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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 25, 2023

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The right isn't always the more interventionist side. During WWII, the left (with caveats) was more in favor of intervention on the side of the Allies than the right. The dynamic where the right always wants to go to war abroad and the left doesn't is mostly an artifact of the Cold War, where the enemy was the communist USSR, which obviously the right had specific reason to oppose. Isolationism can easily be justified on right-wing terms, i.e, not our problem, let's keep our own house in order.

Putin is also, ostensibly at least, the leader of a white, Christian, conservative country. This doesn't make most American right-wingers like him (most definitely don't), but a small fraction does. A couple years ago memes about based manly Putin vs weak sissy Obama were not entirely uncommon from conservative facebook boomer types.

The dynamic where the right always wants to go to war abroad and the left doesn't is mostly an artifact of the Cold War, where the enemy was the communist USSR

It's worth noting that the pro-establishment left was just as committed to the Cold War as the right. Truman, JFK and LBJ all escalated the Cold War. The President who tried hardest to de-escalate it was Nixon. The thing that was different about the Cold War is that the anti-establishment right (the Birchers and McCarthyites) were in favour of it, unlike almost every other "foreign entanglement" (including WW2, the MidEast forever wars, and Ukraine).