What does Republican nominee Donald Trump see in Russian President Vladimir Putin?
“Donald Trump is not backing down from his praise of Vladimir Putin — even if his embrace of the Russian president is sparking media criticism and causing his GOP colleagues obvious unease,” writes Niall Stanage in The Hill.
{mosads}Yeah, but Trump does not back down. It is part of his WWE-inspired public persona. It keeps his name in headlines for a few days more when it would have otherwise passed. It is what he does. Plus, it gives the impression of being a “strong leader.” Putin does not back down; he is a “strong leader.” Trump does not back down.
Tough-guy actors Mickey Rourke and Steven Seagal love Putin.
“They’re not alone in the film world, though, when it comes to hearting Vladimir,” reported The Guardian in 2014. “Gérard Depardieu, who became a Russian citizen early last year, is a long-term fan, having gone so far as to compare the Russian leader to the pope, and the pair’s bromance stretches back years.”
Trump likes him for the same reason: He is a tough guy. But there is more to Putin than that and Depardieu’s analogy to the pope is interesting.
There is something more, way more important to why Putin appears to be finding Republican allies in America today. Conservative Christians have taken to Putin in recent times because he is a Christian leader.
Under Putin’s watch, Russia has become a Christian country. And you cannot say as much about America. America is a secular, constitutional democracy with a lot of Christians in it, but that’s not the same thing. Christian and all religious practice in America is protected by the First Amendment. But in our political times, it appears to many Christian conservatives that this is only window dressing and what the Supreme Court decides, however hostile it may be to dogma and the orthodoxies common to all world religions, will dominate.
And when Chief Justice John Roberts asked, “Who do we think we are?” when the Supreme Court legalized gay marriage in all 50 states, it didn’t exactly instill confidence in the process.
Today in Russia, Christianity is primary, even culturally dominant, in the official political culture. As Wikipedia explains:
[A] 1997 law naming Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and Judaism as important in Russian history. Orthodox Christianity … is Russia’s traditional and largest religion, deemed a part of Russia’s “historical heritage” in the law passed in 1997.
It is an extraordinary transition from the horrors of totalitarianism under the Stalinist regime just decades before and it is singularly the work-in-progress of Putin.
I commented on God and Putin in April 2014:
“Russia is remaking itself as the leader of the anti-Western world,” says author Masha Gessen, who has written a book on Russian President Vladimir Putin. “But the war to be waged is not with rockets,” writes conservative columnist Pat Buchanan. “It is a cultural, social, moral war where Russia’s role, in Putin’s words, is to ‘prevent movement backward and downward, into chaotic darkness and a return to a primitive state.'”
Buchanan said he was “startled to read” back then that among the World Council of Families’ “ten best trends” in the world in 2013, number one was “Russia Emerges as Pro-Family Leader.'”
“While the other super-powers march to a pagan world-view,” Buchanan quotes the WCF’s Allan Carlson, “Russia is defending Judeo-Christian values” …
The West, says Buchanan, has capitulated to “a sexual revolution of easy divorce, rampant promiscuity, pornography, homosexuality, feminism, abortion, same-sex marriage, euthanasia, assisted suicide — the displacement of Christian values by Hollywood values.”
“In the new ideological Cold War,” he asks, “whose side is God on now?”
A faith-based worldview rises today in Russia, in Israel and elsewhere since the fall of the Soviet Union in 1991 and as a political force in America as well. Constitutionalists and “Tenthers” (as I have been called) must understand that constitutional government is not an end in itself but the beginning; the lawful framework for a better life for the state and for the individual. But it is only a structural matrix. A greater or “higher” moral center must be found and forged within the constitutional network, be it Torah-based, dharma-based, Christian-based or other, for the state and individual to awaken to its full destiny.
That is where the “new nationalism” rising today will lead: to rich, holistic internal cultures, to a return to “heritage,” to local solutions and historic traditions of faith to replace utopian globalist abstractions that have insidiously escaped our grip in the recent century. It has already begun in Russia today and is beginning across Europe in Poland, Czech Republic, Hungary and Slovenia — the countries of the Visegrad Group — the four of which have “common roots in diverse religious traditions, which they wish to preserve and further strengthen.” It begins today in Britain after the historic Brexit vote. This new direction is certain to spread across Europe and likely elsewhere.
For whatever else might be said about him, Donald Trump intuitively gets this. And so does Vladimir Putin.
Quigley is a prize-winning writer who has worked more than 35 years as a book and magazine editor, political commentator and reviewer. He lives in New Hampshire with his wife and four children. Contact him at quigley1985@gmail.com.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the views of The Hill.