Forget impeachment over Russia. Millions of angry, white, Christian, GOP men and women remain quite resistant to finding any fault with their President, despite the building wave of revelations and growing breadth and depth of corrupt connections between Trump and Russia. So, it’s worth asking why so called conservatives should feel so comfortable about cozying up to Vladimir Putin and the Russians.
Some explain Trump voters’ indifference to the Russia problems, by blaming the information bubble that propagandizes these voters —
Let’s not underestimate the horror of it all. Large segments of our population have been brainwashed into believing that crimes are not really crimes, that foreign interference in an American election isn’t really a thing. Large segments of our population will cheer on command for the firing of Rosenstein:
Another speculation supposes that entrenched hyper-partisanship explains the phenomenon —
These events had very little impact not because they weren’t important, but because Trump’s supporters simply didn’t care.
Trump has succeeded in making the Mueller investigation so partisan an issue that whatever Mueller has found, or will find in the future, will have little effect other than reinforcing existing views among voters and lawmakers.
However valid these ideas may be, they represent mere trees, lost to sight within a metaphorical forest of GOP hatreds where they grow. Trump’s core voters are most readily understood by noting whom they hate, or, at least, by whom they feel superior to and those whom they feel entitled to dominate. Trump’s bigot army consists of voters largely defined by one or more of the following hatreds: racism, misogyny and homophobia.
When these voters look at Vladimir Putin and Putin’s Russia, they see a world where the most cherished hatreds, in their bigoted American hearts, thrive and help define the Russian culture. For them, looking at Putin is like looking in a mirror. When they look at Russia, they see a bigot’s paradise.
As with the hatreds of Trump’s most ardent supporters, local versions of racism, misogyny and homophobia also help to define Putin and Putin’s Russia.
Case 1 Racism
In America, Trump’s and his voters’ feelings about African Americans couldn’t be clearer, As when they booted a student from a campaign rally just for wearing a Black Lives Matter T shirt. Also, Cf. Ben Carson’s Sleepy Godzilla destruction of public housing. Also, too, a lifetime of Trump slumlording, etc. Don’t get me started on Muslim Bans or Border Walls or Zero T and concentration camps for brown children.
In Putin’s Russia, a large Muslim minority lives concentrated in particular regions, associated mostly with Tsarist era conquests. Open Russian prejudice against Muslim subgroups has grown under Putin and even more so against laborers from Central Asia. But perhaps a more instructive example of Russian racism is the treatment of Black Russians.
Actually there aren’t very many Afro-Russian people in Putin’s Russia, but that doesn’t prevent the tiny minority from being treated horribly. Many of them are orphan’s left behind after government programs under the former USSR, meant to fight colonialism in Africa and the Carribean. Full ride scholarships to Soviet universities brought young men from such regions, to study at various Soviet institutions. Some of these students left behind Russian children, whom Russians appear to have little interest in assimilating or even accepting. Many Afro-Russians have been documented by one of their own, photographer Johnson Artur —
The presence of black Russians, who often describe themselves as “Afro-Russians”, is a reminder of a time when Soviet state internationalism and support for anti-colonial movements meant attitudes towards race were more neutral.
However, today Russia struggles with a reputation for racism: from the abuse of black footballers to violent policing that in recent years has sparked street protests from African students in St Petersburg.
Most of Johnson Artur’s subjects have grown up without much contact with other black people or with little of the shared culture and identity familiar to African-Americans and black Britons.
What they do have in common is the experience of prejudice and confusion shown towards them by much of the Russian public. “Those who grew up and live in Russia still have to justify on a daily basis the fact that they are Russians too,” Johnson Artur explains.
Case 2 Misogyny
In America, Trump inspires men to behave badly toward women. Unlimited examples abound, illustrated well enough by this one —
Kathy Harrington pointed to the offending spot. “It’s probably still there somewhere,” she said. Harrington, 56, was inviting attendees of the annual Musikfest bash in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania, to sign up to support progressive causes – and to protest against Donald Trump.
Interactions with festival-goers over two busy weekends on Main Street in Bethlehem had been “about 75% positive, about 25% negative, and of that I would say maybe 10% more in-your-face negative,” said Harrington, who was wearing a pink “I stand with Planned Parenthood” T-shirt.
And then there was one guy who “just looked at us and spit”, said Sandra Davis, 58, a colleague of Harrington, who pointed out the evidence still evaporating from the pavement.
“They feel empowered,” Davis said of Trump supporters since the election. “They’re given voice. The louder and the more vulgar, the better.”
Images from the night before of white supremacists carrying torches in Charlottesville, Virginia, were deeply disturbing but not surprising, said another activist, Ginny Atwell.
“I think his core base are the true deplorables,” Atwell, 72, said of Trump. “The white supremacists. He’s delivering exactly what they wanted. White male supremacy.”
“No women and no minorities,” said Harrington.
“And keep everybody else out,” said Atwell.
In Putin’s Russia, two years ago, his government decriminalized domestic abuse. Longstanding laws providing severe punishment for family violence, were repealed and replaced, instead, by new rules imposing only light punishment for a man beating a family member, if no more often than once a year, so long as he breaks no bones —
When Russia decriminalized domestic violence in February 2017, civil servants tasked with protecting women in the country’s far east were dismayed by the new vulnerability of their wards. Yet few officials opposed the measure. President Vladimir Putin signed off on the bill after the lower house of the Russian parliament, the Duma, overwhelmingly approved it by a vote of 380 to 3. The new law recategorized the crime of violence against family members: Abuse that does not result in broken bones, and does not occur more than once a year, is no longer punishable by long prison sentences. The worst sanctions that abusers now face are fines of up to $530, 10- to 15-day stints in jail, or community service work. That’s if the courts side with the victim. They rarely do.
I guess if a Russian man was a real romantic, he could beat his wife every year on their wedding anniversary.
Case 3 Homophobia
In America, forget Trump’s posturing with a Rainbow Flag during the 2016 campaign, whatever his voters may have thought of it at the time, The actual policies of Trump’s Presidency have particularly gratified American homophobes. Trump loving homophobes often march under the anti-LGBTQ banner of “religious liberty”, used by bigots to claim that a supernatural being instructs them to be mean to anyone who isn’t straight.
In Putin’s Russia, American homophobes would presumably adore Vlad the Bad for his positively medieval oppression of LGBTQ Russians. Consider this, published by The Independent last March, during the run-up to Putin’s most recent phony reelection as the Russian President —
A quick search recently for LGBT news on Yandex – the largest Russian search engine – threw up a very depressing list: “Users are outraged by the new LGBT-friendly ad for iPhone”, “Russian actor gets kicked out after supporting LGBT people”, “Berlinale-2018: perverts and russophobes are occupying modern cinema”.
A whole stack of news is dedicated to a new online game called “Play for the President: help Putin kill naked men with a rainbow flag”. The game allows you to become “a former KGB agent” and destroy “enemies of the state”, which “naturally” includes the LGBT community, opposition leader Navalny and US President Donald Trump.
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In other countries such online games might have caused a big backlash from the public and commercial partners, but in Russia for many they seem to serve as yet another reinforcement of a very conservative and disempowering belief system. A system in which women are given flowers but also beaten by their husbands, and where it’s widely believed that the immoral influence of the LGBT community should be immediately mitigated for the sake of the children.
Conclusion
For Trump’s most ardent, sexist, racist, homophobic supporters, the President’s connections to Putin and Russia are not a bug. They are a feature. Trump’s angry white, misogynistic homophobes will never turn against him, even in the face of conclusive proof that Putin and Russia’s oligarchs, rather than Trump’s oath of office, control the President of the United States.
CIVIQS, at this writing, hypothesizes that 18% of American registered voters self-identify as white, non-college educated Republicans. More or less 90% of these voters steadily approve of Trump’s job performance.
Once upon a time, voters like these would have hated Russia and the Russians, as much or more than anyone else on their hate lists, on grounds of the four anathemas of Soviet atheism, Communism, egalitarianism and totalitarianism of the proletariat. Putin’s Russia has replaced all of these with nearly their opposites: an official State religion, barely regulated fascistic capitalism gone wild, rampant racism/misogyny/homophobia and the ascendancy of a new aristocracy of oligarchs.
More or less 32.4 million American registered voters appear to have been seduced by an agent of a foreign power and seem untroubled by suggestions that their beloved President is that Russian agent. Why should they be troubled? Putin and the Russians are kindred spirits with American bigots, bonded together in a fraternity of shared hatreds.
More or less 32.4 million registered voters (90% of 18%, per CIVIQS of 2018 peak of 200 million registered US voters) can be found strewn unevenly around the nation’s various local environs. Unfortunately, these voters disproportionately occupy more sparsely populated rural areas, and particularly, the South. Our federal system was built, from the beginning, to disproportionately empower sparsely populated rural areas against more densely populated cities and states. Thus, a dictatorship of the minority has so often blighted our national politics, from time to time.
No matter what comes out about Trump, Putin and Russia, between now and 2020, even if the House of Representatives passes Articles of Impeachment, the GOP hate caucus will terrorize enough Senate Republicans, from mountain, plains and Southern states, to block Senate conviction and removal of Trump on Russia issues or probably anything else.
Unless DOJ indicts, arrests and incarcerates Donald Trump, or unless Trump resigns, e.g. under threats that his family faces arrest, Trump will finish his term. Democrats need to face that fully and abandon pipe dreams about impeachment to instead refocus on things that can actually make a difference, like defeating Senate Republicans and Trump next year and cleaning out Republicans whenever possible at all levels.