For my sins, I still occasionally check in on that podcast I was ranting about a few weeks ago—the one that features a couple of leftist bros I used to admire from the good old days of the fight against the neocons.
This time, they were out with a new episode reporting on a bunch of corruption scandals and mob hits in Ukraine (some with shadowy alleged ties to state security forces), which they claim are being under-reported in the Western press.
As always, they are somewhat coy about why they are telling us all this. But it's hard to avoid the impression that there is some ideological project at work here.
It's the same genre of left-wing writing and podcasting that is always going on about Ukraine's Neo-Nazi Azov battalion—or the role some far-right groups played in the Maidan protests. My reaction is always the same: Agreed, that's bad; but what exactly are these things supposed to prove?
At worst, they are trying to insinuate that Putin's invasion is actually justified.
At best, they are trying to hint merely that Ukraine is something less than a perfect democracy; and thereby subtly to establish a moral equivalence between them and Putin, such that the war between those countries seems less like a clash between victim and aggressor—and more like an ongoing conflict between two equally corrupt powers (which is how Trump and some of his far-right mouthpieces also occasionally try to frame it—remember when Trump was calling Zelensky a "dictator"?).
I'm reminded here again of how Soviet apologists wrote in the aftermath of the Hitler-Stalin Pact.
Undoubtedly, Soviet fellow-travelers were faced with something of a dilemma in 1939—how, when they'd spent much of the past decade campaigning against fascism, were they suddenly supposed to preach quietism and neutrality in the face of Hitler's march into Poland?
"[A]fter having preached the crusade," as a Party member puts it in Arthur Koestler's Arrival and Departure—the new line that all good comrades were supposed to take on Hitler's aggression "was not easy to understand."
Faced with this challenge, some fellow-travelers went the route of saying: "sure, Hitler is bad; but the pre-invasion Polish government were hardly angels. This is just a war of one pack of crooks against another."
As one of these Party sympathizers wrote to Koestler, in partial mitigation of the Hitler-Stalin alliance: how could one let oneself be persuaded, he asked, that Poland, "the country which was the first to introduce yellow ghetto benches in its schools, and to beat Socialists to death slowly in the torture cells of Lodz and Brest-Litovsk, as living in a state of perfect democracy"?
The podcasters I was listening to seemed to be hinting at an argument along essentially the same lines: Ukraine is no "perfect democracy." It has a Neo-Nazi battalion. It has corruption and organized crime.
To all of which, I say—I agree that's terrible; by all means, reform and criticize and improve Ukrainian democracy! But I can't see how this justifies a policy of neutrality in the war with Russia and opposing U.S. aid to the Ukrainian cause.
Two things, after all, can be true. Ukraine can be a flawed democracy and still the victim of an unjust act of aggression. The country might be imperfect and something other than a choir of angels without thereby becoming nothing but a gang of crooks who are morally indistinguishable from the Russian dictator who is invading them.
As Koestler tries to respond to his fellow-traveler acquaintance (as recorded in his memoir Scum of the Earth): "repeatedly in history men have had to fight a merely defensive battle, to preserve a state of affairs which was bad against a menace which was worse."
This, in substance, is my position on the Ukraine war. The U.S. should keep sending aid to Ukraine to fend off Putin because the current state of Ukrainian democracy and society may be bad—but a victory for Putin would be worse.
This too is my attitude to the pre-Trump democracy we had here in the United States—which is often subject to the same kinds of critiques from the same kinds of leftists. Of it too, I say: yes, it was imperfect. All your criticisms are valid. But, in general, I believe we should try to make things better, not worse. And so, the correct response to discovering something bad is to try to improve it—not to use what's bad to excuse or mitigate an even greater evil.
Of both American democracy and Ukrainian democracy, we can say that they are "imperfect democracies," to use Dwight Macdonald's phrase. But better an imperfect democracy, he wrote, than a "perfect tyranny." Better—as Arthur Koestler put it—a "half-truth" than a "total lie." If we have discovered our democracies are imperfect, let us fix them—rather than throw them out and let the despots take the reins.
Our Western democracies may be flawed, after all—but that is not the same thing as saying that they are morally equivalent to the alternative. "Ours is an imperial state, like theirs [...] a militarist state" wrote Macdonald, at the dawn of the Cold War; but that doesn't make our government the same as the alternatives.
"The difference is partly one of degree," Macdonald wrote. While the "USA bribes nations with massive capital exports [...] USSR absorbs them by force (the Baltic nations) or subjugates them by installing a Communist police state (the rest of Eastern Europe)."
Whereas the British Empire for the most part engaged in (admittedly long-overdue) voluntary decolonization in the postwar era, the Soviet Union "has added vast new satrapies since 1945," as Macdonald puts it. Yet somehow—through the magic of ideology—it was the Soviets who became "gilded" in the world's eyes in this same era "with the moral splendor of anti-imperialism."
So it is with our Putin-curious leftists and fellow-travelers today. There is an extraordinary "double standard" at work, as Macdonald observed. While Putin has added "vast new satrapies" in the last two decades—Crimea, South Ossetia, occupied sections of the Donbas which he has purported to annex—a subset of our leftists continue to make excuses for his actions in the name, perversely, of "anti-imperialism"!
Yes, the U.S. engaged in foreign influence operations of our own, even in the pre-Trump heyday of the liberal "rules-based order" and all that. We are no angels. And Trump—who many of these same "anti-alarmist leftists" are often so quick to relativize and excuse—has certainly made us a whole lot less angelic of late (we can now put up two U.S.-led unprovoked invasions just since the start of 2026 against Putin's unprovoked invasion of Ukraine).
But that doesn't mean that our constitutional democracy is not worth defending against people who would make it into something even worse.
The same can be said of Ukraine. I hear any criticism anyone wants to make of the status quo in that country. I have no wish to defend it. But if it is as flawed as people say—let us improve it; not level down by wishing victory to a Russian autocrat who is kidnapping Ukrainian children and bombing civilian areas to the ground!
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