Can You Help?

I started this little blog 15 years ago because I wanted a place to explore my own thinking about politics. I'm not one who automatically buys into the conventional wisdom of the day and often have interests/questions that I don't see addressed in other news outlets. As a pragmatic progressive, I'm drawn to all kinds of topics, but have a special interest in the role that both race and religion play in our politics.

Because I tend to be drawn to angles on stories that don't dominate the headlines, it takes a unique reader to appreciate my writing. That makes you special. So I really appreciate the small audience that has developed here.

As you can see, writing at "Horizons" has never been about making money. While I did have a paid gig at the Washington Monthly for a few years, that ended about a year ago. So far I've resisted putting my writing behind a paywall or heading over to Substack and requiring people to subscribe. Neither of those options have appealed to me.

However, due to some recent unforeseen events, I find myself struggling financially. I don't think it will be permanent, but I'm a bit stressed out at the moment. So if you are one of those special people who appreciates what I do AND you happen to have a few bucks of disposable income, the time has come to ask you to consider making a donation. On the top right corner of this page you'll find a "Donate" button that will take you to my PayPal account.

As is true for most of us, it's never been easy for me to ask for help. But...

Republicans Have Become the Party of Attention-Seeking Trolls

Early in Trump's presidency, Josh Marshall captured his appeal.

People continue to marvel how a city-bred, godless libertine who was born to great wealth could become and remain the political avatar of small town and rural voters of middling means. The answer is simple. Despite all their differences, Trump meets his voters in a common perception (real or not) of being shunned, ignored and disrespected by ‘elites’. In short, his politics and his connection with his core voters is based on grievance. This is a profound and enduring connection.

As one Trump supporter told Jeffrey Goldberg in 2018: “There’s the Obama Doctrine, and the ‘Fuck Obama’ Doctrine. We’re the ‘Fuck Obama’ Doctrine.” That sentiment had been fueled by the fact that in 2009, Republicans abandoned the idea of an agenda and, instead, rallied around a strategy of total obstruction. The party was no longer FOR anything, they were merely against whatever Democrats attempted to do. 

After eight years of "fuck Obama" politics, along came Trump with his so-called "populist" appeal to grievance, telling voters that Democrats were fueling an invasion of immigrants, wanted to take away their guns, and were mounting attacks on their religious freedom. Lance Mannion identified the appeal:

They like feeling persecuted. They need to feel persecuted...it feeds their self-pity and sense of entitlement, and it gives them their excuse.

It’s how they turn offense into defense, how repression and oppression become liberty.

If they are under attack, then they’re free to fight back.

I say all of that as a way to explain why people like Representatives Majorie Taylor Greene, Matt Gaetz, and Madison Cawthorn have risen to become the most popular leaders with the MAGA crowd. 

Think about this: MTG has been stripped of her committee assignments and of the 17 bills she's signed on to as a sponsor, four are to impeach Biden, two would punish Rep. Maxine Waters, and one is titled "Fire Fauci Act." Several others are merely commemorative - like a bill to give Kyle Rittenhouse the Congressional Gold Medal. In other words, she hasn't proposed anything that would actually improve the lives of her constituents...it's all grievance politics. 

So if she's not on any committees or working on any actually legislation, what does MTG do all day? She's a performance artist who spends most of her time attacking the people she has identified as enemies - be they Democrats or Republicans. In other words, she's a troll - which the Urban Dictionary defines as "someone who deliberately pisses people off to get a reaction." 

Writing at the Bulwark, Jonathan Last nailed it.

Does it matter to his future political prospects that Matt Gaetz doesn’t advance legislation? Does it matter that Madison Cawthorn staffed up his office with comms people? Does it matter that Marjorie Taylor Greene doesn’t have committee assignments?

Well, these quirks would matter in a system where legislative accomplishments influenced voter behavior. But the preponderance of evidence suggests that Republican voters don’t care about tangible government outcomes...

Republican voters—a group distinct from Conservatism Inc.—no longer have any concrete outcomes that they want from government.

What they have, instead, is a lifestyle brand.

And if you want to move up the ladder within a brand network, you don’t do it by governing or making policy.

You do it by getting attention.

In a world where legislative accomplishments don't influence voter behavior, getting attention is the name of the game. The more outlandish the accusations - the better. 

Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell is clearing the field for this kind of attention grabbing by admitting that Republicans have no actual policy agenda heading into the 2022 midterms. He believes that voters will reward the party that eschews governance in favor of performance. 

That sets up this dynamic:

Democrats continue to comport themselves as if they exist in a real political economy—a real world where they will be judged by voters on the outcomes of their actual policy choices. Meanwhile Republicans operate according to the rules of the attention economy.

With their focus on actual policy, can Democrats win back voters who gravitated to the Republican Party because it spoke to their grievances? I'm not optimistic, but perhaps there's always hope at the margins. If so, it will probably require them to change the conversation by repeating the question Biden asked a few weeks ago: "What are Republicans FOR?"

Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene Is Trump's True Heir

There are times when the only sane response is to point and laugh.

Just to clear things up, @RepMTG

Gazpacho: a vegetable-based Spanish cold soup
Gestapo: Nazi Germany's secret police pic.twitter.com/T9q76r706G

— The Republican Accountability Project (@AccountableGOP) February 9, 2022

Twitter had a field day. 

Overheard: Marjorie Taylor Greene keeps talking about Nancy Pelosi’s “Gazpacho” and now I want the recipe.

— George Takei (@GeorgeTakei) February 9, 2022

The Washington Post obliged.

Did someone say gazpacho? This recipe, from @chefjoseandres himself, might be just what you're looking for. https://t.co/KLIBxCvEH1

— Post Food (@WaPoFood) February 9, 2022 

pic.twitter.com/CKiCKCzAZY

— Thee Vic 💛 (@vicsepulveda) February 9, 2022

I’ve met some members of the gazpacho police. They are consommé professionals.

— Danielle Decker Jones (@djtweets) February 9, 2022

Defund the Gazpacho!

— Randy Rainbow (@RandyRainbow) February 9, 2022

That's just a sampling of the response to a woman who once claimed that the 2018 California wildfires were ignited by a space laser controlled by a corporate cabal, including the Rothschild banking firm. It's clear that Rep. Greene isn't just a bully who is out of touch with reality, she's also not the sharpest knife in the drawer. 

Does that remind you of anyone? There are a lot of white men who are busy positioning themselves to be Trump's successor, with most pundits assuming that Flordia Governor Ron DeSantis leads the pack. But none of those men truly embrace the essence of the former guy better that Rep. Greene. 

As I've written before, Rep. Greene has actually threatened treason by suggesting that red states divorce themselves (ie, secede) from the blue states. But recently, the woman who claims to represent the true base of the Republican Party has zeroed in on a new target. She says that an intraparty GOP civil war is necessary.

Mrs. Greene, in an interview with The Washington Times Editorial Board last week, said that on some issues, there is no choice but to stand against others in your own party.

“No one likes to watch people fighting, and we’re supposed to support one another — respect and obey Reagan’s ‘11th commandment.’ But If we are truly going to stop the assault on our freedoms and stop what’s happening to our country, where America is just being able to be sold out to the rest of the world,” Mrs. Greene said. “We have to lean into this civil war in the GOP.”

As Mike Pence, Mitch McConnell, and other Republicans break with Trump over what took place at the Capital on January 6, I'm sure that Rep. Greene's response is music to the former guy's ears. He's been trying his damnest to ignite a civil war among Republicans heading into the 2022 primaries.

I have to admit that after years of media focus on "Dems in disarray," this Republican civil war is quite entertaining. But coming on the heels of four years of Donald Trump in the White House, my tendency to point and laugh at these idiots is a bit tarnished. To the extent that makes me too "grim and joyless" in Kevin Drum's eyes, I plead guilty.

Democrats Shouldn't Repeat the Errors of the 90s

For the last few days I've been reading a lot of analysis in an attempt to understand what happened with Hispanic voters in the 2020 election. At first I wasn't sure why this question piqued my curiosity. But a piece by Ron Brownstein helped explain it. He notes that there is a small group of data analysts - primarily David Shor, Ruy Teixeira, and Stanley Greenberg - who are reigniting the idea that Democrats should harken back to the strategies proposed by the Democratic Leadership Council and largely adopted by Bill Clinton in the 1990s. As such, Brownstein refers to these analysts as "neo-New Democrats."

Just like the centrists who clustered around Bill Clinton and the Democratic Leadership Council that he led decades ago, today’s dissenters argue that Democrats risk a sustained exodus from power unless they can recapture more of the culturally conservative voters without a college education who are drifting away from the party. (That group, these dissenters argue, now includes not only white Americans but also working-class Hispanics and even some Black Americans.) 

These neo-New Democrats had already been focused on the need for Democrats to win back white working class voters. But when it became clear that Trump had actually increased his support from Hispanics in 2020, they took it as further confirmation that the party had been taken over by "liberal elites" who were too extreme on so-called "cultural issues," perhaps requiring another Sister Souljah moment. All of that comes regardless of this:

After [Clinton] left office, more Democrats came to view his approach as an unprincipled concession to white conservatives, particularly on issues such as crime and welfare....Hillary Clinton, in her 2016 primary campaign, felt compelled to renounce decisions from her husband’s presidency on trade, LGBTQ rights, and crime...Even Bill Clinton, in a 2015 appearance before the NAACP, apologized for elements of the crime bill, which he acknowledged had contributed to the era of mass incarceration.

If, as these neo-New Democrats suggested, Hispanic voters are drifting Republican (even in the era of Donald Trump) along with their white working class counterparts, that would be a serious problem for the future of the party. So I kept looking for answers about what happened. 

What have I learned? Perhaps the most important thing was a reminder that there is no such thing as the "Hispanic vote." While pundits tend to slice and dice white voters by every criteria imaginable, we think of voters of color as blocs, ie, Black, Hispanic, Asian, Native American. But each of those groups is complex - and none more so that Hispanics. 

As a result, we need to go back to the basics and ask "Who is Hispanic." According to the census bureau, it's anyone who says they are and nobody who says they aren’t. Using that definition, Pew Research says that there are roughly 62 million self-identified Hispanics in the U.S. Further, they found that, when it comes to identity, "47% of Hispanics most often describe themselves by their family’s country of origin; 39% use the terms Latino or Hispanic, and 14% most often describe themselves as American."

To drill down on what this means politically, a Mexican-American in Phoenix doesn't have all that much in common with a Cuban-American in Miami. So trying to figure out what happened to the Hispanic vote in 2020 is going to get very complicated very fast. Anyone who answers that simplistically is most likely skewing the data to confirm their existing biases.

With that in mind, one of the trends that usually gets overlooked is that, according to the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative, "nationwide, Latinos cast 16.6 million votes in 2020, an increase of 30.9% over the 2016 presidential election. By comparison, turnout was 15.9% greater among voters of all races." Some of that was driven by the fact that every year about 900,000 Hispanics turn 18 and become eligible to vote. But that's not the whole story. 

As just one example, here's what happened in the Rio Grande Valley, where Trump made some of his biggest gains.

In terms of raw vote totals, Biden actually saw an increase compared to Clinton - but new Hispanic voters surged to Trump. According to Equis Labs (which analyzes data about the Hispanic Community), the same thing happened in heavily Hispanic areas across the country.

That is important to keep in mind because, while some Hispanics did switch from Clinton to Trump, the swing towards the former guy mostly came from people who hadn't voted in 2016. Equis suggests that these are the true "swing voters" because they are less ideologically driven than hardcore conservatives or liberals.

So the question becomes: what motivated new Hispanic voters to turn out for Trump? That is where the complexities come into play. Claims that Biden was a socialist seem to have gained salience primarily in South Florida (due to disinformation spread in Spanish media by both the Trump campaign and right wing media), while border security was especially important in the Rio Grande Valley where Tejanos ("we didn't cross the border, the border crossed us") don't consider themselves immigrants and tend to work for either Border Patrol or the oil and gas industry. 

But Equis Labs was able to rule out one contributor that has been pushed by the neo-New Democrats.

Do attitudes toward the police and BLM help us to predict which Hispanic voters supported Trump? Our analysis says no: feeling very favorably toward police or unfavorably toward BLM didn't show any significant effect beyond what we would predict based on a Hispanic voter’s partisan and demographic profile.

One factor that seemed to have had salience across the board is the fact that between the 2016 and 2020 election, the conversation shifted away from immigration to the economy.

Hispanic voters tended to give Trump his highest marks on the economy. 

Contrary to what the neo-New Democrats claim, Stephanie Valencia (the president of Equis Labs) told Brownstein that, "Biden might have performed better with Hispanics if the campaign debate had focused more on immigration." According to Pew Research, "86% of Hispanics say there should be a way for undocumented immigrants who are living in the U.S. to remain legally, if certain requirements are met.

With all of that, it is important to balance things out with the other side of the coin - which was provided by the UCLA Latino Policy and Politics Initiative.

The analysis of votes cast in 13 states is the most comprehensive look at how Latinos voted in the 2020 general election. In 12 of those states, Latinos supported Biden over President Donald Trump by a margin of at least 2 to 1. And in nine of the 13 — including the battleground states of Wisconsin and Pennsylvania — the margin was at least 3 to 1. Only in Florida was Biden’s margin among Latino voters less than 2 to 1.

The authors write that Latinos played a key role in swinging election results in several battleground states. In Arizona, where Latinos represent 25.2% of all registered voters, the size and turnout of the Latino electorate helped Biden become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since Bill Clinton in 1996. And even in Wisconsin and Georgia — where Latinos make up less than 5% of registered voters — the Latino electorate helped tipped the results in favor of Biden, whose margin of victory was less than a single percentage point in each state.

Arizona is the one heavily Hispanic state that bucked the trend when it comes to Trump's improved performance. The reason why is likely related to what Black women accomplished in Georgia after years of organizing.

Latinos represent one of every five voters [in Arizona]—six hundred thousand went to the polls this year—and the vast majority of them voted for Biden. “Arizona was no fluke,” Valencia said, noting that Trump won the state four years ago by merely eighty thousand votes. She credited a decade of organizing in response to Senate Bill 1070, the “show me your papers” law, which was designed to crack down on the state’s immigrant community by allowing police officers to arbitrarily question individuals about their legal status. For years, Latinos whose relatives, friends, or acquaintances had been impacted by the law and scarred by the climate of fear fostered by Sheriff Joe Arpaio had organized politically. In 2016, Arpaio lost his reëlection bid, ending a two-decade tenure. The same civil-rights groups that helped defeat him continued mobilizing in 2020, including Living United for Change (lucha), which placed twelve million calls to potential voters with a coalition of organizations. “We’ve been here for ten years,” Tomás Robles, lucha’s executive director, said. “Elections are simply a marker for us.”

Rather than repeat the errors of the 1990s, that provides the answer for what Democrats can do to win increasing shares of the Hispanic vote...work tirelessly on the ground. Even with the massive increase in turnout in 2020, only about half of Hispanics who are eligible voted. There's plenty of work to do.

Does Getting a College Degree Make You Elitist?

According to most pundits, what has fueled the recent divide in our elections has been the divergence between voters who are college educated and those who aren't. For example, Nate Cohn wrote about "how educational differences are widening America's political rift," with college graduates now a firmly Democratic bloc and those without degrees flocking to Republicans. 

Here's a bit from Cohn's piece that doesn't usually get much attention.

Overall, 41 percent of people who cast ballots last year were four-year college graduates, according to census estimates. By contrast, just 5 percent of voters in 1952 were college graduates, according to that year’s American National Elections Study.

Here's a chart that demonstrates that swing:

While the gap persists for Black Americans, we see the same upward trajectory. 

Just as that is happening, we're being flooded with the idea that college graduates are the "elite" in this country that are now pulling the strings in the Democratic Party. For example, in writing about how the cultural elite came to rule the Democratic Party, Michael Barone defines those "elites" as follows:

White college grads have become the dominant constituency in the Democratic Party. Even as the descendants of the party’s blue-collar constituents have become Donald Trump Republicans, Democratic percentages among white college graduates have ballooned.

We see that conflation of college graduates and elites from people as diverse as Niall Stanage, David Brooks, Bernie Sanders, and Thomas Edsall. It springs from the same place as those on both the far left and the right who have appropriated "wokeness" as a pejorative - as if waking up to the reality of systemic racism is a negative.

This one has actually had me floored for a while. Perhaps because I was part of the first wave of women to go to college. Surely there were those from my mother's generation that blazed a trail, but it wasn't until my generation that it became somewhat of a norm. It has always seemed to me that having the opportunity to go to college was an integral part of the American dream. All over this country, parents sacrificed in order to provide that opportunity to their children. Now those who did so are being tarred negatively as "elitists."

How did that happen? It shouldn't be lost on any of us that, just as women and people of color make great strides in getting a college education, the ability to do so is being flooded with negative connotations. 

But that's just part of the problem. Whether they're willing to admit it or not, conservatives have long been aware that, as Stephen Colbert so famously noted, reality has a liberal bias. When young people go to college, one of the things that happens is that they learn about reality - and thus get exposed to a liberal bias. That is why part of the conservative agenda for years has been to target institutions of higher learning.

Meanwhile, over the last few years (and especially in the midst of the coronavirus pandemic), there has been a subtle movement in this country to celebrate ignorance. At the root of that is what Colbert named "truthiness." We are being told to believe what we feel rather than consider what the experts tell us, and to assume that facts based on science are merely opinions. 

The trend towards tarring members of the Democratic coalition as elitists didn't start during the Trump era. No one has explained all of this better than Leonard Steinhorn, who went back to the time when, during his 1981 inaugural address, Ronald Reagan said that we should not allow “government by an elite group” to “ride on our back.” A major tenant of the so-called Reagan Revolution was to paint the government as a "them" that represents the problem, not the solution. 

For four decades now, Republicans have succeeded in framing Democrats as the party that uses government to bigfoot rather than aid the American people. Democrats may celebrate public servants for keeping our food safe and our lakes healthy, but Republicans have successfully portrayed them as a humorless bureaucrats who salivate at the urge to exert power and control over taxpaying Americans.

And Republicans have very artfully created a counternarrative, turning the market into a synonym for liberty and defining it as an authentic expression of American grass-roots energy in which small businesses and entrepreneurs simply need freedom from government to shower benefits on us all...

Indeed, in the Republican playbook it’s the teachers, unions, environmental groups, professors and civil rights organizations that constitute the establishment whereas Koch and other industry-funded astroturf groups are the real gladiators fighting the status quo...

In effect, conservatives have rather successfully portrayed liberals and Democrats as willing to use cultural and political power against ordinary Americans. They want to take my guns, regulate my business, dictate who I can hire, and tell me what I can buy, which doctors I see, how I live, when I pray and even what I say — so goes the conservative narrative...

Taken together, Republicans have successfully defined Democrats as a party of bureaucrats, power brokers, media elites, special interests and snobs who have created a client state for those they favor, aim to control what everyone else does and look down their noses at the people who pay the taxes to fund the same government that Democrats use to control their lives.

That is the core messaging problem that Democrats need to grapple with. In a representative democracy, the government is "us," not "them." As such, it is the tool we have to protect and promote our own interests and hold tyranny at bay. That difference was highlighted when, at their 2014 convention, Republicans overreacted to President Obama's claim that "you didn't build that." Obama's speech at the Democratic Convention provided the road map for a response.

We, the people — recognize that we have responsibilities as well as rights; that our destinies are bound together; that a freedom which asks only, what's in it for me, a freedom without a commitment to others, a freedom without love or charity or duty or patriotism, is unworthy of our founding ideals, and those who died in their defense.

As citizens, we understand that America is not about what can be done for us. It's about what can be done by us, together through the hard and frustrating but necessary work of self-government. That's what we believe.

That is why it is so infuriating when liberals join with right wingers and buy into the notion that college educated teachers, unions leaders, staff of environmental groups, professors, and the leaders of civil rights organizations are "elitist." We might agree or disagree with their beliefs and proposals, but the real elitists are those that are trying to strip the American people of their ability to exercise their citizenship by fulfilling their responsibilities via the hard but necessary work of self-government.

Will Republicans Walk Their Talk? I'm Not Holding My Breath.

Amidst some good news on Friday (ie, the surprisingly great jobs report and the fact that the North Carolina Supreme Court rejected the gerrymandered redistricting map), almost no one paid attention to the fact that the House passed the America Competes Act. As I mentioned previously, the Senate passed a companion bill last June. Overall this legislation is meant to allow the U.S. to better compete with China, strengthen the supply chain, and reduce some inflationary pressures, so this is what the two bills have in common:

USICA and the COMPETES Act share certain core proposals, such as establishing a new National Science Foundation directorate and a program to seed regional innovation hubs across the country. In addition, both would directly appropriate $52 billion for semiconductor production and R&D initiatives that were authorized last year, and both include extensive provisions bearing on trade policy and foreign relations.

But there are some differences that will have to be worked out in conference before any legislation can actually go to Biden for his signature. 

The Senate version received 19 Republican votes (including Senate Majority Leader McConnell), but the only House Republican to vote for it was Rep. Adam Kingsinger (R-IL). That happened regardless of the fact that 16 former U.S national security officials – including Republicans – urged passage of the bill, along with support from the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, labor groups and the semiconductor industry.

Republicans have been especially bellicose when it comes to ramping up the threat posed by China. They also spend a lot of time complaining about inflation and supply chain issues, while touting themselves as the so-called "populists" who care about working class Americans. This legislation tackles all of those concerns. We'll learn whether their rhetoric is backed up by any real desire to address these issues when we see how willing they are to negotiate a compromise between the House and Senate bills. I won't be holding my breath on that one, though.

Did Putin Miscalculate?

When Russia laid out its demands of both the United States and NATO in order to pull back from a possible invasion of Ukraine, there was a lot that all parties could agree to. But the major sticking point is Putin's demand that NATO end its "open door" policy of allowing nations to apply for membership in the alliance. For some historical perspective, this map shows how NATO has grown eastward since its founding in 1949.

There are those on both the right and the left who are suggesting that the U.S. should accede to Putin's demands - assuming that it would persuade Russia to back off their aggression. But as former Russian ambassador Michael McFaul pointed out, "Putin doesn't think like we do."

First, Putin believes that the West unfairly dictated the terms of peace at the Cold War’s end...Now that Russia is powerful again, Putin is prepared to risk a lot to revise this so-called American imperial order, especially in Europe. He sees this mission as his sacred destiny...Even if Biden and his NATO allies wanted to offer that concession, Putin won’t be satiated. He will press on to undo the liberal international order for as long as he remains in power. Normalizing annexation, denying sovereignty to neighbors, undermining liberal ideas and democratic societies, and dissolving NATO are future goals.

Second...Putin does not view countries as unitary actors; he looks within countries to distinguish between dictatorships and democracies. Not without reason, Putin believes that U.S. support for democracy abroad threatens his autocratic rule. During Putin’s reign, most crises in relations with the United States have been triggered not by NATO expansion, but by democratic mobilizations — Putin calls them “color revolutions” — within countries, be it Georgia in 2003, Ukraine in 2004, the Arab Spring in 2011, Russia in 2011 and Ukraine in 2014.

On this contentious issue, there is no deal to be had between the United States and Russia as long as Putin is in power. U.S. leaders cannot command other societies to stop wanting democracy. Putin will always fear mass protests and feel threatened by democracies, especially successful ones on his border with a shared history and culture such as Ukraine.

Writing at the Atlantic, Anne Applebaum went into even greater detail about why Putin would be willing to risk war. After pointing to the protests that erupted in Russia following the 2011 election (which Putin blamed on Hillary Clinton), she writes this:

In his mind, in other words, he wasn’t merely fighting Russian demonstrators; he was fighting the world’s democracies, in league with enemies of the state. Whether he really believed that crowds in Moscow were literally taking orders from Hillary Clinton is unimportant. He certainly understood the power of democratic language, of the ideas that made Russians want a fair political system, not a kleptocracy controlled by Putin and his gang, and he knew where they came from. Over the subsequent decade, he would take the fight against democracy to Germany, France, Italy, and Spain, where he would support extremist groups and movements in the hope of undermining European democracy. Russian state-controlled media would support the campaign for Brexit, on the grounds that it would weaken Western democratic solidarity, which it has. Russian oligarchs would invest in key industries across Europe and around the world with the aim of gaining political traction, especially in smaller countries like Hungary and Serbia. And, of course, Russian disinformation specialists would intervene in the 2016 American election.

What happened in Ukraine in 2014 is important to keep in mind. 

Conversations recently have been hyper-fixated on NATO, but before Russia’s invasion in 2014, Ukraine was not pursuing NATO membership. It was deepening ties with the European Union. Ukraine was attempting to sign an Association Agreement with the EU, which would foster closer relations. Russia strongly opposed the move...

Ultimately, the Ukrainian government abandoned the EU agreement. Russia swooped in offering improved relations and a cut in natural gas pricing. Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych – who was backed by Vladimir Putin’s Russia in the 2004 and 2010 elections – accepted the deal. The decision was met by a cascading mix of pro-European, pro-Ukrainian, and anti-Russian protests across the country. As the demonstrations persisted, Yanukovych eventually fled – tellingly, to Russia and aided by Putin. Moscow responded to the situation by invading — annexing Crimea and sending troops into the Donbas region in Ukraine’s east to support nascent pro-Russian separatist forces.

Fundamentally, Putin does not accept a Ukraine that has the right to choose its own foreign policy. He does not accept that Ukraine could integrate with Western institutions. He does not accept a Ukraine that cooperates more with the United States.

As McFaul wrote, Putin's goals aren't to simply block Ukraine from joining NATO, they are to normalize annexations, deny sovereignty to neighbors, undermine liberal ideas and democratic societies, and dissolve NATO. 

It is clear that the four years of Trump's presidency set the stage for Putin to take this next move of threatening Ukraine and making demands that would undermine NATO. Not only were America's relationships with our European allies strained, the anti-democratic forces that are alive and well in the Republican Party have led to extreme polarization in this country. It is very likely that Putin's calculation was that he could exploit those divisions at this moment in time in order to make progress on his goals. 

But with President Biden at the helm of U.S. foreign policy, the response to Putin's demands from both this country and Europe have been fairly seamless, as Edward Luce wrote.

By demanding concessions that have shocked a divided and rudderless Europe, Russian president Vladimir Putin has united the west behind U.S. leadership. It has been years since that sentence could be written with a straight face. Russia has brought about what it fears — a west that is displaying something approaching resolve. By threatening Ukraine’s sovereignty, Putin has done something Biden could not on his own — unite the west.

Both England and the United States have been declassifying intelligence about what Putin is planning as a way to ensure that the west remains both informed and unified. For example:

The United States has acquired intelligence about a Russian plan to fabricate a pretext for an invasion of Ukraine using a faked video that would build on recent disinformation campaigns, according to senior administration officials and others briefed on the material.

The plan — which the United States hopes to spoil by making public — involves staging and filming a fabricated attack by the Ukrainian military either on Russian territory or against Russian-speaking people in eastern Ukraine.

Russia, the officials said, intended to use the video to accuse Ukraine of genocide against Russian-speaking people. It would then use the outrage over the video to justify an attack or have separatist leaders in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine invite a Russian intervention.

With that, it's probably back to the drawing board for Putin.  

Certainly Tucker Carlson and Senator Josh Hawley are doing everything they can to promote Putin's aims among right wingers in this country. But at least so far, the mainstream media is recognizing what's at stake. That means that the rest of the country isn't buying into the propaganda. The fissures are mostly constrained to disagreements between members of the Republican Party. 

At this point, things seem to be at a standstill in Ukraine. It is unlikely that Putin will make a move at least until the Olympic games in China are over on February 20. But it seems increasingly clear that he miscalculated when it comes to exploiting the divisions he's been feeding.