Russia and the GOP
Russia and the GOP
How did the Republican Party go from being anti-communist to being pro-Putin?
If you look back at the history of the Republican Party (also known as the Grand Old Party or the GOP) and compare it to today, you'd be amazed by the drastic changes in that party.
Abraham Lincoln was instrumental in ending slavery. After his assassination there were Republicans who fought hard to give full citizenship and equal rights to newly freed black slaves, including the right to vote. (These Republicans were known as Radical Republicans.) Today there are efforts in Republican majority states to make it harder for African Americans to vote while calling that effort “election integrity.”
It was a Republican president, Theodore Roosevelt, who took on the monopolies who then-dominated the United States, such as John D. Rockefeller's Standard Oil Company, and he successfully broke them up. Today's Republican Party is not very inclined to look into breaking up today's modern monopolies who now dominate the US, such as Amazon, Verizon, Comcast, and many others while corporations are continuing with merging with each other.
It was a Republican president, Dwight Eisenhower, who was instrumental in creating the interstate highway system so one could go from Point A to Point B without having to frequently stop at traffic lights. It would be hard for today's GOP to consider anything that ambitious that would be paid for with taxpayer funds, unless it was something that was thought up by a giant corporation that frequently donates to the GOP.
It was also President Eisenhower who sent troops to Little Rock, Arkansas after six African American students were blocked from attending the previously all-white Little Rock Central High School by then-Arkansas Governor Orval Faubus. The African American students were able to attend that school soon afterwards. Today's GOP politicians would more likely side with Governor Faubus than allow integration of public schools to take place.
It was a Republican president, Richard Nixon, who was instrumental in creating the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) as a response to the increasing problems of pollution in the 1970s. Another Republican president, Donald Trump, attempted to gut it. There are Republicans who think that the EPA should be disbanded because, after all, they believe that climate change is a myth despite scientific evidence to the contrary.
Then there is the Republican Party's stance towards Russia. In the 1950s it was a Republican, Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led the charge against the country that was then-called the Soviet Union by claiming that Soviet spies and sympathizers had infiltrated the US government, universities, Hollywood, and elsewhere. His accusations of US citizens of being communists had ruined a lot of careers and reputations. He was only stopped when the Senate voted to censure him.
Decades later it was a Republican president, Ronald Reagan, who ramped up the nuclear arms race against the Soviet Union. His administration became involved in the internal affairs of a few Central American countries—especially El Salvador, Guatemala, Nicaragua, and Honduras—under the guise of “stopping communism.”
The old Soviet Union fell and the country is now known as Russia. In a weird bit of irony, there are reports that Russia now funds the Republican Party. This explains why there are Republicans on Capitol Hill who are calling for the US to stop aiding Ukraine while also having no problem with Russian-created troll bots engaging in election interference.
So you're probably wondering how did the GOP change from a party that was staunchly anti-communist yet had progressive tendencies (in terms of ending slavery, integration of public facilities, reducing pollution, and busting monopolies) to one that is now totally regressive in nearly everything and is now incredibly pro-Putin? 🤔
This shift has been decades in the making. Every now and then I see posts on social media claiming that slavery, segregation, and the Ku Klux Klan happened under the Democrats. All that is true but it also misses the point of what the Democrat and Republican parties were like back then and how both parties have literally reversed roles.
Before and during the American Civil War it was conventional wisdom that the Democrats favored keeping slavery legal and the Republicans were abolitionists. After the Civil War ended and during the Reconstruction it was the Republicans who wanted to give full equal rights to African Americans, including the right to vote. The Democrats did everything possible to deny African Americans the right to vote through using things like intimidation and poll taxes. It was the Democrats who came up with segregation in the Deep South.
It was also the Democrats who, starting in the Gilded Age, reached out to poor and working class whites through such things as distributing food and jobs.
If you look at what the South was like during the Civil War and segregation, you'd also learned that there was intense income inequality between the wealthy white plantation owners and non-landowning whites. Very few whites actually owned slaves because one needed to have money to afford even one slave. Poor whites, who made up a larger part of the population, simply lacked the finances. Slavery made it more difficult for poor whites to find work because the plantation owners preferred to own human beings whom they could completely control in all aspects of their lives over hiring workers who weren't as easily controllable.
How the wealthy whites were able to get away with being extremely wealthy during the Civil War, Reconstruction, and segregation without much protest from poor whites is that they successfully convinced them that even if they were poor, they were still superior to black people in every way. President Lyndon Johnson articulated this brainwashing of poor whites by wealthy whites like this:
If you can convince the lowest white man he's better than the best colored man, he won't notice you're picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he'll empty his pockets for you.
When African Americans began their civil rights protests in the 1950s, the Democrat Party began to fracture. The Democrats started to champion the passage of bills that provided such things as equal treatment and access to public places. Yet there were Democrats who opposed the civil rights movement and the majority of them were in the South. They were the political descendants of the Democrats who favored keeping slavery legal and, when that was no longer possible, favored segregation between whites and blacks.
The Republican Party under Richard Nixon pursued the Southern Strategy where they began to woo these same disaffected white Democrats. Some longtime Democrats who were also segregationists, such as Strom Thurmond, switched to the Republican Party. Over time the Republican Party became dominated by these political descendants of the original pro-slavery and pro-segregation crowd. Instead of blatantly using racial slurs like the N word, they now use dog whistles that may sound innocuous on the surface but, if you do further research, you know what they really mean. One dog whistle is Critical Race Theory, which is something that is only taught in graduate level courses. Yet the Republican Party managed to whip hysteria around it by falsely claiming that it is taught in kindergarten. It has given states like Florida the excuse to introduce new standards in schools where middle school students are now taught that slavery benefitted African Americans.
The Southern Strategy worked in 1968 when Nixon was elected president and it worked again in 1972 when he was reelected. His second term was cut short he resigned over the Watergate scandal.
The Southern Strategy would have a bigger effect when Ronald Reagan was elected president in 1980. Reagan, a former Hollywood actor and California governor, initially rose to prominence by frequently telling the story about a woman on welfare, whom he dubbed the Welfare Queen, who successfully defrauded the federal government out of hundreds of thousands of dollars. The term “welfare” is another Republican dog whistle to denote African Americans (even though whites, Asians, and Latinos have also gone on welfare). It turned out that this Welfare Queen was of mixed white/Native American ancestry who ended up serving time in prison for what she did. But she would later go on to commit far worse crimes, such as kidnapping, which is documented here.
Ronald Reagan was a very staunch anti-communist who increased the production of nuclear weapons and intervened in the internal affairs of Central American countries while claiming that it was the only way to “stop communism.” You also can't claim that Reagan was defending democracy in those countries. One such example was El Salvador, which had its notorious death squads. Only Belize and Costa Rica were able to avoid the violence of that region in the 1980s.
As for the increased production of nuclear weapons in the US, the Soviet Union responded by doing the same. By that point, the Soviet economic system was deteriorating where shortages of consumer goods were routine and hoarding was very common. Housing in urban areas was in such critical short supply that it was common to see two or more families share the same apartment. People would stand in long lines for hours just to buy basic staple foods like milk and eggs. Despite the efforts of Mikhail Gorbachev to institute his reformist programs of perestroika and glasnost, the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, just three years after Reagan left office. Republicans like to brag that they made the Soviet Union collapse, the reality is that the old Soviet system had so many problems that it was bound to collapse. It's possible that the Soviet system would have been saved had glastnost and perestroika been implemented years earlier, like in the 1960s or 1970s. But we'll never know for sure. While Ronald Reagan's program of increasing the production of nuclear weapons may have hastened the Soviet Union's demise, I think that the Soviet Union would have collapsed anyway, regardless of the arms race.
After the Soviet Union's collapse and after the rise of Vladimir Putin, the Republican Party in the US began to feel more warm towards their onetime adversary. In June, 2001 then-President George W. Bush attended the Slovenia Summit 2001 along with Vladimir Putin and several other world leaders. It was during that summit that Bush famously said this about Putin:
We had a very good dialogue. I was able to get a sense of his soul. He's a man deeply committed to his country and the best interests of his country and I appreciate very much the frank dialogue and that's the beginning of a very constructive relationship.
That comment about Bush getting a sense of Putin's soul definitely ignited a media frenzy and it also became the butt of jokes for the comedians on late-night television. But it was a total about-face from the Cold War where even just meekly admitting to a hardcore anti-communist Republican that you like eating Russian food or reading Russian literature could lead to that person accusing you of being a communist. I'm old enough to remember Republican politicians going on talk shows talking about how horrible Soviet communism was because there was no freedom of speech nor freedom of religion (the communist Soviet government only approved of atheism).
Yet the Republicans are now okay with Russia being ruled by Vladimir Putin despite freedom of speech being severely curtailed and the Russian Orthodox Church is the only government-sanctioned religion. Why is that? It's very likely that the Republicans never really cared about the curtailing of civil liberties part. They only cared about the part of communism where the means of production was directly controlled by the state because it owned the businesses. Free enterprise, private ownership, and entrepreneurship were mostly outlawed by the Soviet government.
In a nutshell, right-wing Republicans didn't really have a problem with the lack of civil liberties under communism—it was the lack of free enterprise and big business they really cared about. With communism being a thing of the past they are now okay with the bulk of business ownership being in just the few hands of the wealthy oligarchs because they want the same for the United States.
In 2008 the United States made history by electing Barak Obama as the first African American president. When it happened it seemed like a message that the US had finally put its racist past behind it. It seemed that way with the huge number of votes that were cast for Obama. Unfortunately that assessment of the US finally moving forward away from the past was too optimistic.
There was an immediate backlash in the rise of the Tea Party movement, which was loosely based on the original Boston Tea Party, except this one was a mix of right-wing politics and Libertarianism and it basically existed to oppose both Republican moderates, Democrats, and President Obama. In time it attracted the same spiritual descendents of the pro-slavery/pro-segregation/Southern Strategy crowd. The rise of the Tea Party also led to the rise of the birther movement, which claimed that Barack Obama was born in Kenya, which would make him ineligible to become president under the US Constitution. There was a big overlap between the Tea Party and the birthers. Barack Obama's reelection to a second term in office only made the Tea Party and birthers more defiant.
It also led to the rise of Donald Trump and his Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement. Like I wrote in more detail in a previous post, Donald Trump started his career working for the family real estate business then went on to become a bestselling author, celebrity businessman, survivor of multiple bankruptcies, and reality TV host. In the 1980s he was cultivated as a potential asset by the KGB and Trump, his first wife Ivana, and Ivana's assistant were all given a free trip to Moscow and Leningrad in 1987.
The Soviets encouraged Trump to consider running for president. Trump explored the idea of running as a Republican in 1987 but nothing came of it. He ran for president in 2000 under the Reform Party but that one also went nowhere.
By 2011 Donald Trump was the star of the reality TV shows The Apprentice and The Celebrity Apprentice. He took notice of the Tea Party and birthers and he decided to explore the possibility of running in the 2012 Republican primary by making public appearances where he openly questioned whether Barack Obama was really born in the US or not. It was only when NBC looked into replacing Trump as the host of the upcoming season of The Celebrity Apprentice that Trump decided against seeking the Republican nomination that year.
In 2015 Trump made his infamous announcement at Trump Tower in New York that he was seeking the Republican nomination as president. In that speech he also railed against immigration by speaking about how Mexico never sends its best people to the US but it sends its rapists and drug dealers. That remark led to NBC firing Trump from his reality TV show.
The Russians helped Trump through the use of troll farms like the Internet Research Agency. While Trump denied that Russia helped him win that year, a Senate Intel report confirms that this was true. The CIA came to a similar conclusion. In 2021 The Guardian cited leaked Kremlin documents that said that Vladimir Putin personally authorized a secret spy agency operation to support a “mentally unstable” Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election during a closed session of Russia’s national security council.
There were Republicans who were concerned about a potential Trump presidency in 2016. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham famously tweeted “If we nominate Trump, we will get destroyed…….and we will deserve it.”
Donald Trump not only got the nomination that year but he won the presidency. Lindsey Graham did a 180 degree about-face where he is now a very loyal Trump supporter. The reason, as this CNN story states: As a political opportunist, Graham has placed his desire for power above his own professed standards of decency.
That, in a nutshell, explains why so many Republicans have rallied around Trump: His Make America Great Again movement provides a rare opportunity for the Republicans to seize power and rule the country in the way that's reminiscent of the days of the Confederacy and segregation. It's one where wealthy white men dominate everything. White women are treated like fragile beings who should be extremely sheltered. Children should be harshly disciplined without worrying about violating child abuse laws. Poor and/or black folks know their place and don't get too uppity.
There's also a fear aspect to supporting Trump as well. Republicans who have stood up against Trump, such as Liz Cheney, have ended up being voted out of office. Others, such as Adam Kinzinger, decided to quit Congress.
The Republicans who are loyal to Trump aren't concerned about his ties to Vladimir Putin. In fact, for over 25 years there have been Republicans who have gotten very cozy with Putin. Even if Donald Trump would lose the Republican nomination this year or if he ends up in jail or even dies, the problem of Putin's involvement with US politicians will not go away.
Why would a far-right Republican who is aligned with MAGA be sympathetic with Russia under Vladimir Putin? Because Putin has the kind of society that the Republicans want to have for the US: one where there is free enterprise that's privately owned by oligarchies and very little liberalism. These Republicans think that the US Constitution is a drag. In fact, one right-wing think-tank called the Heritage Foundation has something called Project 2025 that would likely be implemented if Donald Trump wins this year's election and it's frightening to anyone who believes in supporting the US Constitution. You can read Project 2025 either in its entirety or just read a synopsis of it.
Regardless of whether Donald Trump ever reaches the White House again or not, we will still have to deal with those who are anti-democracy and we will have a long battle ahead of us.
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