Is Putin Stimulating Conflicted Thinking among US Conservatives?
A quick search on Google using keywords “american right putin” reveals that American conservatives aren’t in agreement about Putin and his latest ventures in the Ukraine. Old schoolers like the clarity that was part of Cold War thinking. It was the enlightened Free World against Communist darkness.
But the “Free World” today is being run by a West that isn’t what it once was. The socialistic governments of these countries promote an anything-goes libertarianism which now manages a populace addicted to social media and mindless entertainment–the perfect medium for social engineering.
Bygone political logos such as Free World and Communism are hopelessly obsolete as identifiers, since ongoing political forces work constantly to reinvent themselves in new guises, hoping to exert influence (that is, manage) out of public scrutiny. In the world of geopolitics, WYSIWYG isn’t always obvious.
The media might attempt to portray Putin as a bad guy heavy, but he is simultaneously a stauncher advocate for Christianity than leaders in “post-Christian” Europe. Putin sticks up for Russian blood and family in Crimea and eastern Ukraine, while Europe pursues a multiculturalism gone wild. Putin says NO to the libertarian excesses of what he sees as a degenerate West–no to perverse rock bands, homosexuality, and legalized drugs, for example.
Putin doesn’t want NATO amassing forces against his western border, especially in a Ukraine that saw its elected government violently overthrown by West-led demonstrations and social media.
As futurist Daniel Greenfield has recently argued, tomorrow’s empires will look more like the past. People want protection from aggressive outsiders as well as from unchecked social change. Empires bring peace through strength and balance of power.
With most establishment Republicans and Democrats now quick to call themselves conservatives–it can mean a hodgepodge of warm, fuzzy sentiments–we have yet to hear much from the Right in the West. Isn’t the Russian Federation mostly European as such? Is Putin more of a gunslinger as the graphic portrays–or more of a cerebral, fiscal manager like politicians in the West?
