'Globalism' Is Now an Alt-Right Smear

Defending Ukraine against Russia is not automagically the same thing as being in league with Klauss Schwab and the WEF.

***

Today's GOP is not only not your father's GOP, it's much closer to his Democratic Party, with the lone exception being its full embrace of your great-grandfather's Christian prudery.

Today alone, we have the increasingly nutty Issues and Insights -- within recent memory a redoubt of relative sanity on the right -- hawking pacifist Tulsi Gabbard as Vice-Presidential material:

Image by Gage Skidmore, via Wikimedia Commons, license.

The Samoan-American, a U.S. Army Reserve lieutenant colonel and decorated combat veteran, showed her plucky streak, and her inclination to think independently, while speaking in December at Turning Point USA's Americafest. She cautioned that "the future of our country is at risk." Her former party, she said, in language similar to that she used when she announced she was leaving the Democrats' fold, is "under the complete control of an elitist cabal of war mongers who are driven by cowardly wokeness." [links omitted, bold added]

Following the links shows Gabbard also smearing Nikki Haley as a "neocon" and railing against "this ongoing proxy war against Russia."

And since today's GOP has no real identity -- except as supposedly the opposite of whatever the Democrats happen to be at the moment -- this makes Gabbard a darling and automatically makes suspect stopping Russia's incursions against the West.

To its small credit, even Issues and Insights can tell that Gabbard isn't a lockstep Trumpist.

That said, it speaks volumes that the GOP is having trouble admitting that, despite Ukraine's imperfections and the fact that the Democrats somewhat support it, perhaps a proxy war now can be a good way to avert a real one later.

This would entail seeing Russia as the threat to the West that it is. And after seeing "An Obsolete Alliance Turns 75" in Chronicles: A Magazine of American Culture, all I can say is Good luck with that from today's conservatives:

That the West felt entitled to dictate the forms, structures, and ideologies of the post-Cold War world was palpable to Russians and the rest of the world. It never occurred to anyone in power to ask what gave "the free world" the right to determine the forms of government, economy, and social mores in countries that were not their own. It was taken as a given that the West had such a right, and a condescending, patronizing, arrogant attitude was pervasive in the corridors of power in Washington. [bold added]

(1) This sounds like a leftist discussing the alleged "right" of pestholes during the Communist era to vote themselves into slavery. (2) And I guess we're supposed to not ask what gave Russia the right to just go in and take over neighboring countries?

The piece is littered with errors and deserves criticism on multiple fronts (particularly using capitalist to describe either of Russia's oligarchic, post-communist political economy or that of the mixed-economy West), but my short, hot take is this: If you wanted to read a piece by a Democrat defending Russia against NATO, back when Russia was communist, you can get the same flavor by reading this piece -- against NATO, now that Russia is against "woke," never mind that their "woke" includes our enlightenment-era institutions as well as the leftist cancer that has, I admit, infected NATO.

Russia has designs on the rest of Europe, and its threat will need to be addressed sooner or later. Whatever the merits of continuing NATO, it is fortunate that, whatever its flaws, it's still around now that Russia and many other authoritarian regimes have become actively belligerent.

I would hazard a guess that bureaucratic alliance with less-than perfect allies is better now than no such alliance at all.

During the Cold War, Ayn Rand, who emigrated from Russia, and saw that it had far more wrong with it than just communist rulers, said:

Observe the double-standard switch of the anti-concept of "isolationism." The same intellectual groups (and even some of the same aging individuals) who coined that anti-concept in World War II -- and used it to denounce any patriotic opponent of America's self-immolation -- the same groups who screamed that it was our duty to save the world (when the enemy was Germany or Italy or fascism) are now rabid isolationists who denounce any U.S. concern with countries fighting for freedom, when the enemy is communism and Soviet Russia.

Today's right uses globalism in a similar way: to smear as leftist, woke morons anyone who is concerned about what Russia is doing.

-- CAV