Words have consequences

Ideas Have Consequences, the 1948 book by Richard M. Weaver, is to American conservatism what Das Kapital is to Marxism.

I first read it some 10 years after writing How the West Was Lost, which is my defence against any hypothetical charge of plagiarism. But what interests me today isn’t so much the contents of the book as its title.

Since ideas are expressed in words, Weaver’s title can be profitably paraphrased into mine above. Words, especially those uttered by people with a wide following, do have consequences – even, perhaps especially, when they convey no ideas worthy of the name.

That’s why, at the risk of angering my American friends, I’ll continue to say that the sycophantic praise of Putin by Donald Trump and other Western ‘conservatives’ has done much to embolden the fascist in the Kremlin (or, these days, in his Altai bunker).

Trump is worshipped by Americans (and others) of the rightish persuasion for the same reason Putin is. People like Pat Buchanan happily agree with Trump when he says that Putin “is running his country and at least he’s a leader, unlike what we have in this country.”

They look at their governments and feel a richly justified disgust. Hence the idea that anyone different from their awful politicians, especially if he is different in every respect, has to be good.

Such faulty logic explains the adulation of Trump in conservative circles – he is perceived as an outsider, which has to be ipso facto good. His admirers are willing to overlook Trump’s brutishness, vulgarity, ignorance and narcissism. More important, they refuse to acknowledge that Trump’s sycophancy towards Putin makes him an indirect accessory to the on-going carnage.

They defend their stand by saying that underneath it all Trump was tough on Putin. That’s why Russia didn’t attack the Ukraine on his watch.

Using the same logic, both George W. Bush and Barack Obama (in his first term) were great presidents too. After all, Putin didn’t attack the Ukraine during their tenures either.

Nor was Trump tough on Putin. His fans talk about the sanctions Congress imposed while Trump was in office, conveniently forgetting that Trump fought them tooth and nail. Those sanctions came into effect in spite of Trump, not because of him.

On the contrary, he desperately pushed for Russia to be readmitted to G7, a club from which Putin was blackballed after his 2014 bandit raid on the Ukraine.

Trump clearly saw Putin as his ally in their common grievance against the American ‘establishment’. That’s why, when everybody knew Putin had meddled in the presidential election, Trump was demanding that the Ukraine be investigated for that very crime. Funnily enough, Putin was demanding the same thing.

Trump even proposed to Putin that the two countries form a joint “cybersecurity unit” to combat “election hacking”. Putin and his retainers must have had a good laugh about that.

According to Trump, Russia “was right to be there [in Afghanistan],” an attitude that explains why he actively promoted Russia’s expanding influence in Syria.

And in response to others taking exception to Putin’s murders, Trump relied on the old moral equivalence defence: “There are a lot of killers. You think our country’s so innocent?”

In any case, as far as Trump was concerned, Putin’s complicity in any murders, such as the one of Litvinenko in 2006, was unproven. He said: “You know, and I’m not saying this because he says, ‘Trump is brilliant and leading everybody’ – the fact is that, you know, he hasn’t been convicted of anything.”

True. A jury of his peers has never found Putin guilty of any crimes. That means, according to Trump, he has never committed any. Why, even his massacre of Ukrainian civilians isn’t criminal on this criterion.

I can’t recall a single critical word Trump has ever uttered about Putin. I do recall countless times he said Putin was “a tough cookie”, “with great charm”, “smart”, “savvy”, “genius”, “strong leader” and some such.

As to Putin’s annexation of the Ukraine’s territory in 2014, Trump claimed Ukrainians welcomed it: “[Putin] is absolutely having a great time… Russia is like, I mean they’re really hot stuff… and now you have people in the Ukraine – who knows, set up or not – but it can’t all be set up, I mean they’re marching in favour of joining Russia.” (Sorry to be quoting at such length, but I can’t get enough of elegant English.)

Whatever Trump’s day job is, he shouldn’t quit it to become an intelligence analyst. His reading of that situation wasn’t quite accurate, wouldn’t you say? But especially relevant today are Trump’s two bookend statements on either side of Russia’s aggression against the Ukraine.

On 22 February, two days before the invasion, when the world observed Russia’s military build-up with horror, Trump had this to say about his fellow strong leader:

“But here’s a guy that says, you know, ‘I’m gonna declare a big portion of Ukraine independent’ – he used the word ‘independent’ – ‘and we’re gonna go out and we’re gonna go in and we’re gonna help keep peace. How smart is that? And he’s going to go in and be a peacekeeper. That’s the strongest peace force I’ve ever seen. You gotta say that’s pretty savvy.”

And yesterday Trump predictably condemned Russia’s atrocities – but again without saying anything critical about Putin personally. He did admit to a slight miscalculation on his part though:

“I figured he was going to make a good deal like everybody else does with the United States and the other people they tend to deal with – you know, like every trade deal… And then he went in – and I think he’s changed. I think he’s changed. It’s a very sad thing for the world. He’s very much changed.”

Before considering the content of that pronouncement, it’s worth commenting on its form. Trump has a tendency to repeat the same words or phrases over and over again within the same statement, which is worrying.

This is called ‘perseveration’ in psychiatry, and it’s usually a symptom of a brain injury or some other organic disorder. Perhaps Trump should concentrate on his own mental health more than he does on Biden’s (which too is cause for concern), and I don’t mean this facetiously.

But that’s by the bye. Important here is that Trump’s view of the world is strictly transactional. He sees every little problem in life as something to be solved by a trade deal. Rather than being a statesman, Trump is a horse trader and bean counter, a man whose sensibilities have been formed by negotiating with Atlantic City mafiosi.

Really worrying is that he believes Putin has changed. Indirectly there’s an aspect of self-vindication there. Trump seems to be implying that yes, he was Putin’s fan when in the White House. But then Putin at that time was ‘smart’, ‘savvy’, ‘genius’ and an all-around good chap who couldn’t see an old woman without helping her across the street.

Alas, when Trump left Washington, Putin changed overnight, by implication partly because Trump was no longer there to keep him on the straight and narrow.

This is arrant, dangerous nonsense – a vindication of Putin by other means and a lamentable failure to understand people, especially those whose interests go beyond ‘deals’.

“Words, words, words,” said Hamlet, meaning they didn’t matter. But they do.

Western politicians act with at least some regard for opinion at the grassroots. This has more to do with bono privato than bono publico, for pleasing the electorate is essential to staying in, or getting into, office. Hence they poll incessantly, trying to calculate the likely electoral response to this or that policy.

And as a rule, the grassroots don’t arrive at their opinions by study, contemplation and analysis. For their intellectual grass to grow, they require constant fertilising with words uttered by figures of authority.

When people held in high esteem, such as Buchanan and Trump, extol Putin’s virtue, that’s fertilising dust sprayed on the grass. This doesn’t mean that everyone on the receiving end will be persuaded – the word ‘everyone’ doesn’t belong in political discourse. But some people will be, and there may be enough of them to skew the polls so much that policy-makers will take notice.

Most conservatives, and I’m using the word loosely, intuitively reach out for authority. This is an echo of times olden, when people’s views on really important things were affected by church doctrine.

Buchanan, Trump and other Putin dupes have, for different and variously merited reasons, built up a capital of authority in such people’s eyes. They’ll take on faith what they hear from such prominent figures more readily than anything they read in The New York Times and The Washington Post, those mouthpieces of ‘liberalism’.

That’s why the inane, ignorant rubbish Trump mouths about Putin tickles the right nerve endings even for some people who have the mind to realise that what he says is indeed inane, ignorant rubbish. And that’s why I tend to be brutal on our own quislings who do Putin’s bidding by consistently saying nice, if mendacious, things about him.

They do untold harm by pushing a domino to create a knock-on effect reaching all the way to Westminster. Words do have consequences, which is why some are life-giving and some are borderline treasonous.