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   From: hayesstw@telkomsa.net   
      
   Right-wing switchback: "National conservatives" dump Putin, want to   
   claim Ukraine   
      
   At global gathering of right-wing nationalists, a startling pivot:   
   Putin's toast — and wow, do they love Ukraine   
      
   By KATHRYN JOYCE   
   PUBLISHED APRIL 13, 2022 6:30AM (EDT)   
      
   From the first day of Russia's invasion of Ukraine, conservatives on   
   both sides of the Atlantic have been placed in an uneasy position. For   
   more than two decades, right-wing activists and politicians have   
   praised Russia as the unlikely wellspring of renewed traditionalism,   
   as Vladimir Putin intertwined church and state in an effort to bolster   
   Russian nationalism and, more quietly, his aspirations to reconstruct   
   the Soviet empire.   
      
   When the launch of Putin's war coincided with the first day of the   
   Conservative Political Action conference in late February, a dizzying   
   ideological switchback began. Speakers who had declared just days or   
   hours earlier that they didn't care about the fate of Ukraine were   
   rapidly forced to recalibrate. Fox News' Tucker Carlson, who in 2019   
   declared he was "root[ing] for Russia" in its conflict with Ukraine,   
   was compelled to recant, at least temporarily. In Europe, Hungarian   
   Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, who had celebrated his long and fond   
   relationship with Putin in Moscow just weeks before Russia invaded,   
   issued a tepid condemnation. (Hungary is a member state of both the EU   
   and NATO, though its relationship with both is tense.)   
      
   At least initially, on the broader, more ideological level, there was   
   a sense that Russia's aggression — and Putin's claims that he was   
   fighting not just Ukraine but the whole of the "degenerate" West —   
   would engender a rebuke of the "illiberal" populist movements that   
   have swept far-right leaders into power around the world.   
      
   As the Washington Post editorial board put it this week, Putin had   
   launched two wars, the second being a war of ideas over the   
   international illiberal agenda Russia has helped lead. Or as columnist   
   Brad Littlejohn wrote at The American Conservative, "behind the   
   battles being waged on the plains of Ukraine was a deeper battle over   
   the narrative that would frame Russia's invasion, the lessons the West   
   must learn from it, and the vision for a future Europe that ought to   
   emerge on the other side of this crisis."   
      
   One contingent on the right that might have seemed particularly   
   vulnerable to this reordering of the political arena are the National   
   Conservatives: a relatively new international right-wing coalition   
   that seeks to rehabilitate the idea of nationalism as a virtue and to   
   oppose the emphasis on individual freedom and pluralism in classical   
   liberalism — meaning the libertarian, small-L liberalism that   
   "mainstream" conservatives used to embrace — as incompatible with   
   traditional values.   
      
   For the last several years, the "NatCons," who held a high-profile   
   meeting in Orlando last November that drew numerous conservative   
   intellectuals and politicians, have labored to combine right-wing   
   social mores, public religiosity and newly interventionist economic   
   policies into a movement better positioned for a populist age. In that   
   effort, they've frequently looked to Orbán as inspiration, especially   
   for the way he has wielded authoritarian measures toward   
   traditionalist ends, even as Orbán has clearly been looking to Russia.   
      
   At their recent conference, the NatCons pivoted to the mind-bending   
   claim that Ukraine's struggle embodies right-wing nationalism, not   
   "Western liberal values."   
      
   Yet when the NatCons gathered several weeks ago in Brussels, for their   
   fifth international conference, the dominant message of the speakers   
   was not reassessment or remorse, but vindication. Not because of any   
   overt or coded sympathy for Russian aggression — the speakers were so   
   uniformly vitriolic in condemning the invasion that conservative   
   writer Rod Dreher, another presenter, noted it was "almost impossible   
   to dissent from anti-Russian maximalism" — but rather because of their   
   ambitious and perhaps mind-bending claim that Ukraine's struggle   
   against an invading army embodied their values, not those of the   
   democratic center or left.   
      
   One former European Parliament member from the U.K., Brigadier   
   Geoffrey Charles van Orden, claimed, citing an unnamed observer in   
   Ukraine, that there were no evident "Western liberal values behind the   
   noble Ukrainian struggle," which was rooted in centuries of Ukrainian   
   nationalist patriotism instead. Another speaker, former Hungarian   
   diplomat Attila Demkó, suggested that a woke Western fixation on   
   "micro-aggressions" had left Europe too soft to anticipate a   
   macro-aggressor like Putin.   
      
   Chris DeMuth, former president of the American Enterprise Institute   
   and chair of the 2021 National Conservatism conference, opened the   
   gathering (in a speech later adapted for a Wall Street Journal op-ed),   
   by arguing that "the free world has fallen prey to certain soft   
   conceits which Putin and his ilk are right to see as weaknesses."   
   While "experts claimed that nation states and borders were barbaric   
   vestiges and global bureaucracies could usher in peace and harmony,"   
   he continued, "it turned out that we had actual barbarians in the here   
   and now, and that nations with borders were essential to peace and   
   harmony."   
      
   All told, reflected conference organizer Yoram Hazony, it was "not a   
   bad moment" for nationalism. Hazony, an Israeli political theorist and   
   chair of the Edmund Burke Foundation, is not just the chief organizer   
   of the NatCon conference series, but one of the main architects of the   
   movement, as author of the 2018 book "The Virtue of Nationalism." For   
   years, Hazony said, critics of his movement had argued there was   
   little difference between nationalism and imperialism. But the Ukraine   
   war, he said, had demolished that argument.   
      
   Nationalists, he said, looked at Russia's invasion and recognized it   
   as unjust, proclaiming "that a people has a right, if it's capable of   
   asserting that right, to be able to chart its own course." By   
   contrast, "imperialists" — a category Hazony defines in his own terms   
   — viewed the idea of independent nations dismissively, asking, "What   
   difference do the borders really make? And why should everybody have   
   their own laws when we know what the right laws are?"   
      
   You may guess where this is going. As Hazony continued: "There are   
      
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   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)