A Parcel of Rogues

 The news media seems largely to have met last night's GOP primary debate with a shrug. The consensus is that it was a dull affair that shed little new light on most of the candidates. I largely agree with that assessment, but with one glaring exception. And to me, it is such an important exception that I almost wonder if we were even watching the same debate. For even if the candidates largely echoed each other on most of the issues up for discussion, they divided in very significant ways over foreign policy. There were basically two sides on stage: there were the ordinary old-fashioned sort of excessively-hawkish-but-at-least-pro-democracy-and-pro-American Republicans, like Nikki Haley; and then there was the terrifying emissary from the party's Putinist future, the flabbergastingly unprincipled Vivek Ramaswamy. 

The news media did not even begin to do justice to the magnitude of the weirdness and eeriness of the views Ramaswamy was spouting on the stage. Here's the New York Times's sanguine recap of the Ukraine segment of the debate, for instance: after describing Nikki Haley's positions, they then summarize: "Most of the other candidates gave versions of the same responses." Well, yes, I suppose this is true in a numerical sense. The majority of the other candidates sounded similar to Haley. But one of them—Mr. Ramaswamy—presented such a frighteningly dissonant alternative that I would have thought it would surely be newsworthy. He went beyond repeating his now-familiar opposition to further U.S. military aid to Ukraine, and began actually parroting Kremlin talking points about the Ukrainian government and the country's eastern provinces. 

Haley, at least, took notice of this, saying Putin would be smiling to have the likes of Ramaswamy in the White House. But the media barely seems to have picked up on it. It is as if the Manchurian Candidate had let slip his true identity in a moment of wandering attention and simply no one noticed. Nor did Ramaswamy stop with selling out Ukraine. He went on to likewise differentiate himself from the rest of the party on Israel. Yet many journalists seem to have missed this key moment as well. "The candidates were largely aligned on support for Israel in its war with Hamas," says the Wall Street Journal. Umm—no they weren't! Or again, if most of them were, Ramaswamy was a telling exception. He is taking his "America First"-ism to a new extreme: opposing even U.S. support for our longstanding ally Israel as it faces an existential threat. 

It's worth emphasizing too that Ramaswamy's positions on these issues cannot be chalked up to good faith disagreements over strategy—still less to humanitarian concerns about the cost of war. There is of course a version of opposition to U.S. military aid to Ukraine, for instance, that is founded in a broader distrust of military solutions to global problems—one that accepts the premise that Putin's invasion is wrong, but which still prefers a flawed and hastily-settled peace to a more principled but longer-lasting war. I could respect such a view, and I've even forwarded it myself. 

But, whatever the merits of such a view might be, it is manifestly not the vision Ramaswamy was offering on stage last night. He simply does not accept the premise that there is anything bad about Putin's aggression. His opposition to Ukraine seems to stem quite simply from a love of Putin's autocracy and a hatred for our ally's democracy. As soon as the topic came up, after all, he spouted attack lines and propaganda channelled straight from Russian state-owned media: falsehoods about Ukraine's eastern provinces belonging rightly to Russia, and decontextualized attack lines about the country's government that are lifted from Russian-sponsored social media accounts, and have recently been promoted online by the likes of Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk as well. 

Let us note in passing that Ramaswamy's opposition to sending military aid to Israel likewise aligns perfectly with Putin's foreign policy. This on its own is probably sufficient to explain why Ramaswamy and the rest of the vanguard of extreme MAGA—Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Elon Musk, etc.—have suddenly soured on Israel. But we can also rightly suspect that there is a strong element of antisemitism involved. This is of course a group of pundits who court a Neo-Nazi fanbase online and are otherwise constantly flirting with the extreme antisemitic outer fringe of the Right. Put the two forces together—the MAGA movement's sheer love of Putin and its increasingly overt embrace of antisemitism—and their opposition to U.S. support for our Israeli allies is overdetermined at this point. 

Plus, Israel is a democracy—however flawed. And MAGA hates democracy, and aims more-or-less explicitly at this point at turning the United States into a Trump-led dictatorship. 

Why does the media not find any of this more strange or newsworthy? Perhaps because Ramaswamy's positions were the minority viewpoint on stage, and therefore mainstream journalists falsely assume they are the minority position within the party. 

But if they still think Ramaswamy speaks for only an irrelevant handful of the MAGA true believers, after everything that has happened, they are woefully out of touch. It is really Haley, Scott, DeSantis and Christie who have no base of support and represent precious few people within the Republican Party now. Ramaswamy is the voice of the future. On Israel, as we have said, he is in lockstep agreement with Elon Musk and Tucker Carlson. And if people think these figures are less important to the future ideological evolution of the MAGA movement than a bunch of GOP primary candidates currently polling in the single digits, they really don't understand the nature of the political movement that Trump has created. The Haleys and Christies of the world, god love them, are going the way of the Pences. They are out; Ramaswamy and Musk are in. 

Listening to Ramaswamy's hectoring diatribes, doing Putin's propaganda work for him by broadcasting Kremlin talking points out to an unwary public and an oblivious journalistic class—who may well come to believe them simply through having no prior inoculation to their content—I had a moment of empathic connection to what people on the right and center-left used to feel about far-left intellectuals parroting the Soviet line in yester-century. I had a sudden glimpse into what it means to fear that one is about to be sold out as a nation. 

For perhaps the first time in my life, I realized what conservatives and Cold War liberals were so worried about, decades ago. It really is possible that a country could fall to its adversaries not through being defeated on the field of battle, but through betrayal from its own elected leaders and chattering punditry. The United States, after all, is not at risk of losing the struggle against Putin's invasion of Ukraine on military lines; nor is it unable to continue to support Israel's self-defense for any financial or capacity reason. The United States will not run out of dollars or missiles. But it might run out of political will. It might elect people who arbitrarily and cravenly decide to roll over to Putin and Hamas and our other anti-democratic adversaries—as Ramaswamy is pretty much explicitly telling us he would do in office. 

When I heard Ramaswamy prating away up there along these lines, about how we should abandon our allies in Ukraine and Israel and let their foes run over them unimpeded, the lines of E.E. Cummings's poem about the Soviet invasion of Hungary came back to mind. (Cummings, recall, accused the U.S. leadership of the time of forfeiting through cowardice the heritage of liberty by leaving the Hungarian democrats to be slaughtered.) Yet, even more forcefully, another poem about political treachery and cravenness elbowed its way back into my mind: it was Robert Burns's "Such a Parcel of Rogues in a Nation." Specifically, it was Burns's line about being "bought and sold for English gold" that flashed through my mind. I suppose in our case, it would be "Putin's gold," but the point is the same. 

Thinking back to Ramaswamy's performance, I kept thinking: here is a bought man. And he is not alone. The whole MAGA wing of the Republican Party, and its punditry, has been bought. Putin is winning: and he is winning not through force of arms, but through corrupting our politics and exhausting the West's willingness to put up any sustained defense of democratic institutions. He is thinking he can simply wait out American democracy. Give it another year to the day, and perhaps it will fall, due to the election of a second Trump administration, complete with Vivek or someone just like him in the cabinet. Putin would then no longer have to defeat the Ukrainians on the battlefield. He could simply wait until the newly-MAGAfied U.S.A. abandoned its allies, withdrew all support from Ukraine, and joined up with Putin instead. 

Tucker Carlson is already pressing for it, seeding Kremlin propaganda; Elon Musk is helping him, promoting the same posts on his timeline and ensuring they are amplified across the platform-formerly-known-as-Twitter that he controls. Tucker then interviews Vivek, who parrots the same lines, and Musk promotes that too. And round and round it goes. 

Bought and sold, they all are; bought and sold. If not for gold, then for power and influence or just sheer vindictiveness and loathing of free institutions. And these are the politicians with the words "America" and "Great" forever on their hypocritical tongues! The same people with the temerity to describe themselves as "patriots" and lovers of "America" in fact are the ones now readying the path to craven submission to U.S. adversaries and a total negation of our democratic way of life. 

I went back to look up the Robert Burns poem, and I found it even more apropos than I had recalled:

What force or guile could not subdue, 

Thro' many warlike ages, 

Is wrought now by a coward few, 

For hireling traitor's wages. 

[...]

But pith and power, till my last hour, 

I'll mak this declaration; 

We're bought and sold for English gold- 

Such a parcel of rogues in a nation!