Weird How the U.S. Right-Wing Is Most Like China’s and Russia’s, What a Coincidence!

In the 2000s, US Republicans thought about the world in similar ways to Britons, Europeans, Canadians.

This made for productive relationships regardless of who was in the White House.

The moderating layers around Trump #1 masked the divergence, but with Trump #2 it’s glaring.

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— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch.ft.com) March 7, 2025 at 2:58 AM

The U.S. right has been ideologically dragged away from the European right and towards our biggest geopolitical enemy and frenemy at the same time the U.S. right is cutting longstanding alliances in Europe and North America to the benefit of Russia and China, what a coincidence!

I’m sure this has nothing to do with developments like Merrick Garland’s DOJ charging right-wing dipshits who say they’re big dumb babies who don’t know anything for allegedly being Kremlin stooges by literally taking money to pump out Putin’s propaganda to a right-wing audience–an audience who built a cult around a man who has been courting Moscow’s elite financial interests since the 1980s. None of this is definitely what it looks like and it was a completely natural process that drove the American right insane enough to ally itself with two countries who are trying to take the next century from the United States (and have succeeded).

This is not to sarcastically say that America’s right-wing is not uniquely unhinged by itself, Hitler did cite it as inspiration, after all. But to quote a character whose whole vibe applies pretty well to the United States’ right now, “see, madness, as you know, is like gravity. All it takes is a little…push.”

While the hysteria around a bunch of GRU shitposting on Facebook and Twitter was beyond unhinged in the 2016 MSNBC cinematic universe, the dismissal of the Trump-Russia stuff by broad swaths of the negatively polarized left was equally flat out wrong and always has been. This is Trump, meaning that corruption is his north star and it’s likely not much more complex than what it looks like: a doofus who went bankrupt in America six times then all of a sudden showed up in Russia running Miss Universe pageants and endorsing Vladimir Putin’s op-eds in the New York Times. Is it so hard to believe that he lost access to U.S. credit markets after failing six times in rigged businesses, and then found new financiers in a place with less stringent lending standards to help him launch Trump vodka and Trump steaks and such?

The black and white tug of war between the MSNBC Cold War conspiracy theorizing of Putin installing himself as president and the negatively polarized left’s “nothing to see here” stance has always been infuriating. Many point out that Robert Mueller concluded that he did not find enough evidence to charge Trump with being a Kremlin stooge, but he also wrote that Trump officials lied to investigators and “those lies materially impacted the investigation of Russian interference,” and that “the social media campaign and the GRU hacking operations coincided with a series of contacts between Trump Campaign officials and individuals with ties to the Russian government.” At no point in his report did Robert Mueller clear these schmucks of total wrongdoing, he just wrote that they did a good enough job of covering their tracks that he didn’t think the case could win in court. There has long been a plume of smoke hovering over what everyone can see is some kind of fire in Trumpland.

The KGB and now the FSB has always lived in shades of gray, which perfectly fits the dynamic we have wrestled with for the last century over America’s inherent depravity invalidating its stated aspirations—all while the Kremlin inflames it and cheers it on. This is an especially uncomfortable fact for us lefties because in the past, we were a target of KGB operations due to our closer ideological alignment to the Soviets than the capitalists. But Moscow’s spies have never achieved a greater victory than this. The American right-wing is wholly dedicated to Kremlin priorities as a matter of their own now. These people are as negatively polarized as they come, as you could get them to oppose oxygen if you convinced them it was woke. American right-wingers are the perfect fodder for any professional spy in any three letter agency around the world who knows how to mold human putty in their hands (like the Israelis who likely interfered in the 2016 election as much or more than Russia did, which Mueller also detailed in his report).

How much of this ideological drift towards Russia and China’s rigid right-wing authoritarianism is due to the U.S. right’s natural incoherence—or the Russians or Chinese or Israelis or U.S. capitalists giving them a push with their own propaganda efforts—is difficult to quantify. But it’s pretty hard to argue at this point that Russia and China’s obvious attempts to pull the American right towards themselves has been anything other than a wild success.