The right is left out as Ukraine-Russian war unites progressives around the notion of the virtuous West

Your correspondent got some pushback earlier this week on the notion that the Russia-Ukraine war had left NATO “screwed” — by which I meant that its capacity to project power beyond itself had been called as a bluff by the invasion.

That, it must be said now, was somewhat of an assessment of the old NATO — the Anglosphere Atlantic power with West Germany at the front (France was partially or wholly out from 1959 to 2009, for just that reason), Turkey as an outlier, and against a global bloc who represented (however willingly) an entirely different approach to social life, both lined up, nukes to nukes.

Now NATO seems to me to be such a complex, sprawling beast that any clear mission that is purely military would be wreathed in levels of politics. But it’s also clear, as some noted, that it has renewed its purpose along defensive lines. Ambiguity is still possible where clarity matters most: what if Putin or post-Putin Russia were to take the Baltics? Is there a core and periphery NATO? Though a European defence organisation shorn of US and Canada would be a more genuine defence organisation (and will not happen), the Western solidarity movement with Ukraine has coalesced around an allyship that has little time or place — save among a few commentators — to also target NATO expansionism or imperialism, or even much comprehend it.

Many thousands of progressive people have leapt into action, effectively fusing their social progressive politics with a geopolitical take in the same spirit. That has had two quite consequent effects, one of which is to utterly marginalise any genuine anti-imperialist discourse in Western societies. But the other is one that resituates left and right fundamentally with dire consequences for the latter — a shift the right appear not to have understood yet.

Thus the small avalanche of op-eds and takes from the Australian and UK right trying to create a clear cultural frontier between left and right over the war, and claiming both that Western weakness and decadence, on matters of green politics and trans politics, etc, has emboldened Putin to invade Ukraine, but also that we will have to become far more like Putin’s Russia if we are to defend ourselves from the threat to Western civilisation represented by Putin’s Russia.

There’s Tony Abbott doing his wise old man schtick, Janet Albrechtsen talking about Pollyanna politics of the West, ASPI’s Peter Jennings warning that Biden is too soft, and Peta Credlin essentially repeating the line in her column, with Peter Dutton presumably to follow. Only the right can embody the West in that account. Progressives are a fifth column.

What the right do not seem to realise — or are simply trying to ignore — is that the old notion that the left and progressives always side with the West’s enemies has not only been stood down in the Russia-Ukraine war, but has been entirely reversed. The political division they wish to capitalise on — in which a right defends the virtues of Western civilisation despite its flaws, while the left “obsessively” seeks to find the West in the wrong — has now almost completely disappeared from even the broadest conception of mainstream politics.

Across the Western world, the people getting out into the streets to support Ukraine, and to insist on a simple rights-based account of its political autonomy as a state, are the people who normally organise demonstrations in the streets: the progressives and the left. They are the ones defending the notion of a virtuous West. This as opposed to the right, which is split three ways, between a mainstream right which wants to claim the “Western champion” tag, a realpolitik right, which, in simply looking at how states respond to threats, cannot help but concede that NATO’s overextension is a primary casus belli, and a cultural paleoconservative right (stretching from respectability to white supremacists) who threw in their lot with Putin years ago, as a preserver of Western Christendom in exile, anchoring it until it can be restored in the nihilised West.

This mainstream conservative right — the Credlins, Abbotts, etc who argue that the Mardi Gras caused the shelling of Kyiv — is trying to restore an old Thatcher/Reagan politics in which support for pro-Western geopolitics was fused with a support for pre-1960s traditional Western culture, centred on the religious and modest nuclear biological family, joined together with others through national patriotism. This conception was accurate enough at the time, since the post-WWII left had evolved a complex politics in which global anti-imperialism had become twinned with libertarian cultural politics at home.

But since Mao’s great victory in 1949, global left hopes had been borne by nationalist and peasant forces, who were explicitly socially conservative. The Algerians, Viet Cong and Palestinians would not be attending Orgasmopol Happening ’72 in Amsterdam anytime soon, and some were actively repressing personally liberated women, gays and lesbians, artists, “bohemians”, etc (though the global alliance did shift that somewhat in many places).

Something of this strategy and split hung around the Western left right up to the end of the global anti-capitalist movement of the late ’90s/early ’00s. In those demonstrations there were still radical unions whose members had fairly traditional social values, Communist parties supporting ghastly regimes, all linking arms with those seeing DIY transformations of gender/race/sexuality social issues as equally important.

But by the time Occupy came round in 2010, this fused politics had more or less disappeared. Why? Partly, US imperialism had destroyed itself as an authoritative player with the Iraq debacle, the farce to Vietnam’s tragedy. Moreover, capitalism had become so distributed as to have no frontier, less B52s and GM, more Starbucks and Foxconn. China’s entry into this world cultural system meant that there was no plausible countervailing power.

Occupy was concerned with the growing inequality and destructiveness of capitalism within the West, not by it, and this melded easily with the next stage of social politics, an acknowledgement of the equality of proliferating identities. The Occupy generation was now pushing for the West to live up to its claims of democracy, liberty and freedom to flourish. Crucially this marked the end of attachment to a militant present third world, and a re-attachment to the politics of colonialism (past event, present spirit), and the substitution of indigenous peoples for militant peasantries — often with a shift from solidarity in struggle to a revival of “noble savagery”.

In the decade since Occupy rose and fell, the social grouping that had borne forward this energy for half a century — now, the knowledge class — had come to the centre of social and economic life and rapidly reconstructed the content of its institutions. However resisted by brown energy and other interests, the institutions of society have become vehicles for green energy, for the pluralist celebration of identities, all drawing on secularised Judeo-Christian notions of the right to flourish within a peaceful society.

It’s true that the ’70s version of the new left was “anti-Western” in many ways, in that it sought an explosive anarchy in sexual extremism (from BDSM to the “sexual liberation” of 12-year-olds), the violence of red terror, deep green communalism and the like. By the 21st century, as its class took power, it turned on a five cent piece, and advocated same-sex marriage, censorship of “unsafe” texts, and social control through an enforced moral order prioritising protection over risk.

That has left the mainstream cultural right in a terrible spot, because there is now no major social force advocating the anti-Western ideas they seek to organise against. There’s no hard-left cell left in the Labor Left; the Greens are standing with Ukraine; Socialist Alternative and other far-left groups are denouncing the dual imperialisms of the West and Russia, but crucially, not representing the latter as an anti-imperialist force. Even the goddamn Communist Party of Australia (Marxist-Leninist), the old Chinese tankies, won’t stand with Russia. There’s no bad guys to turn the attention of the mainstream to.

Indeed, this is where the trap that the right backed itself into snaps shut. Taking an ancient notion of decadence as demasculinised, unassertive, not single-minded, unwilling to dominate nature (a sort of protein bar version of Nietszche), they’re trying to construct progressivism as 1972-style spliff-addled playpower. But if a certain discourse of fragility has arisen in progressivism, it does not equate with a lack of drive to public action.

It’s the progressives who march and organise. Would that amount to a progressivism willing to turn towards territorial war? Not yet, I think, and never of the cannon fodder kind. But hi-tech smart war in defense of the West, in its progressivist form, against societies who aren’t like that? It won’t take many years before that enthusiasm appears on the progressive left — perhaps akin to the way imperialism became a liberal cause in the 1860s, after earlier episodes of pure brigandry and theft fell away. It’s mainstream right-wing voters who are disengaged from such purposefulness, by the appeal of private life, Netflix and negative gearing, the anti-lockdown crowd not really mainstream material.

Now its cultural politics appears to be in exile from the mainstream, propped up only by News Corp in print and Sky after dark. Whatever sort of rightist he is, Scott Morrison is not this Spenglerian kulturpessimismus type, and it was precisely to head off the possible continuation from Abbott through to Peter Dutton that Scotty from the suburbs was selected. Nor has any groundswell developed around Dutton as a personification of such a spirit.

There is now no public space, I think, to launch a successful mainstream politics attacking Western decadence — but this is for the melancholy reason that there is now no substantially anti-imperialist discourse alive in the West, one willing to say that, in the last instance, some grisly characters and regimes nevertheless have a case.

So, where once leftist parties would have seen Russia’s de facto resistance to anti-imperialism as worthy of “support” (at least by non-condemnation), and Ukraine’s suffering as just part of the great clash of a world revolution, I suspect much of the passionate pro-Ukrainian advocacy among progressives is coming from a fusion of liberal-democratic values around state sovereignty, with the moral energy of anti-colonialism. It is that fusion that is giving it its extraordinary force.

That leaves the mainstream cultural right absolutely nowhere to go in their attempt to regain cultural hegemony of this process. For they are attempting to summon up that part of the Western spirit that Russia is expressing — the courage to kill and die, the strength to not be cowed by taking the other’s viewpoint — in order to oppose it. They are willing to concur with Putin on Russia’s non-European character, in order to stage a clash of civilisations for the revival of the West. Whereas the Western pro-Ukraine movement is condemning Russia for acting badly within the rules of a rules-based order it now asserts as universal, and having no real origin, history or interests.

That is the moral argument that channels the progressive energies accumulated from a decade of social-cultural struggles within Western societies to the geopolitical frame. It is capable of being drawn back into naiveté, sentimentality and kitsch, but on the other hand, it may represent the moment of a great political-cultural crossover, epochal.

And here is the great, great irony of it. In taking up such a geopolitical cause as a question of right and identity, with no reference to the actual politics that preceded the event, progressivism becomes an agent of disguising Western interests with a force and reach that earlier Western agencies — from UNESCO to the World Trade Organization — can only dream of. Reaching across the world and back into contemporary Western societies, it ensures that the absence of any anti-imperialist current in the West splits the world into two great geopolitical camps, with the US-UK-NATO supremacy now capable of spruiking a human rights geopolitics almost with a single voice.

Meanwhile China, India, Russia and various global southern states form a bloc whose narrative tells a wholly different story (India’s membership in “The Quad” is already coming apart, one might suspect; it seems ad hoc and provisional, with the Modi government quickly reasserted a solidarity with China and Russia in this episode).

What would be interesting about a deepening Russia-China-India alliance is that it would align the old Communist bloc with two colonised or subordinated megastates, giving a unified narrative to their shared historical journey, while also taking up most of the “world island” (i.e. Eurasia) from old geopolitical theory. That leaves a declining US and UK on the periphery. There must surely be a strong motive for India to throw in its lot with the centre. At which point the world is two massive camps and the deterritorialised movement once known as global anti-imperialism may for a time disappear from the world.

With these momentous shifts underway, Western culture wars may look like the product of a historically becalmed period and the right’s culture war even sillier and more irrelevant than usual. Looking ahead further, NATO would either be broken down into its parts, or draw in all the nations of the periphery. A sort of Oceania versus Eastasia. Oh dear.