The domestic political fallout from Russia’s Ukraine invasion will be developing over the coming weeks, months, and likely years, but as I discussed last week, some elements are already crystal clear. The Republican Party has indicated that, despite the U.S. facing arguably the worst foreign policy crisis since the end of the Cold War, it will use the conflict as a partisan political weapon against the Democrats and President Biden in upcoming elections. Far from being the good-faith criticisms of a loyal opposition, the GOP’s line of attack constitutes a shocking willingness to do substantive harm to national interests in the name of partisan gain.
Even as they appear to be abandoning long-term indifference to Ukraine’s fate (more on that shortly), Republican politicians have floated two major criticisms: that President Biden is responsible for Vladimir Putin’s decision to invade Ukraine due to his incompetence and weakness, and that Biden is responsible for the high gas prices that have ensued, both due to his aforementioned culpability in causing the invasion and because he has set up the U.S. for oil and gas shortages because of his (actually non-existent) aggressive measures against global warming and in favor of green energy.
The danger, as Brian Beutler writes this week at Crooked Media, is that the national unity against Putin that Joe Biden claimed in his state of the union address will inevitably fray if the Republicans continue to press their attacks against the president. The idea of unity at the political level is of course already tenuous, given that there’s no good evidence that the GOP’s sudden reversal into concern for the fate of Ukraine has any real substance to it. But there is actual unity among the voting public, at least for now (among other startling recent poll results, some 79% of Americans favor banning imports of Russian oil, even if it means higher prices at the gas pump). This widespread shared public outrage against Russia is a big part of why Republicans have at least felt compelled to voice their outrage about the attack on Ukraine, even if their actions over the past several years have told a far different story about their support of that embattled nation.
Beutler’s point is that this public unity will eventually dissolve, at least among GOP voters, if their elected officials continue a campaign of denigration against the president’s leadership and place the blame for higher gas prices (and thus continued inflation) squarely on Biden. In other words, the GOP’s electoral strategy is inextricably linked to subverting Joe Biden’s — that is, the nation’s — ability to confront and restrain Vladimir Putin in his war against Ukraine, which already contains dark, if still remote, possibilities of spreading into a broader war against NATO.
I highly recommend reading Beutler’s column, which presents the dynamic I summarize above in much more nuance and detail, and also gets at the solution to this issue: the need for Democrats to ensure that their arguments prevail against those of the GOP in what will inevitably become (due to the GOP’s scorched earth strategy) a partisan fight over the direction of U.S. policy towards the invasion and management of the accompanying economic and political challenges. But there’s another angle I wanted to bring into play here, probably not a surprising one for many: the continuity between GOP actions on Ukraine and the Republican insurrectionary project that’s been underway since the waning days of the Trump administration.
We can’t really properly talk about the Republican reaction to Ukraine without putting it in the broader context of the ongoing GOP attack against free and fair elections in this country, which I’ve argued constitutes a slow-motion coup against American democracy. Republican efforts to unfairly blame Biden for Russia’s invasion, in a way that ultimately strengthens the hand of an authoritarian ruler, needs to be seen as deeply linked to the GOP’s own authoritarian aims in the United States. It is not so much that Republican politicians see Putin as an actual ally — though some, including former President Trump, clearly do — but that the GOP has no actual interest in defending democracy, or warding off authoritarianism, in another country. After all, a true commitment to promoting democracy abroad would inevitably expose the gaping distance from the GOP’s policies at home, where voter suppression, radical gerrymandering, and white supremacism are central elements of its politics. The GOP can’t defend democracy abroad in any meaningful way without undermining its war against democracy at home.
In turn, any Democratic strategies regarding the Ukraine crisis that fail to account for the GOP’s insurrectionary turn are bound to be hampered and subverted by such a glaring blind spot (this, not coincidentally, is definitely a theme of Beutler’s article noted above). Here, Republican backing of a ban on Russian oil imports is a chilling case study. As The Washington Post’s Dana Milbank summarizes, “For days, Republicans called for a ban on imports of Russian oil, a move that, while the right thing to do to counter Putin’s attack against Ukraine, would cause already high gas prices to rise even further. Biden did as Republicans wanted — and they responded by blaming his energy policies for spiking gas prices.” While the GOP benefits in the public eye by appearing tough on Putin, I would argue that the primary GOP interest in banning these oil imports is in fact to harm the Biden presidency, given the Republican Party’s actual lack of interest in either defending Ukraine or democracy in general. Recognition of this fact would prompt a far different Democratic response, which right now is primarily to overlook the GOP attacks in favor of pointing to the GOP actions as a demonstration of national unity.
This is not to say that there aren’t very good reasons for Biden and the Democrats to want to create an appearance of togetherness. After all, any perceptions by Putin or U.S. allies that America is divided in its resolve to defend Ukraine could have deeply counterproductive consequences in the real world, whether by emboldening Russia or disheartening our friends. But Democrats surely also have an interest in promoting actual unity at home, rather than the false one that currently obtains — and this would entail confronting the GOP on its hypocrisy when it blames Joe Biden for the consequences of the very actions the GOP claims to support.
Rather than impute good faith to the GOP’s support of a Russian oil ban, Democrats should act with full awareness of the GOP’s insurrectionary nature, and mercilessly attack the GOP when it tries to turn a show of bipartisan unity into a baseless attack on the president — that is, when it reveals the true motivations behind its pretense of unity. This might seems counterintuitive — won’t this just cause the appearance of American disarray the Democrats are so eager to avoid? — but the fact of the matter is that, at least right now, the GOP is actually in a bind. GOP politicos do have to appear anti-Putin and anti-invasion, due to broad public upset at the Russian attack. And so when they blatantly use actions they themselves support to attack Biden, and thus undermine the very efforts to bring Russia to heel that they claim to back, they create enormous vulnerabilities for themselves. The hypocrisy is so glaring as to be not blinding, but deeply illuminating. When the GOP demonstrates that it would rather blame Joe Biden for inflation than Vladimir Putin, the party is both showing its true insurrectionary colors and placing itself in the crosshairs of a righteous critique.
As we’ve seen so often before, Democrats insist on compartmentalizing the feral, anti-democratic descent of the GOP, behaving as if its war on democracy might somehow be separated out from other areas of politics. This manifests in various ways, from President Biden’s continued insistence on the supreme importance of bipartisan legislation, to the party’s general reluctance to highlight the broader GOP’s complicity in Donald Trump's January 6 coup attempt, to a refusal to level with Democratic voters and the public at large about the GOP’s white supremacist, Christian nationalist vision for America. And now, at a time of foreign policy crisis, the Democrats risk repeating the error, promoting a fiction that politics stops at the water’s edge even as the GOP demonstrates the folly of such self-delusion.
Only self-imposed constraints are stopping President Biden and his fellow Democrats from making the GOP pay a steep price for their subversion of American efforts to counter Russian aggression, which is the far more accurate reading of the past few weeks’ events than the fiction that the GOP has joined Democrats in an amazing display of national resolve. Democrats should proceed with eyes wide open as to the nature of their political opponents. The fact that the GOP has not been shaken back into a shared national purpose, even with Russian armies threatening the systems of post-Cold War stability, should in fact be another wake-up call as to the true nature of the contemporary GOP.
The ability to roll back Russian aggression, defend global stability, and, above all else, promote true democracy around the world depends on the Democrats’ ability to roll back the GOP. On its own, the media will obviously not zero in on the Republican Party’s malign role in the current crisis — but if Democrats make this into a story, then there is a far greater chance this will become a larger part of the national conversation. As has frequently happened over the past several years, the Democrats can promote the national interest at the same time as they promote their partisan goals, which is what happens when only one party is committed to the perpetuation of American democracy.
The alternative, which strikes me as likely absent a course change by the Democrats, is that the Republican Party will simply escalate its attempts to blame Biden for any invasion-related fallout to the U.S. economy. Without active efforts by the Biden administration to maintain public support — which necessarily involves pushing back against the GOP’s self-serving and deceptive critiques — this support will gradually diminish, particularly among a Republican base driven into a frenzy against “Biden inflation.” With the GOP hell-bent on turning U.S. resistance to Russian aggression into a partisan issue, the Democrats ignore this distinct possibility at the nation’s peril.