Trumpian Conservatives Hold an ‘Emergency’ Meeting Over Russia

At a Washington Marriott, the nationalist wing of the Republican Party wrestles with what Putin’s war means for their movement.

"J.D. Vance was on the warpath. “Using American power to do the dirty work of Europe is a pretty bad idea,” he told a crowd on Thursday, warning against the U.S. getting more involved in Ukraine. “We don’t have that many non-insane people in Washington. I need you to be some of them.”

Vance wasn’t speaking at a campaign stop in Ohio, where he is running for the U.S. Senate, but at the Marriott Marquis hotel in downtown Washington. The audience consisted of over one hundred mostly younger conservatives, and he was sounding the alarm about not just foreign intervention, but about other conservatives — the worrisome resurgence of the Republican establishment.

“Ukraine is a corrupt country. Come and get me,” quipped Helen Andrews, a senior editor at the American Conservative.

Several of the panelists either avoided talking about Putin or largely elided the brutality of his attempted subjugation of an entire people. But more than a few appear to harbor a conciliatory view of Putin’s prowess that was first enunciated by Patrick J. Buchanan eight years ago in a column in the American Conservative. Buchanan asked, “Is Vladimir Putin a paleoconservative? In the culture war for mankind’s future, is he one of us?” The question was pretty much rhetorical. Buchanan’s argument was that America, not Russia, was the bad guy in the world. According to Buchanan, “President Reagan once called the old Soviet Empire ‘the focus of evil in the modern world.’ President Putin is implying that Barack Obama’s America may deserve the title in the 21st century. Nor is he without an argument when we reflect on America’s embrace of abortion on demand, homosexual marriage, pornography, promiscuity, and the whole panoply of Hollywood values.”

At the conference, I asked Scott McConnell, a lapsed neocon who co-founded The American Conservative with Buchanan and Taki Theodoracopulos in 2002 to protest the Bush administration’s march to war in Iraq, why a host of conservatives shifted from the Reagan-era stance of supporting freedom abroad to backing Putin and other far-right populists like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán.

He explained, “Putin and Orbán are not communists. They are classic authoritarian autocrats. There is far more freedom in Hungary than there was thirty or fifty years ago.”

It’s a point of view that is unlikely to disappear any time soon on the “America First” right — and that helps guarantee that the Marriott conference was but a fresh skirmish in a longer battle inside the GOP itself."

[politico.com]