When Doves Cry

When most people my age want to emphasize how old they are, they reference movies or music. Did you know, fellow Gen Xers, that we’re further removed in time from Purple Rain than Purple Rain was from Meet the Beatles?

Specifically, almost twice as far removed?

It’s usually not entertainment that makes me feel my age. It’s the occasional reminder of how far certain commentators have traveled on their political journeys since they first made a name for themselves online. (Trump fans would cite me as one of those commentators.) Someday, children, I’ll tell you the story of how this guy became one of the first superstars of left-wing political blogging by galvanizing American progressives against … war.

Righteous outrage over Russian war crimes makes strange bedfellows.

Moulitsas (forever known as “Kos” to Bloggers Of A Certain Age) was peeved over a letter sent on Monday by Democrat Pramila Jayapal and 29 other House progressives to Joe Biden asking him to do, well, something about the war in Ukraine. Read it and you’ll find that “something” was suspiciously vague. There was, to be sure, plenty of “to be sure” verbiage in the text blaming Russia for the war and the “incalculable harm” it’s done to Ukrainians. But it’s time nonetheless for negotiations, the signatories say: “We urge you to pair the military and economic support the United States has provided to Ukraine with a proactive diplomatic push, redoubling efforts to seek a realistic framework for a ceasefire.”

The substance of the letter isn’t very interesting. What is interesting is the ferocious blowback Jayapal and her colleagues received from members of their own party after it was published. By no means was Kos’ reaction an outlier. The anger extended all the way to members of Pelosi’s caucus.

Sen. Chris Murphy lashed the Jayapal faction as well, tweeting that negotiating now “risks legitimizing [Putin’s] crimes and handing over parts of Ukraine to Russia in an agreement that Putin won’t even honor.” Bill Browder, who spearheaded passage of the Magnitsky Act to punish Russian human rights violations, was irate. “Makes my blood boil,” he wrote of Jayapal’s statement. “She wants the US to reward Putin’s murderous aggression. We all know where appeasement goes and it’s nowhere good.”

The response was so negative that some of the letter’s own signatories began distancing themselves from it, claiming that it was written months ago and no longer operative given how the momentum on the battlefield has shifted since then.

Within hours Jayapal herself backed off, issuing a statement pledging that her faction’s support for Ukraine was “unequivocal” and stressing that diplomacy, while an important tool, “is just one tool.” But the backbiting continued. “It’s just a disaster. The CPC just needs to clean house,” one aide told Politico, referring to the Congressional Progressive Caucus. A signatory who requested anonymity called it “amateur hour on part of the CPC.” 

The outcry was such that the 30 signatories took the all but unprecedented step Tuesday of formally retracting their own letter, blaming it on an, ahem, staff error. Never mind that Jayapal herself reportedly approved the letter’s release.

It’s the most shambolic retreat since the Russian army ran screaming out of Kharkiv.

And an uncharacteristic retreat too. It’s not often that you see populists on either side backpedal while under fire from the center. Part of being a populist is showing that you’re willing to fight the establishment and its conventional wisdom even when doing so is unpopular. Not this time. How come?

It’s simple. Populists in both parties are confused over how they’re “supposed to” feel about Ukraine and U.S. interventionism more broadly.

Jayapal’s fiasco isn’t the only recent case of a populist outfit getting tripped up by the war, remember. Three weeks ago CPAC heralded Putin’s sham annexation of four “Ukrainian-occupied” territories on its Twitter account and grumbled about “Biden and the Dems” sending Kyiv billions in aid. They were quickly and rudely reminded by right-wing hawks that most Republicans support that aid too, prompting a sheepish follow-up tweet that called Putin a madman and agreed that “Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine must be repelled.”

The original tweet was also blamed on a staff error, wouldn’t you know it.

In that moment, CPAC became a casualty of the right’s identity crisis. “America First” nationalism skews isolationist in theory, since putting America first logically means spending to improve the lives of Americans, not foreigners. And although few admit it, many nationalists are post-liberal authoritarians who want to make the world safe for Putin’s model of governance. Watching the czar get humiliated in battle by a European force sponsored by “soft” Western liberal regimes undermines that goal.

But the right also prizes strength, toughness, and American dominance abroad, all in contrast to the sissy liberals who are forever looking for foreign nations to apologize to. (Even nationalists tend to make an exception to their isolationism for China.) It cherishes the concept of armed self-defense and ardently resists the left’s attempts to limit it at home. Older conservatives are also naturally suspicious of Russian expansionism, having come of age during the Cold War. All of that points toward supporting Ukraine.

CPAC got caught between the two camps. Its first tweet pandered to the right’s influential nationalist minority, the second tweet retrenched and pandered to the party’s hawkish majority.

I think Jayapal’s faction also got caught between two camps. On the one hand, progressives have traditionally led the domestic anti-war movement, a bulwark against those darned warmongering conservatives. Opposing wars of choice, first in Vietnam and then in Iraq, became defining moments for two different generations of left-wingers. When Uncle Sam starts pouring billions into funding a vicious proxy war abroad, that old muscle memory kicks in. As you get out toward the socialist fringes of the party, you encounter some anti-anti-Russia sentiment as well. The Orbánist right and tankie left each want to see the establishment liberal order routed in Ukraine for their own insurgent political reasons.

But there are conflicting impulses within the Democratic Party as well. Democrats despise Putin for having meddled in the 2016 election to damage Hillary Clinton and are game for payback. They’ve also undergone a philosophical shift over time on intervening abroad to avert humanitarian catastrophes. When Obama’s team began supporting the Libyan rebels against Qaddafi, they cited the U.N.’s “responsibility to protect” principle as justification. According to that principle, when a population faces “genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity,” the world is supposed to intervene to prevent it. Let there be no doubt that Russia’s actions in Ukraine fit that bill.

The left’s interventionist identity crisis is on full display in Jayapal’s original letter. We agree that Russia’s conduct is outrageous and that America shouldn’t pressure Ukraine to negotiate, the signatories write—before adding that, all the same, the White House should explore every possible avenue toward reaching a settlement, including “direct engagement with Russia.” There are no concrete suggestions as to what that settlement might look like, only breezy references to sanctions relief and security guarantees. The thorny question, territorial concessions, is simply ignored.

It’s not a serious proposal. It’s virtue-signaling designed to try to please both of the left’s camps, futilely. The hard fact is that, so long as Ukraine maintains the initiative on the battlefield and Russia continues to hint darkly at nuclear reprisals, there can be no negotiations. No one wants to sabotage the Ukrainian army by demanding that they stop the fight just as they have Putin on the ropes and at risk of a knockout. And no one wants to reward Moscow’s nuclear blackmail with concessions aimed at averting it, as that incentive structure will lead to ruin in future conflicts.

No one wants to reward this either.

Krasovsky’s comments were so disgusting that RT, Russia’s chief propaganda pipeline to the Western world, felt obliged to suspend him for PR reasons.

If you’re Jayapal or one of the other signatories, how are you supposed to respond to all that? You need to show off your anti-war bona fides, but you also need to uphold the left’s responsibility to protect the vulnerable from genocide. Result: A letter that says little more than “Russia is evil, diplomacy is good” without any meaningful attempt to reconcile those two realities.

Which brings us to the strangeness of the timing.

It would have been bad enough for Jayapal, et al., to have sent the letter over the summer, undermining Ukrainian forces when they were bogged down under Russia’s relentless artillery barrage. To send it now, with Ukraine on the march and Putin sounding like Dr. Strangelove, is lunacy—all the more so given that we’re two weeks out from an election in which the electorate remains overwhelmingly supportive of Ukraine. “People are furious—especially front-liners,” said one House Democrat to CNN of unhappiness among his party’s congressional candidates over the Jayapal letter.

Worse, it’s a signal to Putin that if his army can just hang on a bit longer then U.S. lawmakers might pull the plug on Ukraine next year. He’s under increasing pressure from his own cronies about the state of the war, yet here’s Jayapal giving him a glimmer of hope, suggesting that Putin might be able to cut Ukraine’s supply line from the west by forging on through the winter just as Ukraine has efficiently cut Russia’s supply lines by bombing bridges and railways. However inadvertently, she’s encouraging him to fight on.

So why send the letter now? My guess is that it’s a function of what we might call “market positioning.”

Partisan polarization is compounding the identity crises among populists on the left and right. Imagine the confusion among rank-and-file progressive peaceniks when they opened their morning papers last week to find Kevin McCarthy rather than Nancy Pelosi warning that there’ll be no more “blank checks” for Ukraine. How embarrassing for them that a “Rethuglican” is more serious about peace than the so-called liberal leadership in Congress. All the more so considering that Democratic support for funding Ukraine has been unanimous in the House thus far, which means even the Congressional Progressive Caucus is complicit in the warmongering.

Jayapal and her colleagues might have gotten an earful from those constituents, stewed over it, and concluded that they couldn’t let themselves get outflanked as doves by Kevin McCarthy and the MAGA authoritarians. They had to say something in support of ending the war expeditiously, if just to throw the tankies a bone.

So that’s what they said: Something. Nothing useful; nothing original, even, assuming it’s true that the letter had been sitting in a desk drawer since July. Just … something. They had to keep up with McCarthy and preserve their position in the electoral market as the true home of American doves. The eternal impulse within each party to define itself in contrast with the other may have led the Jayapal group into an otherwise wholly avoidable stumble.

I suspect that, as happened to CPAC, the confusion caused by her side’s identity crisis led her to miscalculate what sort of reaction the letter might receive. She thought it would be cheered by the left, a reclamation of the mantle of “the peace party” for her base, and jeered by the usual suspects among centrist Democratic hawks. She might not have anticipated jeers from pro-Ukraine progressives like Kos and Chris Murphy, nor having her letter derided by her own side via comparisons to McCarthy’s “blank check” remarks. “Vladimir Putin would have signed that letter if asked,” a member of the House leadership told Politico. “That bone-headed letter just put Dems in the same league as Kevin McCarthy, who said in the same week that Ukraine funding could be in jeopardy.”

Note that in her retraction statement Jayapal was keen to distinguish the original letter from McCarthy’s comments. Here too partisan polarization seems to have driven her thinking. She may have been able to live with the knowledge that she’d done Putin a favor by nudging the White House to start peace talks, but once other Democrats started denouncing her by comparing her to—ugh—Kevin McCarthy then that letter had to be formally withdrawn. Never mind that it was likely McCarthy’s comments that inspired her to release the letter in the first place.

Ironically, this episode may lead McCarthy back toward a more hawkish middle ground on Ukraine. The noisier progressives get about peace and diplomacy, the more right-wing populists will instinctively begin to question the merits of that position as redolent of sissy liberalism. It’s already confusing for right-wing hawks to have Joe Biden as lead spokesman for their position. If there’s meaningful movement from Jayapal and the Squad toward defunding Ukraine next year, McCarthy will be able to play off of it to shore up support for the war among confused right-wing doves.

To a degree. The fact that Biden will continue to lead the pro-Ukraine wing of American popular opinion means the new speaker will be able to bring the House GOP into alignment only so much.

There’s one more possibility to explain the timing of the letter’s release. I wouldn’t call it a good reason, but it’s understandable. More so, at least, than “Kevin McCarthy looks more progressive than we do.”

Jayapal and her fellow doves may have been spooked by the growing risk that the war is about to turn nuclear. The news this week is not great.

The Russian defense minister, Sergei K. Shoigu, had claimed over the weekend that Ukraine was preparing to detonate a “dirty bomb,’’ a phrase that describes a conventional explosive, like dynamite, that is wrapped with radiological waste. In a series of phone calls on Monday with NATO nations, Moscow’s top military commander, Gen. Valery Gerasimov, repeated the allegation.

…

The allegation, which the United States has said was baseless, spooked senior defense and military officials, who expressed concern that Moscow might be using the false flag as a distraction, masking some other more ominous development.

That possibility only heightened concerns among already jittery senior Pentagon officials about Russia’s next possible step up the escalation ladder. One senior U.S. official said there were new, troubling developments involving Russia’s nuclear arsenal. The official asked for anonymity and declined to provide any details, given the sensitivity of the issue.

Read the last paragraph of that excerpt again and worry. Reportedly Russia’s foreign minister even wants to raise the issue of a Ukrainian dirty bomb at the U.N. The idea is nutty, needless to say: Zelensky and his team have no reason to contaminate their own territory with radiation, particularly given how doing so would give Russia a pretext to retaliate with its own nuclear use. A dirty bomb makes sense only as a false flag operation, staged by the Russians themselves to justify a nuclear escalation.

And I use the term “makes sense” loosely. Everyone would see through it, as Tom Nichols notes, and it would leave Russia more isolated and desperate than before. But a Russia that’s isolated and desperate enough to manufacture a nuclear provocation is a Russia that may be isolated and desperate enough to go further, toward unthinkable scenarios.

Perhaps Jayapal and other members of the progressive faction have seen worrying intelligence recently that made them conclude diplomacy is urgent to avert those unthinkable scenarios. That would amount to paying the Danegeld, implicitly encouraging America and Ukraine to let themselves be extorted by nuclear threats. But given a choice between that and a small but now nonzero chance of Armageddon, you can see why lefty doves might have decided that it’s finally time to send the letter they signed in July.

It sure wouldn’t explain why they retracted it, though! And it wouldn’t explain these comments from the most influential progressive in Congress.

Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders said Tuesday that the Russian invasion of Ukraine “has to be resisted,” and that the Congressional Progressive Caucus was right to withdraw a letter that urged President Biden to negotiate an end to the war with Russian President Vladimir Putin.

…

Sanders, who is launching a multi-state midterm campaign swing to help Democrats in tough races, remained committed to supporting Ukraine from “a major power invading and causing mass destruction.” He dismissed the claim from some candidates, and some protesters, who have called progressive members of Congress “war mongers” over their votes to fund Ukraine’s counter-offensive.

“Democrats, war mongers?” said Sanders. “When you have Putin breaking all kinds of international laws, unleashing an incredibly disgusting and horrific level of destruction against the people of Ukraine?”

Presumably Bernie has access to the same intelligence as Pramila Jayapal, yet here he is sounding like an old-school neocon, as untroubled by the prospect of Armageddon as a Reagan Republican circa 1983. If you thought the populist right’s identity crisis on foreign policy was rough, hoo boy. The left’s will be a spectacle for years to come.