The Anti-Anti-Russia Thinkers Need to Think More Clearly (web version)

 

The Anti-Anti-Russia Thinkers Need to Think More Clearly

We have probably seen the last debate between major party candidates. The Republican National Committee voted unanimously to end its cooperation with the Commission on Presidential Debates, thereby making it nearly impossible that any such event will be held in 2024, or at any time, until the party’s ideological character changes.

It’s become fashionable to dismiss the presidential debates as a cheap spectacle. And it is true that presidential politics can survive without them. (The first one took place in 1960, and they have only been held regularly since 1976.) Nonetheless, I believe we’ll miss them as a civic ritual. The debates forced candidates to engage with each other’s arguments and created a situation that forced voters to watch the issues being discussed in a forum outside of the curated bubbles so many prefer, in which the opposing party’s views are ignored or caricatured.

You might wonder why Republicans would be killing debates now when they insist the president is a senile, doddering half-wit barely able to form a coherent sentence. Shouldn’t they want to expose him in a televised prime-time face-off?

The answer is that Republicans believe the news media inherently protects Democrats from being exposed the way Republicans believe they should be. The conventional wisdom on the right is that Chris Wallace — yes, the Chris Wallace who worked for Fox News — actively worked to subvert Donald Trump by attempting to enforce the time limits that both parties had agreed upon but which Donald Trump blatantly ignored.

Chris Wallace    Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photo: Joe Raedle/Getty Images

The conservative media’s response to the 2020 debate focused on Wallace. “Chris Wallace Just Gave The Most Embarrassing Moderator Performance In History,” cried The Federalist. “Chris Wallace, over the course of the night, has moved from moderator to debater,” complained Ben Shapiro. Biden’s failure to appear the way he appears in conservative media — as a nincompoop stumbling his way through selectively edited clips — could only be explained by the debate moderator’s liberal bias.

I’ve never believed the charge of liberal media bias is wholly imaginary. As I’ve written before, there are many areas in which the national media myopically reflects the perspective of non-elderly urban college graduates.

But the Republican Party’s problem with the media can’t be resolved by a more rigorous application of traditional journalistic standards because the party’s problem is with the standards themselves. The party’s general strategic orientation has moved away from engagement with the mainstream media altogether — conservatives used to assiduously “work the refs” — and is now based on discrediting it entirely.

Trump, in some ways, is a holdover in his continued interest in securing good coverage in the mainstream media. Ron DeSantis largely ignores mainstream news media altogether except as a target for abuse to perform dominance. Republicans believe they can effectively compete while getting out their message entirely through party-controlled news organs.

Debates require reporters — real ones, not Sean Hannity — to play a mediating role. There’s simply no role for debates within the party’s current posture toward the media.

The red-brown magazine Compact, which Eric Levitz analyzed sharply not long after its recent launch, has become a center for a certain brand of anti-anti-Russia sentiment. It recently sponsored an open letter denouncing the West’s response to Russia’s invasion without either supporting the invasion or stating precisely what the West should be doing instead. (The signatories “urge the Biden administration to focus on an immediate humanitarian ceasefire,” though, of course, Russia, not the United States, began the hostilities and is the party currently refusing to halt them.)

Lacking any coherent policy of their own, the anti-anti-Russia intellectuals have focused instead on refuting the idea that NATO should establish a no-fly zone. I agree substantively that a no-fly zone would pose an unacceptable risk of direct conflict with Russia. Alas, so does the Biden administration and every NATO state.

But the anti-anti-Russians loathe Biden and the foreign-policy apparatus that supports his policy of arming Ukraine without directly intervening. And so the anti-anti-Russians need to present the no-fly zone NATO will not establish as some kind of nebulous consensus against which they are bravely dissenting.

“A NATO no-fly zone over Ukraine would lead to a direct and possibly apocalyptic confrontation with nuclear Russia,” warns Sohrab Ahmari. “Nonetheless, some hawks continue to press for it. When even The Guardian publishes claims that a NFZ ‘shouldn’t be off the table,’ it becomes clear that a deep consensus is in formation.”

Matt Taibbi warns that it is becoming conventional wisdom that the United States should risk nuclear war by provoking Russia:

“Headlines of the ‘We’ll take those odds’ variety are springing up everywhere, from the Seattle Times (’Atrocities change the nuclear weapons calculus’) to Radio Free Europe (‘Former NATO Commander Says Western Fears Of Nuclear War Are Preventing A Proper Response To Putin’) to Fox (which had on Sean Penn, of all people, to say to Sean Hannity, ‘Countries that have nuclear weapons can remain intimidated to use them, and we’re seeing that now with our own country’). This is fast becoming a bipartisan consensus.”

In sum, the examples they have mustered to prove this “consensus” are:

➽ One op-ed in The Guardian (which opposes a no-fly zone).

➽ The Seattle Times. (This example turns out to be not even the editorial position of the Seattle Times, Seattle’s second-most-prestigious local paper, but a syndicated columnist I’ve never heard of published in its columns.)

➽ One retired general.

➽ Actor Sean Penn.

If this is “fast becoming a bipartisan consensus,” I wonder what slow would look like.

Samuel Moyn, also a signatory to the Compact letter, takes a different approach to his anti-anti-Russia stance. Yes, he concedes, the invasion is bad. But: “Its most damaging legacy may be the self-righteous return to the nostrums of a failed western-style internationalism—one that seeks to defend our flawed democracies as they are, rather than trying to improve them.”

If there is any evidence whatsoever that the war has come at the expense of improving democracy, Moyn does not provide it. Instead, he simply treats this trade-off as an obvious fact he needn’t establish and can rest his argument on the premise that support for Ukraine’s defense weakened democratization at home.

Moyn asserts this through juxtaposition, saying, “As military spending has risen, social spending has stalled, and [Biden] has given up making necessary fixes to the antique voting system that Trump exploited in his quixotic attempt at a ‘coup.’” But Biden gave up on democratization because he couldn’t get the votes in the Senate. You could blame Biden for failing to mind-control either ten Senate Republican opponents of democratization or Joe Manchin into abandoning his misguided refusal to alter the filibuster, though I don’t find that persuasive. Even if you do blame Biden for the demise of the democratization push, it occurred long before the Ukraine invasion.

Of course, Moyn, a leftist, has different ideas than a liberal like Biden about what strengthening democracy would entail. Probably he considers Democrats’ plan to protect voting rights, grant D.C. statehood, end gerrymandering, and so on insufficient or even worthless. But this would make his argument even more strange. If Democrats were never true allies of democratization, what opportunity was lost by rhetorically and militarily defending Ukraine?

Moyn appears to be moved by a resentment that he cannot articulate into a coherent policy-based objection and is channeling it into an unrelated issue. If Biden had announced that Ukraine’s democracy is pathetic and Russia is free to swallow it whole, the cause of deepening democracy in the United States would have been advanced not one iota.

I imagine there is some vestigial Cold War anti-anti-communist reflex at work. Moyn may still associate defenses of democracy with anti-communism and oppose them on this basis, even after the communist target has disappeared and been replaced with a kleptocratic gangster state that pays not even lip service to socialism. But I am not his analyst. All I can say is that his argument makes no sense, and the anti-anti-Russia thinkers need to think more clearly.

Ron DeSantis’s supporters in the highest corners of the conservative media have committed themselves to ignoring his growing support for the anti-vaccine wing. (Anti-vaxxers, on the other hand, openly celebrate DeSantis as an ally.) An important part of their denial has been to cite Florida’s vaccination statistics, which they present as an all-purpose rebuttal. Who could complain about Desantis’s (many, many) steps to foment anti-vaccine myths when the statistics show Florida has a high vaccination rate?

This is why I highlighted reporting by the Palm Beach Post finding, as many officials suspected, that Florida’s vaccine statistics are wrong. This reporting knocks out the legs beneath the defense that DeSantis’s campaign to sow distrust couldn’t matter.

Dan McLaughlin, one of DeSantis’s many enthusiasts in the media, has produced a response running to thousands of words yet still coming nowhere close to the point. McLaughlin insists that other states have problems with their vaccine data, too, and that Florida’s errors are not intentional.

What he fails to acknowledge is, first, that National Review had previously been insisting Florida’s statistics had to be accurate because they were in the New York Times. (The Times is filled with rabid partisans, you see, so they would be looking to smear DeSantis.) He likewise fails to acknowledge his previous smear that anybody questioning the accuracy of Florida’s vaccine statistics was a loony conspiracy theorist.

McLaughlin, now conceding the error in the statistics and acting as if this was never in question, insists, “It is bizarre to argue that this somehow proves that the state’s government is conducting a ‘war on vaccines.’” But nobody is saying that! The charge is that DeSantis is conducting a war on vaccines by taking steps such as, among many others, appearing at a rally with anti-vaxxers and appointing a vaccine skeptic, Joseph Ladapo, as his state’s chief health officer. (Ladapo made Florida the only state not to recommend a COVID vaccine for people 18 and under.) The name Ladapo does not appear anywhere in McLaughlin’s extremely long article.

It seems intuitive to me that DeSantis’s effort to court the anti-vaccine movement is extremely harmful and also broadly indicative of his strategy of courting the right-wing fringe in general. His defenders kept insisting the charge was unfair because Florida’s New York Times–verified vaccine figures were good. Now they concede the numbers are inaccurate. So can they actually acknowledge DeSantis is actively courting the anti-vaccine movement and taking concrete steps to undermine vaccinations?