Putin's war and the Chaos Climbers

Why pro-Russia narratives are uniting -- and exposing -- all the worst people

In the first couple of weeks after Vladimir Putin ordered his legions into Ukraine, the media narrative was overwhelmed by the moral clarity of the situation. A totalitarian tyrant had launched a murderous, unprovoked invasion of another country, whose people were valiantly fighting to defend themselves. America’s hyper-partisan shouters, if not exactly silenced, were at least forced to momentarily keep their heads down. Almost everyone basically agreed that Russia was the bad guy. But now, almost a month into the war, Russia’s propaganda narratives are slowly pushing their way back into the conversation. There are basically three Putinist narratives:

1. Russia’s invasion is a reaction to NATO expansion.

2. Ukraine has been taken over by neo-Nazis and needs to be “denazified”.

3. Russia is inevitably going to win the war, so Ukraine should surrender for humanitarian reasons.

All three of these narratives are baldly ridiculous and extremely easy to debunk. Just for the record:

1. Putin’s seizure of Crimea and Donbas made it impossible for Ukraine to join NATO even before this invasion, because that would have immediately required NATO to go to war with Russia. So this invasion wasn’t sparked by fear of NATO.

2. Ukraine has a very small neo-Nazi element — a group called the Azov Battalion. They number fewer than 1000 people, compared to Ukraine’s total fighting force of somewhere around 400,000. Ukraine’s far-right parties won only 2.3% of the vote in a recent election.

3. Neutral observers like the Institute for the Study of War agree that the Russian offensives in Ukraine have now ground to a halt. Independent visual confirmations of Russian losses are increasing at a rapid and steady pace, and Ukraine is still receiving massive amounts of military aid from the West. Russia still has a lot of ability to deal death and destruction in Ukraine, but they’re far from the inevitable victors.

This isn’t a full and complete catalog of the pro-Putin narratives — there’s also a weird conspiracy theory about U.S. chemical weapons labs in Ukraine, for example. But the three narratives above are the most common ones. And you can see these narratives being parroted more and more by Americans on both the far Right and the far Left.

Putin apologists of the Right and the Left

Here are just a smattering of examples of people promoting and defending pro-Putin narratives.

First we have Marjorie Taylor-Greene, the far-right Georgia congressperson, declaring that Ukraine is doomed:

PatriotTakes 🇺🇸 @patriottakes

Marjorie Taylor Greene went on Facebook Live after President Zelensky spoke to Congress and communicated three times during her speech that Ukraine will end up losing to Putin.

She also asserted that both sides are at fault.

Tulsi Gabbard, meanwhile, has helped to spread the bioweapons conspiracy theory, and argues that Ukraine ought to make concessions (i.e. surrender) to end the war.

Here is the Democratic Socialists of America’s “international committee” condemning U.S. military aid to Ukraine:

DSA International Committee 🌹 @DSA_Intl_Comm

The US has sent over $1B in military aid to Ukraine in the past year and over $3B since 2014. Continued large deployments of weapons from the US/ NATO only further exacerbates the war. We have to call for humanitarian aid and diplomacy to de-escalate. 3/11

theintercept.comU.S. and NATO’s Unprecedented Weapons Transfers to Ukraine Could Prolong the WarWestern nations must ask themselves whether the current course of action is more or less likely to help end the horrifying violence being imposed on Ukraine’s civilian population.

Here’s Tucker Carlson pushing the conspiracy theory that U.S. labs in Ukraine are creating weapons of mass destruction:

Tucker Carlson @TuckerCarlson

The U.S. government confirmed there are biolabs in Ukraine. But now anyone who says that out loud is accused of treason.

Tucker also argues that military aid to Ukraine will simply “prolong the fighting” (i.e. delay Russia’s supposedly inevitable victory):

Acyn @Acyn

Tucker says you’re not allowed to ask if sending more weapons to Ukraine will prolong the suffering of the Ukrainian people

Although Tucker did once grudgingly condemn the invasion, Putin’s government has gone to great lengths to feature Tucker’s show on all the media it controls.

Jacobin magazine persists in assigning NATO part of the blame for the war:

Before the war, Marcetic wrote an article blaming Joe Biden and the U.S. media for “fanning the flames of war”.

Here’s a former Trump Defense Department senior official declaring that we should support Putin’s invasion:

j.d. durkin 🌱 @jd_durkin

here’s MacGregor (fmr Trump DoD senior official) moments before, calling out the US’ “usual effort to demonize [Putin] and his country.” Q: Should we let Russia just take what they want? “Yes. Absolutely… the population there is indistinguishable from their own.” full:

Trump ally and criminal Roger Stone is also vocally supporting Putin’s invasion.

Leftist shouter Ryan Knight declares that Ukrainian President Zelensky is a fascist (and that U.S. Democrats are fascists):

British leftist George Galloway, meanwhile, is claiming that the U.S. is about to launch a “false-flag WMD incident” in Ukraine, whatever that means.

And here are a list of the only 8 members of Congress to vote against the removal of normal trade relations with Russia:

Blake Allen @Blake_Allen13

In a 424-8 vote the U.S. House votes to remove normalized trade relations with Russia. The 8 reps (all Republican) voting no: Bishop Boebert Biggs Gaetz Greene Groth Massie Roy

Anyway, the list goes on. These are some of the most prominent people carrying water for Putin’s preferred narratives of the war, but there is also a small army of tankies, neo-Nazis, and associated other grifters eagerly pushing pro-invasion propaganda. Just to show one tiny example, some tankie even put a “Z” — the Russian symbol for the Ukraine invasion force, which now carries heavy fascist connotations — over a poster for a Ukrainian organization in Washington:

Why do people carry water for Putin?

The real question, of course, is why this diverse array of rightists and leftists is tripping over themselves to carry water for Vladimir Putin’s preferred narratives of the war. The easiest and simplest explanation is that all of these people are basically on the same team — part of a new global axis of authoritarianism, with the extreme left and the extreme right basically indistinguishable in their desire to create totalitarian societies.

I don’t think this theory is entirely bunk — there is a clear trend toward authoritarianism all over the world, and it doesn’t have an obvious left-right valence. But I think it’s a trend more than a movement, and while I think the new authoritarian impulse might nudge people toward support for Putin, I frankly don’t think most of the people listed above have thought far enough ahead to envision any kind of a future regime.

Another, more subtle theory — which I’ve advanced myself — is something I call Last Bastion Theory. This is the tendency of people in the U.S. and Europe to view Russia as the distant protector of something they hold dear. For traditionalists, Russia can be seen as the last protector of Christianity, or of traditional gender roles. White supremacists might see Russia as the last White empire on the globe. And for leftists who view America as the world’s imperialistic Great Satan, Russia might seem like a bastion of resistance. Of course, the Russian government goes out of its way to encourage such perceptions. To all of these groups, the distant sphinx of the Kremlin might have seemed like a power capable of offering support while representing no threat.

But I don’t think this completely explains it either. Once Putin’s rocket launchers rolled into Ukraine and started slaughtering the locals, it became clear that Russia’s rulers were not such a distant, safe ally after all. And the combination of incompetence and cruelty with which Russia has prosecuted the war makes Putin both a toxic and unreliable patron.

And yet some people still defend Putin’s war narratives. There must be something else at work here, and I have a guess as to what it is.

The title of this post is a reference to a line from the TV show Game of Thrones, where the scheming nobleman Littlefinger declares that “Chaos is a ladder.” By disrupting the stability of the current regime, he intends to create space to move up in the world. In the same way, I see many of the above-mentioned figures on both the Right and the Left as Chaos Climbers — people who believe that the travails of the liberal order built after World War 2 represent an opening for their own fringe ideologies to advance their power.

This might sound wildly accusatory, but it’s not — it’s just a description of what has been actually happening over the last decade.

It was the failure of conservatism that gave rise to the Trumpist movement and the alt-right. Bush’s muscular interventionism ran aground in Iraq, laissez-faire economics crashed the economy in 2008, and Christian conservatism failed to halt the gay rights movement. The conservative paradigm that had taken over the GOP in the 70s and 80s failed all at once, and fringe elements — the alt-right, conspiracy theorists, Trump — sort of took over the party.

Meanwhile, on the Democratic side, the socialist Left that started to revive itself with the antiwar movement and Occupy blossomed into a full-blown generational movement with the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign that revived the DSA, spawned a new generation of activist orgs like the Sunrise movement, and created a new (though still modest) socialist media. So far, despite fierce factionalism, the socialists have not yet succeeded in taking over the Democratic party like Trump took over the GOP. But in highlighting the failures of centrist Dems to curb inequality, revive unions, fix health care, or save the welfare state, they clearly hope to be able to pull off a takeover at some point.

In other words, all of the people now pushing Putinist narratives are people who have been able to use chaos as a ladder to build up their own positions within the U.S.’ two political parties, to some extent. Establishment failures equal insurgent opportunities. That shouldn’t be too controversial.

So where does Putin come into this? Both the liberal center-Left and the conservative center-Right are basically committed to upholding the global liberal order. Putin, by invading and attempting to conquer a sovereign state, challenges that order. If Putin succeeds, even modestly, it represents a failure for the U.S. establishment figures who tried to stop him. And establishment failures equal insurgent opportunities. Both the rightists and the leftists here are fighting against the Fukuyaman end-of-history idea that gives their own movements little space to move up.

If Putin defeats the Ukrainians, the conservatives that are standing against Putin will look ineffectual and weak. The Trumpists will then be able to solidify their control over the GOP. And it also means a victory for raw power and will (perhaps implying that efforts like the January 6th putsch are the preferred method for attaining power). But if Putin loses, then Trump and his allies who for years praised and defended Putin’s regime will be discredited. Success has a thousand fathers; failure is an orphan. Even more damningly, if Putin loses, it’ll be a success for the globalist order — sanctions and aid to Ukraine will represent a triumph of international cooperation. Exactly the kind of world order the Trumpists want so badly to smash.

As for leftists, if Putin wins, it’ll represent another failure of what they perceive as the American empire. As with the pullout from Afghanistan, failure to stop Ukraine from being overrun with military aid and sanctions would show that America is a paper tiger, has feet of clay, blah blah blah — pick your metaphor. Frustrated by Joe Biden’s triangulation of some of their economic ideas (just as communists were enraged by FDR’s New Deal in the 1930s), leftists have been hoping to score anti-establishment victories in the foreign policy realm instead. If Putin defeats Ukraine, it’ll be a debacle for Biden and the establishment, and perhaps a socialist candidate will be a little closer to winning the next primary.

So Chaos Climbers on the Right and Left both have some incentive to want Putin to win — or at least for the war to be perceived as a NATO loss. This doesn’t mean they’re ready to cheer for Putin openly, or even to hope for his victory — the blazing moral clarity of the situation is still too strong for that. But it does mean that they feel the need to muddy the waters, to curb U.S. support for Ukraine and make the establishment look irresolute, and to prepare narratives that would allow them to take advantage of a Putin victory.

What these people all fear is the return of the order of the 1990s — a return to the idea of liberal internationalism as the least bad of all possible systems of human organization. If Fukuyaman ideas return to the pole position in American thought, all of the various revolutions that people have allowed themselves to dream about during the past eight years of unrest will be put on indefinite hold. With domestic unrest starting to flag a bit as well, the rightists and leftists must now see their shared nightmare unfolding before them — a great muddling-through, a slow revivification of the institutions that failed in Iraq and the Great Recession and the Trump Era. To paraphrase Hunter S. Thompson, many people all over the ideological spectrum allowed themselves to see the chaos of the last decade as a high and beautiful wave that would carry them to power…and now, if Putin is ejected from Ukraine by a triumphant international liberal West, the various Chaos Climbers may see their waves break and roll back.

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