Jacobin
By Branko Marcetic
Feb. 10, 2022
After weeks on the sidelines, Bernie Sanders and other progressives
are taking a forceful stand on the Ukraine crisis. They’re navigating
a dangerous climate created by mainstream media — including liberal
outlet MSNBC — that casts antiwar opinion as disloyalty.
Yesterday, Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) weighed in on the standoff in
Ukraine with the most comprehensive stance he’s taken on the conflict
so far. Liberals, progressives, and socialists should all pay
attention.
Writing in the Guardian, Sanders places the blame for the crisis
firmly at the feet of the “liar and demagogue” Vladimir Putin and his
“gang of oligarchs,” but makes clear his unease with the “familiar
drumbeats in Washington” and the “simplistic refusal to recognize the
complex roots of the tensions in the region.” Pointing to not just the
devastating potential of war in the region, but the ruinous ripple
effects that even just imposing sanctions would have on ordinary
people in Russia and throughout the world, he urges all parties to
“work hard to achieve a realistic and mutually agreeable resolution” —
starting with taking seriously the “legitimate concerns” in Moscow
about NATO’s eastward expansion.
“To put it simply, even if Russia was not ruled by a corrupt
authoritarian leader like Vladimir Putin, Russia, like the United
States, would still have an interest in the security policies of its
neighbors,” Sanders writes. “Does anyone really believe that the
United States would not have something to say if, for example, Mexico
was to form a military alliance with a US adversary?”
Sanders is treading a very fine line in making a point that was once
mainstream and common sense, but has in the current political climate
become unspeakable: that maybe the US policy of enlarging the
anti-Soviet military alliance right up to Russia’s borders has not
been particularly wise or reasonable — and may, in fact, be a root
cause of the current tensions.
Sanders’s op-ed comes as progressives in Congress have been
increasingly vocal against Washington escalation in Ukraine. Last
week, Representative Ilhan Omar (D-MT) warned the Democrats’ bill to
send $500 million worth of military aid to the country — coming at a
point when even the Biden administration is joining the rest of the
world in admitting a Russian invasion may not actually be imminent —
simply “escalates the conflict without deterring it effectively.” Two
weeks before that, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY)
cautioned that “there is not a military solution to this problem,”
warning it could spark an energy crisis, and blaming it all on a
military-industrial complex “starved of revenue” since the Afghanistan
pullout.
Statements like these carry more than a small amount of political
risk, which is maybe why they took so long to materialize among the
Congressional left. Progressive lawmakers have had to navigate the
Ukraine crisis in a world still infected with the post-2016 viral
cocktail of anti-Russian hysteria and McCarthyite-style accusations.
The Worst People in the World Have a Point
You only need to look at how the Democratic Party and its affiliates
spent the year so far responding to similar antiwar and de-escalatory
arguments. Disappointingly, these initially didn’t come from left-wing
or even liberal lawmakers and pundits, but from the Right side of the
political spectrum.
There was the New York Times’ Ross Douthat, who proposed an “ideal
retreat” for Washington that would see “NATO expansion permanently
tabled,” among other things. Former Trump official Michael Flynn, who
once upon a time appeared to have had surprisingly sensible foreign
policy views before the Internet drove him completely insane, wrote
that NATO’s eastward creep would be the “principal cause of a
devastating war.” More recently, Senator Josh Hawley (R-MO) has gone
further than any elected official, explicitly questioning the idea of
including Ukraine in NATO, and warning that “our interest is not so
strong” in Ukraine’s independence and sovereignty that it would
“justify committing the United States to go to war with Russia.”
But maybe most prominent of all has been Fox News’ Tucker Carlson, who
as far back as December 2021 was admonishing Republicans for goading
Biden into being more aggressive and using rhetoric that was “hotter
and crazier and more disconnected from reality.” Since then, he’s
continued to question Ukraine’s strategic value to the United States,
argue against war with Russia, and compare, accurately, Ukraine’s
entry into NATO to Mexico entering a military alliance with China.
Carlson’s broadcasts reportedly led some Republicans to adopt his same
position on the Ukraine crisis, a notable shift for a party that has
typically never met a war it didn’t want to charge into.
Carlson is, of course, a charlatan who, for all his populist rhetoric,
is a conventional neoliberal Republican on almost every issue. But he
also happens to be completely right on this particular matter. And
it’s telling that even as Carlson continued to broadcast vile agitprop
calling for the banishment of the homeless and fearmongering about
immigrants, it was his entirely sensible position on Ukraine that got
the most aggressive widespread pushback from the liberal-Democratic
side of the spectrum.
Late Show host Stephen Colbert accused Flynn of using Putin’s “exact
argument,” and called Carlson an “apologist” for a “murderous
dictator.” Carlson’s points were “in perfect alignment with the way
Russia’s beleaguered neighbor is being smeared on Kremlin-funded state
television,” wrote the Daily Beast, noting what it called “the tactic
of terrorizing American audiences with the possibility of nuclear
war,” as if this were a messaging strategy and not an objective fact.
Even pieces of ostensibly straight reporting framed such statements as
mere repetition of Kremlin propaganda. (Newsweek headline: “Tucker
Carlson Backs Russia, Compares Ukraine Joining NATO With China
Controlling Mexico.”)
It’s been much the same on CNN, where host Brianna Keilar accused
Carlson of having a “pro-Russia stance.” “Tucker’s propaganda is very
convenient for Russia,” the Daily Beast author told Reliable Sources,
ostensibly the network’s media criticism show. Ronald Reagan’s son
dipped into the same playbook on the network that the Right once used
to attack Reagan himself for turning to diplomacy with the Soviet
Union, suggesting that Carlson was one of a “number of people who
would take Vladimir Putin’s side over our own president.”
“I don’t want to throw around words like ‘traitor’ or ‘traitorism,’
but that’s coming pretty close,” he said. The apple clearly doesn’t
fall far from the tree.
But it’s on MSNBC where this kind of rhetoric is on overdrive, with
talking heads accusing Carlson of “shilling for Vladimir Putin,”
broadcasting a “very pro-Kremlin message,” of “doing the work of the
autocratic Russian government,” feeding people “Russian propaganda,”
and “rooting for Russia.” New Jersey Democrat Tom Malinowski came on
to complain that “I started getting calls from my constituents,
basically, saying: I have been watching Tucker and we’re being way too
hard on Russia. And why should we go fight a war for this unimportant
country, Ukraine, that’s far away?” The horror!
Accusing Carlson of “pushing this kind of Russian message,” MSNBC’s
Ari Melber warned that while it may be “a dovish message and it may be
the foreign policy many would agree with,” people should know it’s not
the truth. For Melber, and on MSNBC as a whole, the reality presented
is one in which the Ukraine issue is a battle of democracy versus
autocracy, NATO has nothing to do with what’s going on, all of this is
entirely due to Putin’s domestic political concerns and imperial
mindset — vast oversimplifications that don’t really hold up if you
know the slightest bit of the country’s recent history.
There’s almost no alternative to these views on the network. MSNBC’s
long-serving progressive voice, Chris Hayes, has tended to avoid the
issue, and when he has tackled it, he’s interviewed figures like
Senator Chris Murphy (D-CT) — a man who stood shoulder to shoulder
with one of Ukraine’s leading fascists, as he announced his support
for the revolution that helped bring us to this crisis in the first
place. About the only exception is Mehdi Hasan, who has challenged
some of his more hawkish guests, and has said that Hawley has “got a
point” on explicitly limiting NATO expansion.
Unfortunately though, this reckless type of rhetoric is now more and
more seeping out from the toxic soup of cable news. The St Louis
Post-Dispatch, Hawley’s hometown paper, has now run two pieces by its
editorial board attacking him and Carlson from the right for being
insufficiently hawkish on Ukraine, accusing them of a “pro-Russia
stand,” criticizing Hawley’s “naivete regarding Russia” and for not
understanding “why containing Russian expansionism remains such a big
deal.” These op-eds have, in turn, been celebrated by even progressive
outlets like Raw Story and Huffington Post. A letter writer likewise
accused Carlson of disloyalty, and for siding with a “totalitarian
adversary” instead of a “liberal democracy” — something Ukraine most
certainly is not.
Now, the government is getting in on the action, too. Press Secretary
Jen Psaki accused Hawley of “parroting the talking points of Russian
propagandist leaders” and charged that anyone doing so is “not aligned
with longstanding bipartisan American values, which is to stand up for
the sovereignty of countries like Ukraine.” Even more shockingly, when
an Associated Press reporter asked a State Department official last
week to provide evidence, not simply assertions, that Moscow was
planning a “false flag” operation to justify invading Ukraine, that
official accused him of finding “solace in information that the
Russians are putting out.”
Don’t Do Them a Favor
It should hopefully be clear why this is so dangerous. If what Hawley
and Carlson are saying amounts to “siding” with Russia, parroting
Kremlin propaganda, and “disloyalty” and “traitorism,” then the same
applies to Bernie Sanders, Jacobin, and anyone else arguing against
war over Ukraine or pointing out NATO’s role in the tensions. Just
look at Lawfare’s Benjamin Wittes, who responded to the Democratic
Socialists of America’s statement on the crisis by saying the
organization “sound[s] indistinguishable from Tucker Carlson,” and was
“siding with authoritarians against the democratic aspirations of
Ukrainians.”
Here is the poisonous fruit of the Russiagate nonsense, which even
some leftists humored, believing it to be a harmless way to undermine
Donald Trump in the short-term. Instead, what’s happened is that a
liberal establishment that endlessly compares Trump to the demagogic
Joseph McCarthy has now wholesale adopted McCarthy’s style of reckless
accusations and disloyalty charges, sprinkled with the Bush-era
tendency to equate opposing a war as being on the side of the enemy.
The result has been a marked hawkish turn on national security among
the left-of-center public. Tenuously construe anything as serving
Russia’s interests, and that idea becomes automatically illegitimate
in the eyes of a large chunk of the US public, the very strategy used
to undermine withdrawal from Afghanistan under Trump. What we end up
with is a powerful disincentive for any progressive official or
commentator to take the kind of stance Sanders has now taken. After
all, who wants the trouble of being blacklisted from cable news, or,
worse, face a news cycle accusing them of doing Putin’s work?
The irony is, this kind of rhetoric is doing high-profile figures like
Carlson and Hawley a favor, making them seem like far more reasonable,
moderate figures to a younger, more politically amorphous audience
than they actually are, just as they desire. Or to put it in a way
these media and political figures might understand: your coverage is
very convenient to Tucker, and is doing his work for him.
Carlson currently has a lock not just on Republican viewers, but a
surprisingly high number of independents and Democrats, too. This is
dangerous, because beyond every other noxious, neoliberal position he
holds, Carlson, like Hawley, Douthat, and others on the Right, isn’t
actually antiwar — rather, they simply prefer to pointlessly stoke
conflict with a different boogeyman in the form of China, and see
tensions with Russia as undermining that disastrous boondoggle.
The job of opposing war is too important to be left to right-wing
hawks like Carlson and Hawley. With Sanders and others now
increasingly speaking out, let’s hope it’s creating the political
space for progressives and leftists to follow suit. And let’s hope the
shameful rhetoric of those in the media and government who should know
better doesn’t undercut them.