tradition only as a symbol of authoritarianism and old-fashioned machismo for its own sake. They cannot bear to see the West stand up to Putin because he is the one that embodies the values they really care about--not the West.

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