Opinion | Putin and the Right's Tough-Guy Problem - The New York Times - 0 views
www.nytimes.com/...putin-ukraine-toughness.html
toxic masculinity foreign policy putin cult right-wing
shared by Javier E on 24 Feb 23
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there are significant factions in U.S. politics — a small group on the left, a much more significant bloc on the right — that not only oppose Western support for Ukraine but also clearly want to see Russia win.
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Putin, by contrast, very much is the subject of a personality cult not just in Russia but also on the American right and has been for years
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I’d argue that many people on the right equate being powerful with being a swaggering tough guy and sneer at anything — like intellectual openness and respect for diversity — that might interfere with the swagger.
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Putin was their idea of what a powerful man should look like, and Russia, with its muscleman military vision, their idea of a powerful country.
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National power in the modern world rests mainly on economic strength and technological capacity, not military prowess.
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Why has Russia’s military failed so spectacularly? Because modern wars aren’t won by strutting guys flexing their biceps. They’re won mainly through logistics, technology and intelligence (in both the military and the ordinary senses)
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Just to be clear, wars are still hell and can’t be won, even with superior weapons, without immense courage and endurance. But these are also qualities Ukrainians — men and women — turn out to have in remarkable abundance.
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The key to understanding right-wingers’ growing Ukraine rage is that Russia’s failures don’t just show that a leader they idolized has feet of clay. They also show that their whole tough-guy view about the nature of power is wrong. And they’re having a hard time coping.
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None of this means that Russia can’t eventually conquer Ukraine. If it does, however, it will, in part, be because America’s Putin fans force a cutoff of crucial aid. And if this happens, it will be because the U.S. right can’t stand the idea of a world in which woke doesn’t mean weak and men who pose as tough guys are actually losers.