Category: US Politics (Page 1 of 2)
Did you seriously think that a standard-issue Democrat who happens to be a Black South Asian woman had a chance of winning against a white male cult leader whose entire political career is based on celebrity and pandering? Some Redditors were idiotically predicting a fucking landslide for Harris, which I always thought absurd. If Biden didn’t win in a landslide against Trump, why would Harris?
I hate Trump as much as the next guy. And I also hate being right when I’m pessimistic.
But I was never confident that the Democratic candidate, whether that was Biden, Harris, or someone else, had what it took to forestall a Trump victory. I have been pessimistic about this election since the beginning of this year, when Trump easily won the Republican primaries.
I do not fault the Democratic Party for deciding on Harris. She is the sitting vice president and had the best chance of getting campaign funds. The fault here was Biden’s, since he failed to step down and stupidly decided to run for reelection instead, despite his advanced age. But even then, any Democrat would have faced an uphill climb against Trump, given the state of the economy as perceived by the average voter.
Much of this is attributable to Trump’s personality cult and this country’s deep political polarisation. Even if you set aside Harris’s race and gender, Trump is the kind of candidate who gets irregular voters to come out for him every time he is on the ballot, even though they don’t care about any other candidate but him. There are a lot of people who aren’t even Republicans, but they love Trump so much that they register GOP just so they can vote for their “God-Emperor” in the primaries. He has managed to have people marching in his name and starting riots. People see him as a Jesus substitute. This is not a candidate who loses handily, even against someone vastly more intelligent and competent than he is (and that’s most of the people he’s run against, though I wouldn’t call Biden particularly intelligent). His loss to Biden was in a squeaker. And Trump can also rely on just enough voters who will pull the lever for anyone with an (R) after his name, even when it’s a raping, lying, cheating, grifting fraudster. No matter what, they’ll reliably vote Republican. Trump can pool together the reliable Republicans and the “nonpartisan” MAGA cultists and win, and that seems to be what he’s done. I’m not a pollster, of course, so my perceptions could be off base. But judging by what I’ve seen of Trump and his supporters for the past nine years, I believe it is plausible.
A second Trump presidency, which seems likelier by the minute, will be a disaster not just for the United States, but the world generally. He is a mendacious, corrupt, vile, felonious excuse for a human being who should never have been near the Oval Office in the first place. Any Republican presidency would be dangerous for marginalised people (do you think that the chillingly fascistic Project 2025 is just for Trump?), but Trump is his own brand of awful because of his cult following. (And this time around, there will be fewer safeguards, since he no longer has to face the voters as he did in 2020, and the Supreme Court has declared him immune from prosecution if they believe that he has performed “official acts.”)
And Joe Biden is going to hand Trump the election on a silver platter if he continues to stay in the race. States like New Jersey—yes, New Fucking Jersey—are in play. The swing states all seem to be going to Trump.
If Biden stays in the race, I will never forgive him. No matter what he did during his presidency, he will sully his legacy by letting his ego get in the way of preserving democracy.
Drop out, Joe! Only then can we dump Trump for good.
… really, these could just be shitposts, but they’re too serious for that, so I’m combining them into a convenient bullet-pointed list.
- Russia and Ukraine are both using cultural and ethnic minorities as scapegoats to keep the public in line. The Russians are notorious for systematically targeting LGBTQ+ people as a symbol of “Western decadence” and “extremism.” They’re also a convenient sacrificial lamb for the ultraconservative, rural Orthodox Christian voters that Putin depends on. The Ukrainians, meanwhile, are doing the same with ethnic Russians, as well as Russian-speaking Ukrainians and socialists who are critical of the government. Although some of these opponents are pro-Russian, not all are. To keep the support of the hardline nationalists, especially in the West, the central government will happily sacrifice these “superfluous Ukrainians.” I expect this from Russia, since its human-rights record has been spotty for a long time, but Ukraine’s actions disappoint me more because I expected better from a country that aspires to be more democratic than its former ruler. Being of Russian descent, speaking Russian, or preferring socialism over capitalism is not the same thing as supporting the Putin regime. (See also my comments about the Ukraine War being Russia’s proxy war against the West, and the own-goals by Ukraine and Russia.)
- People who support terrorists are assholes? Who would’ve thought? I hate to say this, but I have seen more empathy and compassion from progressive Zionists than anti-Zionists or hardline Netanyahu supporters. Every day I continue to be dumbfounded at how cruel, vengeful and inhumane some anti-Zionists can be. I can’t side with anyone who’s being that cruel and vindictive. Not in an anodyne “why don’t we all just get along when the Israeli government is doing monstrous things” way, but the idea that it is morally acceptable to kill civilians or take hostages for being “settlers.” I know there are several anti-Zionisms, but I am talking about the people who support or do nothing but make apologies for Hamas. I shouldn’t expect humane behaviour or decency from anyone who actively supports a terrorist organisation. I have said this before and I will say it again: this isn’t Nelson Mandela. Mandela wanted to make a South Africa for everyone. His goal was not to kill everyone in sight and kick out non-Black South Africans. Hamas’s goal is to eliminate and destroy, not merely to liberate.
- Western countries should drop sanctions against Iran, North Korea, and Russia. Not because anyone should approve of these countries’ practices (I certainly don’t, which is obvious to anyone who’s read this blog), but because the main people who suffer from these sanctions are ordinary Russians, North Koreans, and Iranians, not their leadership or oligarchs. Russia has enough global influence (and oil) to make up for the revenue lost from sanctions. The South African sanctions worked, but that’s probably because South Africa had historical ties to the West. American and British pressure worked. There’s no love lost between Iran/North Korea and the West, and the relationship between Russia and the West has been adversarial since at least 2014, after the Obama administration’s “Russian reset.”
- Many Marxists can be reductive and dismissive about any relationship of dominance and oppression that isn’t economic, but their universalism is refreshing in a polarised society. I’d like to see a communism that keeps some of Marx’s ideas but makes them more expansive, easier to understand and responsive to today’s modern needs.
- There’s a difference between being a supporter of human rights and being an identitarian woke-scold. In the first case, you acknowledge systemic oppression and want to rectify it. You do this by implementing policies that allow the historically oppressed group to be a full member of their society. It’s about including everyone, not acting at someone else’s expense. Identitarians, on the other hand, use real grievances to justify an eye-for-an-eye, dog-eat-dog, hyphenated-thing-to-reflect-violent-actions morality. Gandhi never said, “An eye for an eye will leave the whole world blind,” but it fits all the same. Social equity is not a zero-sum game. (This kind of violent “morality” is an own-goal by social justice activists… and I think that will be my next full post.)
- FUCK HAMAS, FUCK PUTIN, FUCK ZELENSKY, FUCK NETANYAHU. (I couldn’t resist.)
The world has seen an epidemic of throwaway politics over the past decade or so. What do I mean by “throwaway politics”? Throwaway politics is the practice of treating entire demographics as expendable, useless, superfluous. Throwaway people are second-class citizens, Others, subalterns. They are often ethnic, racial, religious, gender, or sexual minorities, but not always—for example, Black South Africans were throwaway majorities under apartheid.
Politicians and constituents who adopt throwaway politics are usually on the right, but the right doesn’t have a monopoly on the practice—consider left-wing Hamas supporters’ callous attitude towards Jews, or certain left-wing politicians, such as Sahra Wagenknecht, who vilify migrants to outflank their right-wing counterparts.
The demographic characteristics of throwaway residents may vary, but the underlying dynamics are the same: there are some people who are less equal than others. In Europe and European-influenced countries, typical throwaway people are often Muslims, immigrants from the “wrong” countries, refugees from the Middle East (who are typically Muslims), LGBTQ+ people, and occasionally Jews.
Once you’re a throwaway, nobody cares about your rights. You’re not worth listening to. You may as well not even exist. You are no longer deserving of empathy or consideration.
We know where this leads: the events of 1933–1945. Hitler’s primary target was Jewish people, but Jews were not the only throwaway Germans. Disabled people, dubbed “ballast existences,” were targeted through the Nazis’ Aktion T-4. So were the Roma. The Nazis didn’t care much for Russians, either. Queer and trans people were also fodder for Hitler’s hate machine.
Why the hell are exclusivist ideologies, or the remnants of exclusivist ideologies, given any credence in supposedly inclusive (most Western democracies) or anti-fascist (Russia) societies? We know where this can go. It’s not as though we’re in 1920 and had no record of an industrial-scale genocide. Hitler’s Germany is still in living memory. Why are TERFs’ arguments taken seriously, especially when their “sex-based rights” model is a few steps away from Kinder, Küche, Kirche? Why is the Russian government endlessly pursuing LGBTQ+ people and claiming to be “anti-fascist” when their attitudes towards the community are little different from those expressed by the Nazis? Why are Christian fundamentalists, whether American Protestant or Russian Orthodox, treated as a legitimate political constituency when the same liberal or progressive politicians see right through their Islamist counterparts? Why do American police officers disproportionately target Black people with violence? Why are US presidents calling neo-Nazis “very fine people” and calling for the “complete and total shutdown of Muslims entering the United States”? Why is the new, modern, liberal, European government in Kiev treating ethnic Russians and Russian-speakers as fifth-column traitors, in a shadow of what the US government did and has done to Arab and Muslim Americans after 9/11 and now the Hamas attacks? Why is the Israeli government bombing Gaza instead of trying to live alongside the Palestinians? And why are supposedly “woke,” enlightened people claiming that every Israeli Jew is a throwaway person blocking Palestinians from their freedom?
Despite all the claims to fight for the working class, a lot of American leftists don’t know how to talk to or about your average working-class person. (This probably applies to other countries that were on the left side of the Iron Curtain too, though I can’t be 100% sure.) And no, this has nothing to do with identity politics—that’s for later. Right now, I’m focusing on the struggles of daily life.
I grew up working class. I knew very few adults, other than teachers and medical professionals (and a single relative), who had bachelor’s degrees, much less master’s degrees and PhDs. Having a degree was a big deal; most of these people finished high school and went straight into the workforce if they didn’t do a stint at a community college first. People do not throw around terms like “bourgeoisie,” “proletariat,” and “material conditions.” Instead, they’ll say “the little guy” and “the bosses.” People talk plainly and clearly; they don’t go in circles using management-speak and Marxist jargon.
When working-class people talk about their material conditions, they give concrete examples, not turgid treatises on Engels and Žižek:
“When I was growing up in the 1960s, you could get a burger for 16 cents. Now you’ll be lucky to get one for $6.”
“They closed down the factory 20 years ago because they outsourced all the work to China. Dad had a hard time getting a job after that and needed to go on benefits.”
“I broke my hip and couldn’t do my job any more, but unemployment couldn’t cover my rent. I got evicted and had to stay in a shelter just to stay alive.”
“They’ve got us under surveillance all the time. You can’t even get up to go to the bathroom without logging it on a time sheet.”
“I’m getting early and late shifts stacked together at Amazon and can’t get any sleep.”
“I need to see the doctor, but my job doesn’t give me benefits, my state didn’t expand Medicaid, and I can’t afford an Obamacare plan.”
Despite their purported focus on material conditions, many leftists (especially Marxists) spend more time spouting academic-sounding jargon rather than listening to the people they want to defend. I’ve lived in the professional middle-class world for just over a decade now. But I’ve tried not to forget where I came from or what my values were. I still detest jargon and doublespeak and piles of abstractions that sound pretty on paper but mean nothing in practice.
Want to support the working class? Then listen. Don’t call them the “proletariat.” Say “you and me,” “your average person,” “the little guy.” Don’t talk about the “bourgeoisie.” Say “the bosses,” “the big guys,” or give names: Donald Trump, Elon Musk, Warren Buffett. It’s a lot easier to grasp it if you talk about specific people rather than a nebulous “bourgeoisie.” Put down Das Kapital and the Communist Manifesto. Talk plainly. Speak from the heart. Make it easy for people to imagine a better world. If you want to talk about material conditions, then fucking describe them. If you want to talk about how companies exploit their employees, then give examples. Some leftists do this, but it’s typically covered in a pile of jargon.
And your average working-class American isn’t going to be thrilled to talk about communism or socialism, either, especially if they’re older. The same people who want the government to provide them with healthcare and housing, or their unions to protect their rights, are the same ones who will turn around and denounce communism. “The country’s becoming more communist every minute,” someone—a sixtyish woman working in a unionised job—said to me recently. Communism isn’t a concrete set of political demands; it’s an abstract evil force that they associate with the Soviet Union (though they’ll usually call it “Russia”) and the Cold War. Like it or not, Marx’s better ideas have been tainted by association with the terrors inflicted by Stalin and his imitators. “Dictatorship of the proletariat” is going to make people think of Stalin, not workers’ taking control over what they produce, as they do in worker-owned cooperatives. When you ask them to think of a socialist country, they’ll think about dictatorial regimes like the USSR and North Korea.
This isn’t to say that working-class people are stupid because they think of Stalin and Kim Jong Un when you mention socialism. Quite the contrary. They may not have read a word of Marx, but they can tell you exactly how alienated they are from their job, how exploited they feel by their bosses, how much they want to put food on the table without accounting for every penny, how frustrated they are when they talk and no one listens.
If you want workers to rise up against unfair conditions, if you want to spur a mass movement, you need to be able to meet people where they are. You can’t just wait for everything to suck so much that people will join the Socialist Equity Party of Liberation instead of voting for the tried-and-true Republicans and Democrats who actually know how to win an election. They’re just going to pull the lever for Biden or Trump. It’s impossible to have a mass movement if you don’t know how to reach the masses, but a lot of “materialist” leftists don’t seem to get that—they’re trapped in the ivory tower as much as their “pseudo-leftist” progressive counterparts are.
Talk plainly. Speak from the heart. Ditch the jargon. And then you’ll have a movement.
…I mean, a left movement that manages to avoid the following things:
- Praising Hamas or other theocratic terrorist organisations (eg, Al-Qaeda, ISIS, Boko Haram, Palestinian Islamic Jihad or Hezbollah)
- Writing in a way that’s inaccessible to the people they claim to stand for (usually the working class, and sometimes disabled people if it’s disability-studies scholars who sound no different from their non-disabled counterparts in all the worst ways)
- Politicising identity to the point that people turn into two-dimensional “oppressor” and “oppressed” classes (usually based on ethnicity, race, or gender) without nuance or distinction
- Thinking that YELLING LOUDLY WITHOUT CLARIFYING YOUR POSITION is a GOOD WAY TO MAKE A POINT IN AN ARGUMENT. Extra points if you use the clapping 👏 hand 👏 emoji 👏 or repeat your sentence three times, first time in regular type, then italicised, then boldfaced
- Promoting ideas that are impossible to implement on a large scale unless there’s a transitional period between the current and ideal states
- Claiming that state propaganda organs like RT (Russia), Sputnik (Russia), TASS (Russia), the Korean Central News Agency (North Korea), Xinhua (China), Press TV (Iran), Global Times (China), TeleSUR (Venezuela), Prensa Latina (Cuba), Al Mayadeen (Lebanon), or Orinoco Tribune (Venezuela) are real “anti-imperialist news”
- In contrast, relying solely or primarily on Western state media like Radio Liberty/Radio Free Asia (USA), BBC (UK), Deutsche Welle (Germany), or France 24, though this is more of a centre-left phenomenon. Although these sources are much more reliable than their Russian, Chinese, or Iranian equivalents, they tend to gloss over the faults of pro-Western regimes like Ukraine, South Korea, Japan, Qatar, and Saudi Arabia
- Using only pro-government sources (there are sites that criticise the government without defending Russia) about the Ukrainian conflict, including Kyiv Independent, Kyiv Post, Ukraine Crisis Media Centre, Euromaidan Press, and Ukrainska Pravda. Ukrainian propaganda is less likely to make shit up than Russian propaganda, but it often treats Kiev’s repression and ethnocentric nationalism as a good thing
- Using conspiracy-theory-laden websites like The Greyzone, MintPress News, Donbass Insider, and Moon of Alabama as reliable sources about China, Russia, or Syria
- Spreading conspiracy theories in the name of “anti-imperialism,” including debunked claims about Syria’s gas killings and Ukraine’s purported biolabs
- Treating activism like the Oppression Olympics, even though that’s a game nobody actually wants to win
- Creating new political parties instead of trying to push existing ones further to the left (yes, I’m kind of an entryist; deal with it)
- Related to the last point, running presidential or other candidates that have no chance of winning—why run anyone for office if you know damn well that a candidate from the People’s Socialist Party of Freedom, Equality and Liberation has zero chance of winning against the Democrat or Republican (or mainstream equivalents in other countries, like the Tories and Labour in the UK, or the German Christian Democrats and Social Democrats)
- Refusing to build coalitions across the left because purity politics makes it impossible, thereby allowing the right to split us up and indirectly help leaders like Donald Trump, Geert Wilders and Jair Bolsonaro come to power
- Expressing essentialist ideas about genders, races or cultures (“Russian culture exists to oppress Ukrainians,” “Indigenous Americans are noble sages,” “men are all rapists,” “‘real’ women are delicate flowers who need ‘sex-based rights’ to protect them from evil trans women”)
- Calling anyone who disagrees with them “reactionary” or “pseudo-left” (Trotskyists do this a lot)
- Focusing more on style than substance (“trans women” versus “transwoman”, #KyivNotKiev)
- Venerating past and present tyrannical dictators like Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, “respected comrade” Kim Jong Un and the rest of his family, Bashar al-Assad, Vladimir Putin (who isn’t even a leftist, much less a communist), Xi Jinping, Ho Chi Minh, Fidel Castro, Hugo Chavez, Nicolas Maduro, Daniel Ortega, ad nauseam
- Focusing on foreign policy to the exclusion of domestic policy
- Focusing on domestic policy to the exclusion of foreign policy
- Treating Volodymyr Zelensky (and by extension the bumbling Ukrainian central government) as though the were the second coming of Winston Churchill
- Throwing around jargon like “anti-imperialist,” “settler colonial,” “decolonise,” “bourgeois,” “proletarian,” “imperialist,” “neoliberal,” and “geopolitical economy” without being clear about what they mean
- Reducing all relationships of dominance and oppression to the control of the means of production or the lack thereof (which is silly, since racism, all sexisms and xenophobia can occur under any economic system, including socialism)
- Supporting right-wing authoritarian states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly Russia and Iran)
- Supporting authoritarian communist or socialist states because they’re opposed to US policy (mostly China, North Korea, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and Syria)
- Treating politics like a sports game
- Spouting ableist views—including fat-shaming—because their concept of class or identity organising completely ignores the idea that disability is political
- Treating the writings of Marx and Engels (or sometimes Lenin, Stalin, and Mao) as holy writ
- Siding with anti-Western states because they’re “anti-imperialist” (as though China and Russia weren’t expansionist empires, which is the analogue of Japanese, Ukrainian or Taiwanese boosting of Western imperialisms because they’re against China and Russia)
- Supporting reactionary, xenophobic movements like Brexit (a common view among some British communists, as well as the perennial candidate and professional fruitcake and anti-vaxxer Jill Stein) because they’re against the EU’s neoliberalism
- Dismissing reports of sexual abuse because they’re a “distraction” from the class struggle
- Denying genocidal actions of anti-US regimes (China in particular)
- Claiming that their movement, whether Trotskyism, orthodox Marxism–Leninism, anarchism, or any other tendency, is the only way to solve society’s problems
- Uncritically defending Ukraine or other pro-Western countries with deeply problematic policies (more common in North American and Western European mainstream media, though views like this sometimes appear among social democrats and other more moderate leftists)
- Dismissing, defending or promoting racism, misogyny, homophobia or transphobia on the grounds that feminism, pro-LGBTQ activism and antiracism distract from the class struggle
- Constantly putting political one-upmanship over the real lives, concerns and feelings of actual human beings
Unfortunately, this seems impossible to find, at least for now. I know I can’t agree with everything I find, but the lacuna between my views and theirs is staggering. (But mainstream centre-left politics leaves me unsatisfied, too, and anything on the right is obviously out of the question.)
Inverse oppression is not liberation.
Calling to commit genocide against a dominant ethnic group is still wrong. It still implies that there are groups of people who don’t deserve to live, not because of what they have individually done, but because of the cruel actions of their government. Targeting your own citizens because they speak the “oppressor’s language” isn’t going to free you from domination; it’s merely going to tear your country apart because your blinkered nationalism has caused you to forget who is also on your side.
I don’t mean this to be a saccharine “why can’t we just get along” plea. I don’t mean that we have to suck up to people who don’t value our lives. Fuck them. But I won’t endorse essentialist claims about how, for example, Russians exist solely to oppress Ukrainians and must be destroyed. This is toxic garbage. Nobody exists solely to oppress anyone else. When you claim that someone’s very existence is oppressive, you sound like a fucking fascist.
Most social justice activists aren’t like this. Most want to find a place for themselves within a pluralist society. But they are drowned out by a loud minority that calls for blood at the earliest opportunity.
Turning misogyny around and claiming that men are all domineering brutes who want to subjugate women doesn’t lead to women’s liberation—it just causes misogynists to double down and act worse because “women hate us anyway.” And “reverse misogynists” are often the ones who end up becoming TERFs, since they believe in sexual determinism. If you’re born with this bodily configuration, you’re virtuous; if you’ve got the other kind, you’re damned.
Certain “woke” academics and students think that antiracism means dehumanising white people, straight people, or cis people—and those white, straight, and cis people will turn around and escalate their racist, homophobic, and transphobic claims because they think that non-white and LGBTQ+ people are out to get them. They think they’re going to be oppressed, too. When they talk about being “decolonial,” they want to become the new colonisers instead, wiping out history and rewriting it to fit a new “liberated” agenda. (And some are perfectly fine with some colonisers like the Chinese.) They conflate cultural exchange—a near-universal in all human societies—with crude cultural appropriation, like white people wearing stupid fake Native American headdresses at Coachella.
Real liberation occurs when societies can reckon with historical inequities and find ways to live alongside each other. We must not tolerate racism, sexism or any other prejudice. But this demand must be separated from retributive, eye-for-an-eye, tooth-for-a-tooth “morality.” There is a difference between fighting for one’s rights—even with violence—and wanting to eliminate the other side. For example, I don’t want white Americans to be wiped out. I want them to start seeing their non-white counterparts as full members of society.
I am tired of hearing that calling for reconciliation and kindness, rather than calling for blood, means “siding with the oppressor.” Unfortunately, a lot of oppressed people think that liberation means doing what the other guys did to them. The oppressed can become oppressors. One cursory look at a history book will show this to be true. The Russians were oppressed by the Mongols. Later, they turned around and oppressed Mongolic groups like the Buryats. Jews were and are oppressed in Western societies and the Arab world. But now the Israeli state (not Jews as a whole, just the Israeli state) is oppressing Palestinian Arabs, and those Arabs, as well as their Iranian allies, are now calling for the oppression of Jews as a whole. Both Jews and Muslims are marginalised religious and ethnic minorities in the West, and this complicates politics among Israel’s allies. Anti-Zionism is shot through with antisemitism, and Zionism is shot through with Islamophobia. And there are people who are both oppressor and oppressed—for example, non-white Americans may serve in the army and still struggle with racism at home. I side-eye anyone who talks about “The Oppressor” as though this is a permanent category, an indelible mark of evil.
I do not believe in tit-for-tat morality and I will never endorse it, even if it is masked as “liberation.” I’m not against the use of violence to send a message (though it should occur only after non-violent options have been exhausted), but it has to be targeted—and it should not be directed at civilians or private citizens. I’m sick of this Manichaean bullshit, and I hate that social justice movements have been infected with it.
If you are obsessed with eliminating groups of people, you aren’t freeing anyone from literal or figurative bondage. You just want to be the new master.
Tankies have created their own counterpart to Wikipedia: ProleWiki.
You can learn that the correct name for Americans is actually “Statesians.” You’ll also learn that North Korea—I mean the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea—is a happy workers’ paradise, not a totalitarian hellhole full of people who are fed a healthy diet of propaganda rather than actual food to eat. Russia’s RT, Iran’s Press TV, and other state media from authoritarian states, as well as conspiracy-mongering publications like CovertAction Magazine and The Greyzone, are now “anti-imperialist media.” And you’ll learn that virtually anything wrong in the world is a “Statesian” plot led by the CIA. The words “bourgeois,” “capitalist,” “ruling class,” “means of production,” and “material” are thrown around liberally.
And to the editors of ProleWiki, Stalin and Kim Jong-un are deeply misunderstood men who want to do right by their people, not iron-fisted tyrants. And Xi Jinping is praised by way of a quote from that stalwart champion of human rights, Fidel Castro. In general, if the media say anything negative about the USSR, North Korea, China, Cuba, Vietnam, or any other “actually existing socialist state,” it’s bourgeois propaganda.
At least the ProleWiki editors are pro-LGBTQ, unlike some other Marxist–Leninists who see anything non-heteronormative as being bourgeois, idealist, or degenerate. I guess even a stopped clock is right twice a day.
If I see the expression “collective West” in English-language articles, I tune out immediately, since I know that I’m going to encounter undiluted Kremlin propaganda, either from Russians or foreign admirers of the Putin regime, including tankies, vatniks, so-called libertarians, and ultraconservatives, and it often comes alongside disparaging attitudes towards LGBTQ+ people, feminists and others who challenge the patriarchy. For some, it reflects a hostility towards liberalism—that is, non-authoritarian politics, rather than the European sense of deregulated free markets or the American sense of barely-left-of-centre views. And for others, it is merely a catch-all term for the United States, NATO, the European Union, and possibly Australia and New Zealand alongside them.
But this unity is a myth—and Russian officials and propagandists know full well that there is no singular “Western consensus.”
Here’s why.
Trumpers, Tories, and TERFs—oh my!
Russian propaganda may portray Ukraine’s supporters as libertine, decadent states devoid of conservative “family values,” but this is not in keeping with these countries’ domestic policies. We’ll use four countries as examples: the United States, Poland, Italy, and the United Kingdom. Though I’ll be sticking to four countries, we could easily substitute France, Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands, all of which have right-wing governments or nascent far-right movements.
United States
Anyone with even a cursory knowledge of American politics knows about our extreme polarisation. The idea that this country is a free-for-all feminist and LGBTQ+ paradise is easily disproved by the spate of anti-LGBTQ+ and anti-woman bills, laws and executive orders pushed through by doctrinaire Republican legislators, Supreme Court “justices” and state governors over the past two years. Our rights may have advanced in more progressive states like California, Massachusetts, and New York, but they have regressed in red states, including Texas, Missouri, and Florida.
Russian officials will find a lot in common with governors like Greg Abbott of Texas and Ron DeSantis of Florida, all of whom have launched crusades against LGBTQ people, Black activists, and anyone else who challenges the established conservative order. And Donald Trump is back on the campaign trail, this time using culture-war issues like trans youth to keep his ultraconservative voters engaged—and ensure that he doesn’t lose support to DeSantis and other Republicans who appeal to Christian fundamentalists.
And although some “America First” Republicans (e.g. Marjorie Taylor Greene) have questioned the need to provide Kiev with more military support, the GOP-controlled House of Representatives has approved multiple military-aid packages.
Poland
Poland, one of Ukraine’s staunchest allies, is an extremely conservative Roman-Catholic-dominated country not known for its LGBTQ+ friendliness or feminist attitudes. It’s probably a hair away from Russia in this regard—the dictatorial repression may not be as extreme, but the conservative environment is still suffocating for queer Poles. The country even has “LGBT-free zones” (mostly in the south-east): something unthinkable even in the reddest of red states, at least not formally. There are liberal and progressive Poles, just there are liberal and progressive Russians and Italians, but they do not control the national government. Poland is considered one of the worst countries in the EU for LGBTQ+ people, and yet it works closely with Kiev in the anti-Putin war effort.
Italy
Italy is an unwavering supporter of Ukraine’s efforts to repel the Russian invasion. It is also led by Giorgia Meloni, who is the furthest-right Italian leader since Benito Mussolini. Her Fratelli d’Italia (Brothers of Italy) party is an outgrowth of old-school fascist movements. Far-right politicians in other countries—for example, the leaders of Germany’s AfD and the French Rassemblement National (National Rally, formerly Front National)—have balked at providing Kiev more support, but Meloni is not among them.
Although Italy is a safer place for LGBTQ+ people than Russia or Hungary, it has the fewest legal protections or rights for LGBTQ+ people in Western Europe; it lags far behind countries like Germany, France, the UK and Spain, which have all legalised same-sex marriage, allow for legal transition, include hate-crimes protection, and more.
United Kingdom
The Conservative-led British government has consistently supported Ukraine throughout the full-scale invasion, but their support for Kiev in no way suggests that the country is as liberal or progressive as Russia claims it is—unless they mean “classical liberal,” rather than “non-authoritarian” or “social libertarian.” Some of the loudest pro-Ukraine media outlets are also some of the most conservative, especially the Daily Mail and Daily Express, along with the more genteel Times and Telegraph.
Although British politicians are comparatively less hostile toward queer and trans people than their Polish, Italian, or Russian counterparts, there has been an alarming rise of homophobic and transphobic rhetoric coming from both Tory and Labour politicians, as well as the press. Some Tories, such as Suella Braverman of the Home Office and the “Equalities” minister Kemi Badenoch, are especially hostile. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were not known for their social progressivism either. The days of David Cameron and Theresa May are long over. The UK, once listed as the most LGBTQ+-friendly country in Europe, no longer has that reputation—it has been slipping in the rankings over the past eight years.
It’s also important to remember that the UK has been the primary exporter of homophobia and transphobia. For example, the “anti-buggery” laws in African and Caribbean countries like Nigeria, Jamaica and Uganda are colonial leftovers that the locals now see as their traditional values. Before “muscular Christianity” arrived on the African continent, many cultures, such as the Igbo of what is now Nigeria, had more fluid views of gender.
Why the “collective West” charge is disingenuous
The Russians’ condemnation of the “collective West” has nothing to do with the political composition of NATO or EU states. It doesn’t have jack shit to do with LGBTQ+ rights or “moral decay.” It is just an excuse to legitimise its attempts to annex the entirety of Ukraine to the Russian state. No self-respecting leftist should use the “collective West” narrative; it’s merely self-serving Kremlin waffle.
In fact, American evangelicals have worked with Russian Orthodox fundamentalists to persecute queer and trans Russians. The media has covered Russia’s exploitation of our internal tensions for its own geostrategic interests—for example, the “Heart of Texas” and “Black Matters” Facebook groups that popped up during the 2016 election.
There is no such thing as the collective West—only countries that aren’t lining up to do Russia’s bidding.