Western Reactions to the War in Ukraine
- Thread starter Rawhide "Doug" Kobayashi
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Petr
Administrator
And Fade the Butcher sort of agrees with Kluge's take, from the opposite side of the political aisle:
occidentaldissent.com
House Approves $95 Billion Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan Aid
How should we respond to this defeat?
occidentaldissent.com
I’ve had some time to sit with my anger.
I am determined not to irrationally and emotionally react to this setback.
Nothing new was revealed yesterday in the House vote on Ukraine, Israel and Taiwan aid. We have long known that the Republican Party is about evenly split on Ukraine aid. We have known that the Democrats are bitterly split on Israel aid. There is much more support in both parties for Taiwan aid.
In the end, every single Democrat voted for Ukraine aid and even burst out in celebration chanting “Ukraine” while waving Ukrainian flags when the bill passed. 112 Republicans voted against Ukraine aid. 101 Republicans voted for it. House Speaker Mike Johnson is being compared to Winston Churchill for breaking the Hastert rule and allowing the bill to be put on the floor without the support of a majority of his own caucus. Ukraine hawks control every single important committee in the House.
As the House debate on Ukraine aid vividly showed, there are two Republican parties. There is a populist, nationalist and libertarian wing led by Marjorie Taylor Greene and Thomas Massie whose audience is younger and more online. There is also a more traditional conservative wing led by people like Mike McCaul and Dan Crenshaw whose audience is older and watches FOX News. Around 15 percent of Republican voters supported Nikki Haley in the 2024 primary. Around 30 percent of Republican voters are Reaganites who voted for Ted Cruz in 2016 and supported Ron DeSantis in 2024.
In recent years, the Bush and Reaganite wings of the Republican Party have been in decline. This was confirmed by the 2024 primary in which DeSantis and Haley got blown out. It has also played out in Congress with a series of retirements in the House and Senate. The best recent example of this is J.D. Vance, a strong critic of Ukraine aid, replacing Rob Portman who was a stalwart Ukraine hawk in the Senate in the 2022 midterms. In spite of this, Reaganites and Bush Republicans who represent older voters remain entrenched and overrepresented in Congress and yesterday they scored a pyrrhic victory.
Don’t be fooled.
Congress isn’t a lost cause.
Older voters and entrenched establishments have always been overrepresented in Washington. Older people are much more likely to vote. It takes time for them to lose altitude and power. That’s why it seems like our views have become so much more influential over the last ten years.
In the House debate, Ronald Reagan was invoked 19 times before the final vote on Ukraine aid. Older Republicans made up their minds about Russia and foreign policy during the Cold War. Reagan was a decisive influence on their politics. Winston Churchill was also repeatedly brought up during the debate. Mike Johnson was compared to Churchill for putting the Ukraine aid bill on the floor. Many of these people compared Putin to Hitler and Ukraine to Great Britain. We are living in the 1930s. We are unironically fighting an “Axis of Evil” in the form of evil dictators who rule Russia, China and Iran. It brought back memories of the GOP of the W. years in the lead up to the invasion of Iraq.
The key difference is that today this sort of rhetoric is highly controversial and was met with widespread ridicule online. House Speaker Mike Johnson could end up losing his job. What used to be more of the mainstream consensus in the Republican Party in the 2000s has shrunk down to 1/3 to 1/2 of the party. It continues to shrink with each passing year and the vote on Ukraine aid is another milestone in the decline of this worldview. This vote also showed that Ukraine aid is not becoming more popular.
The most constructive way to respond to this defeat is to 1.) end Mike Johnson’s political career to send a message, 2.) use it further shift our politics in an isolationist direction when it becomes clear that it is yet another gargantuan waste of money and example of neglecting our domestic priorities and 3.) to accelerate the decline of Reaganism by purging as many of the House Republicans who voted for this as possible like Dan Crenshaw, Tom Cole, Joe Wilson and Mike McCaul.
Again, the political situation isn’t hopeless. This faction is already in decline. It just needs to be given a hard push to expedite its slide into irrelevance. We are already succeeding in defining the issue.
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Petr
Administrator
Senate Passes Ukraine, Israel, Taiwan Foreign Aid Bill
Senate Republicans are like Winston Churchill in 1940
occidentaldissent.com
In the final vote, 31 Senate Republicans voted for it, 15 voted against it and 3 missed the vote. 64% of Senate Republicans voted against the will of 61% of Republican voters.
...
It was like entering a time warp.
The Republican Party in Washington, especially the Senate, is still the party of George Will, Jonah Goldberg, Bill Kristol and David Frum. We saw Axis of Evil rhetoric straight out of the 2000s. Mitch McConnell and Dan Crenshaw are like Winston Churchill standing up to tyranny in 1941.
The Republican base has changed. The online Right has changed. Lots of mainstream conservative institutions have changed. The politicians have changed too in the House and Senate, but seem to be a lagging indicator. Republican leadership is still mentally in the Cold War in the 1980s.
Since winning the 2022 midterms, the agenda has been banning TikTok, passing around a dozen bills about anti-Semitism on college campuses, expanding government surveillance in the FISA bill and delivering Joe Biden’s agenda by sending $95 billion in foreign aid to war zones or potential war zones around the world. In previous years, the Republican legislative agenda has been things like trillion dollar spending bills, making Juneteenth a federal holiday and passing criminal justice reform.
These people are living in a different political universe. They are responding to donors and very old voters. Many of them undoubtedly just made up their mind about politics in the 1960s and 1970s. My final takeaway is that their victory on Ukraine aid was bought on credit. They didn’t have the political support in their own party to do it, but did it anyway out of self-righteous conviction.
The bill will eventually be paid.
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Petr
Administrator
I remember that this was something that Steve Sailer also "noticed" back then - that without those "hard men," or Ukrainian Far Right nationalists acting as the spearhead of Maidan rioters, the whole thing might have withered away. Or at least that is what they themselves like to boast:
And here is pretty direct confession from an Ukrainian official:
Translation:
"This man was head of the Kiev office of the Böll Foundation (Greens) and admits what is criminalized here as "Putin propaganda": Without Nazis, the "Maidan" would not have been successful. And he calls for terror against the freely elected and popular government in Georgia."
And here is pretty direct confession from an Ukrainian official:
Translation:
"This man was head of the Kiev office of the Böll Foundation (Greens) and admits what is criminalized here as "Putin propaganda": Without Nazis, the "Maidan" would not have been successful. And he calls for terror against the freely elected and popular government in Georgia."
