Rudy Giuliani’s latest gambit to contaminate a US election with Russian active measures lays bare the ideological and operational affinity between elements of the Republican Party (base and congressional wings) and Putin’s Russia. It began before Trump and will continue after.
At crux is a shared hostility towards liberal democratic pluralism, its foundation in rational empiricism, individualism and rights based on law and accountability. The affinity is for politics of hierarchy, authority, racial tribal identity sustained by and nurtured by an enrolling, evolving narrative to maintain in group mobilization.
Let’s walk through the concentric rings of political evolution and awareness that led to that affinity. How did the US conservative Movement described below become the de facto GOP base? How did it then conquer congressional Republicans and party apparat?
Answering these questions makes it easier to see how the Movement itself then walked away from post-1945 US national identity traditionally understood as it discovered superseding shared priorities and enemies in its perception of Putin’s Russia.
