Throughout the 2016 presidential campaign, Donald Trump claimed that he had been opposed to the US invasion of Iraq from the start and promised to end the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan if he were elected. In early 2020 he concluded a peace deal with the Taliban and then, in the final days of his administration, announced a major drawdown of US troops from both countries.
The Republican Party appears to have turned against American involvement in military missions around the world. However, unlike the hard left, it has not turned pacifist. And, also unlike the hard left, it is not bent on allocating the funds that would be thus saved to improving the welfare of American citizens. Rather, it is part of the growing Sovietization of the American right-wing.
Sovietization was a term popularized in the late 1940s, after countries taken over by the Red Army in the course of World War II were remade after the Soviet model. They had to adopt Soviet-style institutions, expropriate and arrest members of the propertied classes and suppress the opposition. More important, the Soviet ideology was inculcated into three generations of their citizens. When communism collapsed in the late 1980s, the institutions were changed and economic reforms brought back private enterprise. The ideology, on the other hand, proved more resistant, as the experience of Poland, Hungary and eastern German states demonstrates.
The experience of Soviet citizens is an important guide for understanding the ideological change taking place on the American right. When the first ex-Soviets started coming to the United States in the early 1970s, they imposed their vision of the world to the political reality in America. In the 1976 presidential campaign which pitted Republican candidate Gerald Ford against Democrat Jimmy Carter, my countrymen and I were eager to explain to our new American friends that a vote for Carter would be tantamount to a vote for communism.
Naturally, we didn’t expect Carter to ban religion, institute the Gulag on American soil or bring about long lines for sausage on the streets of Kalamazoo, Michigan. In the Soviet Union politics defined as the art of the possible or as a compromise simply didn’t exist. Rather, we had a division between communism on one side of the barricades and everything else on the other. This went back to Lenin, for whom it didn’t matter what ideological stripe his opponents were. As long as they didn’t share his radical, purist vision of Marxism they were enemies — and other Socialists and Social Democrats were the worst enemies of all.
And so it was for us, former Soviet citizens: you were either an anti-communist or a communist, and there was no other choice. The Republican Party at the time was positioning itself as staunchly anti-communist and anti-Soviet, and so everyone who opposed the Republicans had to be a communist.
We were willfully ignorant of American history with its legacy of the popular vote, human rights, legal protections for minorities, the rule of law and equality before the law. Ironically, just like our communist rules, we felt that the world-historical battle between communism and anti-communism required actions that rode roughshod over democratic niceties. Naturally, we supported the CIA-inspired coup against Salvador Alliende in Chile and were glad the Chilean president was murdered.
In the United States today, the surviving moderate wing of the Republican Party clings to the hallowed American democratic tradition and mainstream political ideology. It is still a conservative party in the original meaning of the word — a party determined to preserve the existing system. Meanwhile, the radical right wing of the GOP has become ideologically Sovieticized. That is to say it is no longer a political party in the traditional American sense.
Now that Trump has resumed its rallies, his followers are flying Trump flags spelling F–k Biden. Following Trump, prominent Republican politicians are calling President Biden, a middle-of-the-road thoroughly conventional US politician, a communist. That’s Joe Biden who spent 35 years in US Senate, becoming along with other American politicians, instrumental in defeating communism in the Cold War and bringing about the collapse of the Soviet Union. They see his timid-to-a-fault policies as radical left.
In a similar vein, former Soviets in America saw US trade unions as the thin end of the communist wedge, even though there had been few more consistently anti-communist political leaders in America than George Meany, the long-term head of the AFL-CIO.
And so it goes with the sudden right-wing opposition to foreign wars and the embrace of Trump’s anti-military rhetoric. The left was opposed to the Vietnam war and attacked — often personally — US servicemen who fought in that war. Over the past two decades, during the two “forever wars”, a remarkable nationwide consensus has emerged in support of “our men and women in uniform”. However, more recently, attacks on American war veterans, Purple Heart heroes, Gold Star families and US generals have come from the right — and that too is a sign of Sovietization.
Lenin was famously opposed to World War I. While other socialist parties in Europe turned nationalist at its outbreak, Lenin’s Bolsheviks declared it a rapacious struggle for colonies among capitalist powers. Lenin was opposed to annexations which the warring nations talked about in the event of their side’s victory. But Lenin was no pacifist. His slogan was Convert the Imperialist War into a Civil War — which he successfully did across the Russian Empire after the November 1917 coup.
It’s pretty much the same with US right-wing extremists. There are some 300 militia groups in the country, with up to 20,000 active members. They are heavily armed, some have military or police experience and they are training for a civil conflict, to fight against their fellow Americans. They are rejecting the 250 years of American democratic tradition, focusing only on the American revolution. The first engagement of that second civil war (the Fort Sumter moment) may have taken place on January 6, 2021.
Sovietization implies a rejection of politics — which is a way of reconciling legitimate claims of various equal members of society — and a return to pre-modern tribalism. In the tribe, there is a tribal chief whose whims and wishes are regarded as holy writ. In the absence of politics, Soviet and post-Soviet leaders invariably turned into such tribal chiefs. In America, too, unbelievably, we have seen a tribal chief arise in the right-wing.
Tribal societies are also traditional ones with traditional roles for members and for sexes. So in all of Soviet history, there has never been a woman anywhere close to power, and in today’s America, too, politically active women — be they Hillary Clinton, Kamela Harris or Liz Cheney — elicit visceral, primal hate.
