President Donald Trump’s Republican Party acts less like a traditional political party than a cult of personality, according to a historian who specializes in fascism — and he points a finger of blame at Russia.
“How does the party go along, in lockstep with that?” podcaster Shane Smith asked historian Timothy Snyder in a video that dropped on Thursday. “I get that, and I probably agree with that, but that’s one person. How do you get the whole party, if not the whole country, to just overnight agree with you in lockstep?”
Snyder replied, “I’m going to answer that, but I’m going to qualify it first, because it’s not the whole country. The polling on the Russia-Ukraine war is actually pretty good. Even Republicans are about fifty-fifty, independents are mostly pro-Ukraine, and Democrats are overwhelmingly pro-Ukraine. So I wouldn’t say the whole country. There has been a seismic shift in the American right. And I think there are a couple of causes beyond Trump, who has a lot of influence. Opinion polls on Russia among certain people change because of him. He does have a lot of influence on, let’s say, half the Republican electorate.”
He continued, “But in addition to that, there’s the fact that a lot of Americans on the far right really like Putin’s ideology. They like the notion of civilization. They like the sexism. They like the racism. They like the conspiracy thinking. They like the anti-gay stuff. And then, to make matters a little more practical, Putin’s Russia shares money around with the far right. I worked on this in Europe. I’ve never worked on it in the US, but I’d be stunned if it weren’t true in the US as well. They support individual right-wing actors with money, and they also platform them. And they also coach them, like with Tucker Carlson.”
Snyder later pointed out that Russia is no longer left-wing, as it was under the Soviet Union, but is right-wing under President Vladimir Putin.
“There’s the fact that Russia is no longer the communist Soviet Union; it’s right-wing Russia, which is naturally attractive to certain right-wing people,” Snyder told Smith. “And then there are all the ops. The way we run social media in the US is basically laissez-faire: anybody can do what they want to do. And under Trump, that’s basically policy, which means that not just the Russians, but the Chinese and everybody else, are all over our social media. I think that’s some of the answer.”
He added, “And then let’s not overestimate the American memory, or underestimate the American capacity for contradiction. Right now, the Republicans are trying to claim that the current midterm election is about anti-communism, when their guy admires a former KGB officer, fawns over the head of the Chinese Communist Party, and couldn’t say nicer things about the communist dictator of North Korea. So part of it is just an American capacity to not remember things and to embrace contradiction. I wrote a book that was largely about the 2015–2016 Russian operations in the US. I’m forgetting now who said this, but he had his finger on something important. One of the Russian operatives was actually in the United States trying to figure out what they were going to do with the social media ops. He said, ‘These people believe in anything they want, and I admire them for that.’ That’s of course not true of all Americans, but there is a certain fluidity around the way we remember politics sometimes, which means the Cold War doesn’t really last as long as one might think.”