At some point in my lifetime, the Republican Party went from saying, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall!” to effectively telling Russia’s current leader, “Mr. Putin, invade our NATO allies.”
I’m left wondering how this transformation could take place, and (almost as curious) why so many of my contemporaries switched sides in this debate?
I’m not alone. In response to a Fox News tweet about “young Republicans” like Sens. Mike Lee, Eric Schmitt, and J.D. Vance (who criticized a Senate bill funding Ukraine), Democratic Sen. John Fetterman weighed-in. “I’m their same age but I never rooted for Russia in [the movie] Red Dawn,” Fetterman tweeted. “Were you rooting for Russia in 1984 like 2024 too? #WOLVERINES.”
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Fetterman has a point, but how many young Americans are familiar with Red Dawn? A more relevant analogy (partly because of the Creed movies) might be rooting for the steroid-enabled Soviet boxing machine Ivan Drago to beat the beloved American icons Rocky Balboa and Apollo Creed in Rocky IV. (Creed, of course, was played by Carl Weathers, who passed away recently. And Drago was played by Swedish actor Dolph Lundgren, who just became a U.S. citizen this week.)
It’s easy to watch Rocky IV today and see it as campy, but it was pretty intense for a kid growing up in cold war America (I’ll never forget seeing this trailer). It was a huge cultural phenomenon. And (spoiler alert!) watching Drago beat Creed to a pulp and then utter those infamously callous words, “If he dies, he dies,” was unbelievably shocking at the time, and remains powerful to this day.
I honestly can’t imagine telling an 11-year-old me—who just watched Drago kill a stars-and-stripes trunks-wearing Apollo Creed right after James Brown sang a rousing “Living in America”—that someday his political party would be rooting for Russia. But here we are.
As I write this, my old boss Tucker Carlson is garnering buzz (and criticism) for saying that Russia’s grocery stores and a subway station he visited in Moscow are nicer than America’s—a message that has drawn comparisons to “useful idiot” Walter Duranty’s New York Times coverage of the Stalin-era USSR, and democratic socialist Sen. Bernie Sanders’ praise for tyrannical leftist regimes.
Tucker also recently conducted an interview with Vladimir Putin, who returned the favor by saying he thought the American interlocutor would have asked him tougher questions. (Note: As I have long contended, Tucker was a great boss, and he is also dead wrong about Putin.)
As Fetterman observed, you wouldn’t think so many prominent members of Generation X, kids who cut their teeth on movies like Red Dawn and Rocky IV, would be so supportive of a former KGB agent who is now reportedly pursuing a “space-based nuclear weapon”—but they are.
Again, for anyone who came of age in the Reagan years, this transformation is hard to comprehend.
Of course, it didn’t happen overnight. I’ve seen it coming like a slow-motion disaster.
Toward the very end of the Barack Obama presidency, I started noticing Twitter memes juxtaposing images of a shirtless Putin riding a horse with pictures of Obama wearing a helmet and riding a bicycle.
Then, while working for Tucker at the Daily Caller, I attended a conservative conference in 2013. And, for the first time in my life, I encountered a pro-Putin “conservative” in the wild. At the time, this development was so unthinkable and potentially harmful that a Breitbart News editor accused me of making up the story.
But five or so months later, Pat Buchanan seemed to confirm my experience when he published a syndicated column (rhetorically) asking, “Is Putin one of us?”
For many on the right, the answer was a resounding YES!
It’s worth pointing out that (as Barack Obama snarkily informed Mitt Romney) the Soviet Union no longer exists—even if Russia’s strongman believes its demise was “the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the century.”
With all due respect to Obama, the evil empire might be gone, but it’s not like Putin’s Russia isn’t still a villain.
This Russia is bad. This Russia started a war with its neighbor. This Russia rapes Ukrainian women and steals kids and indoctrinates them.
So why did Republicans learn to stop worrying and love Russia?
For those of us who used to be called “full-spectrum conservatives” (fiscally conservative, socially conservative, and in favor of a strong national defense) there were numerous reasons to disdain and fear the Soviets and communism. They had a command-and-control economy. They were atheistic. They were authoritarian and imperialistic.
With the collapse of the Soviet Union, only the latter concern applied.
And exactly why do so many on today’s right seem to like modern Russia so much?
Is it the sense that liberal democracy is weak and that a ruthless and murderous strongman is needed to restore order and make the (subway) trains run on time? Is it just because they are ostensibly “Christian” and persecute gays? Or maybe, unlike diverse America, it’s because Russia is perceived as a “white” nation?
There really are no acceptable answers. Likewise, there really is no good reason to be rooting for Drago, Russia… or Putin.
