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Not sure if this belongs here or in SQS, but it could either be a small question I don't understand or a discussion depending on whether or not people disagree about the answer.
Why did support for Ukraine split along the left/right the way it did (at least in the U.S.), when typically one would expect it to go the other way. That is, the right is usually more pro-military, pro-military intervention, and patriotic defending of one's homeland. Even though the right tends to be more focused on domestic issues and oppose foreign aid, military support tends to be the exeption. Although there was bipartisan support of the Iraq war (at least in the aftermath of 9/11) the Republicans were more strongly in favor of it and stayed in favor of it for longer. If Russia had threatened to invade the U.S. the Republicans would have been not only gung-ho about repelling them but also about retaliating and obliterating them in revenge so that none would dare try ever again. So you would think they would sympathize with Ukrainians as similarly patriotic defenders of their home turf, while the left would be all peace and let's try to get along and diplomatically convince the invaders to stop without violence, or something like that.
But that's not what happened. Why?
Is it just because the left has been harping on about Putin for years so hopped on the anti-Russia train too quickly and the right felt compelled to instinctively oppose them? If China had invaded Ukraine (for some mysterious reason) would the right be pro-Ukraine and the left opposing intervention because they don't want to piss off China (and accusing Ukraine of being nazis as an excuse)? That is, is there something specific to Ukraine/Russia that caused this divide here specifically, or am I misunderstanding the position of each side regarding military intervention in general (or has it changed in the past few decades and my beliefs used to be accurate but no longer are)?
It never made sense for right wing voters to support neo conservatism.
Iraq ended up with a flood of migrants to the west. Afghanistan ended up with a heroin epidemic. Libya ended up with a massive migrant crisis and terrorism. Expanding the empire into Asia turned the American heartland into a rust belt with extreme supply chain vulnerabilities. Expanding the empire into Eastern Europe has caused millions of migrants to come into western Europe while it has depopulated Eastern Europe. Now we risk nuclear war over the council of foreign relations crowd wanting to expand their empire into Ukraine. The result is always the same, a massive failure, vast number of dead people and a migrant crisis. Vietnam ended with boat people, Afghanistan ended with planes exceeding their weight limit due to the migrants, and Ukraine has exported a mid-sized European country worth of migrants.
Also, I deeply disagree with the council of foreign relations mission. I don't want Taiwan to have the values of the NYC elite, I don't want western jobs shipped there, and I don't want an elite that I despise to control even more of the planet. I see blackrock, the council of foreign relations and the Washington elite as my enemy. I don't support the NSA, I don't support the financial system that blocks dissidents, I don't support elites that want the world ESG-rated.
Ukraine is the next nation building adventure disaster. Hundreds of thousands of people are dead and wounded and Ukraine is destroyed. Ukraine is ramming through LGBTQA+ stuff because it is now a colony of the US and it will be forced to adopt the values of its imperial master. Europe once again is flooded by migrants and we now have a country in absolute shambles that we are going to have to nation build. Ukraine's military is 1.5 times bigger than the French military, and building and equipping it with western equipment is going to cost tens of billions if not hundreds of billions every year for multiple decades to come. Defence contractors get their billions, you get lack of resources.
The elites are too focused on their global ambitions that they completely neglect their own country. They seem more interested in creating a global liberal hegemony with values that I despise than actually fixing their own country. Right wing voters have signed up to die for these attempts to spread liberalism across the world and got nothing in return. Thousands of republican voters were killed in these foreign fiascos. In return their neighborhood now has central American gangs who came when the US was going to defeat communism by letting wall street contol latin American economies and cause massive exoduses of migrants.
Why is the right going full neocon against China then? That will cost more blood and treasure than all America’s late-20th-century adventures put together, and for nothing.
Are they? I'm legitimately asking, I don't follow much common right wing people. I know they used to be, but I haven't seen it as much.
My father is more right wing (very pro-Trump) and seems more isolationist and pessimistic about taking on China, which he seems to have gotten from various blogs he reads.
I've personally seen more anti-China stuff from the left, though they've slowed down after Ukraine and Russia went to war. Of course selection effects by more often being around left/center people.
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I have never really understood why the right is so anti China. I understand bringing the jobs back but I can't why the right is so eager to defend LGBT on Taiwan.
I'm not sure why "the right" is - I'm not sure I even count as "rightist" - but here's at least a right-leaning explanation.
You don't like cancel culture? Then you don't want the PRC as hegemon. It started there and it's far more entrenched there than it is in the West. The Chinese version of financial institutions has cancellation explicitly built into it; if we cede hegemony to China then this is the mechanism the world will be working with.
You don't like censorship and political indoctrination? You extra super don't want the PRC as hegemon. The West has issues with these creeping in around the margins, but the setup in the PRC is far, far worse because it's pursued openly as policy - for all SJ's excesses, it does not literally round up all the conservatives and throw them in re-education camps. And in a world where the PRC is hegemon, those policies will be rammed down the West's throat - literally item 14 in the list of things the PRC wanted Australia to "fix" was that Australian media said "unfriendly" things about the PRC government, so we have proof positive that in a PRC-hegemon world, our freedom of speech will be demanded of us (Hollywood's also gotten into the habit of self-censoring due to the Chinese market).
You want to preserve your traditional way of life and not have your culture and fertility dismantled? Well, good thing you don't live in China, where there was a one-child policy for 35 years and where they're currently engaged in removing Uyghurs as an ethnicity by literally locking up all the men so the women can only breed with Han Chinese. Admittedly, they haven't shown interest in exporting this one, but holy shit.
If you're a libertarian, then as bad as the West has gotten of late with anti-terror laws and then the SJ movement getting its ten million tentacles around everything and squeezing, the PRC is so much worse. Putin's Russia you can make some argument out of it when comparing it to the non-US West (in much of which there are straight-up hate speech laws), but with the PRC it's a flat no.
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...do you really think that the entire US Taiwan policy can be summed up as "defending LGBT on Taiwan"?
It is about ensuring global liberal hegemony. A hegemony that comes with a globalized labour market, global homogeniety and Americanized values.
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I think Beinart was right in the Times that it’s a combination of residual Cold War “anti-Communism” (the GOP was fervently pro-Kuomintang rule until Nixon and many in the part were hostile to changing affiliation to Red China even then) and the fact that many 20th century Republicans were involved in the large American missionary movement in China (which Mao obviously put an end to), and that Chiang Kaishek was considered to be a civilized Christian, and residual Yellow Terror racial impulse, China is the first major non-white power since Japan to truly threaten the U.S., and even in WW2 the Japanese were the lesser partner to Germany once US war aims were clarified. (And even in the early 20th century before Pearl Harbor, US nativists were typically much more hostile to the Chinese than the Japanese migrants).
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