Because Tucker Carlson is part of a network of right-wing political and media players whose goal is to promote rhetoric which vilifies China, when he interviewed Putin this month he naturally inserted an anti-China psyop into the conversation. He asked Putin a push question, spinning a narrative about China being an aspiring colonial power and then trying to get Putin to say Russia should break from China’s supposedly malign influence. It was a shameful tactic, but I don’t intend to center this essay around countering Carlson, because my audience already knows his anti-China narratives are incorrect. I instead intend to provide a counter—or rather a necessary piece of omitted context—to the way that Ben Norton and his ideological camp have responded to Carlson’s Putin interview. Context that pertains to something these kinds of leftists don’t want us to focus on: Putin believes the USA’s conservative base is compatible with the pro-China stance.
First, this is the response that Putin made to Carlson’s anti-China statements, and that Norton highlighted in his commentary on the interview:
We’ve heard that bogeyman story before, it’s a bogeyman story. We are neighbors with China. You cannot choose neighbors, just as you cannot choose close relatives. We share a border of a thousand kilometers with them, that is number one. Second, we have a centuries-long history of coexistence. We’re used to it. Third, China’s foreign policy philosophy is not aggressive. Its idea is to always look for compromise, and we can see that. The next point is as follows: we’re always told the same bogeyman story, and here it goes again. Through a euphemistic form, but always the same story. The cooperation with China keeps increasing. China’s cooperation with Europe is growing. It’s higher than the rate of growth of Chinese-Russian cooperation. Ask Europeans: aren’t they afraid? They might be, I don’t know. But they are still trying to access China’s market at all costs, especially now that they are facing economic problems. Chinese businesses are also exploring the European market. Do Chinese businesses have a small presence in the United States? Yes, the political decisions are such that they are trying to limit cooperation with China. It is to your own detriment, Mr. Carlson, that you are limiting cooperation with China.
Norton’s analysis of this little moment of confrontation between Carlson and Putin was that Carlson, and the pro-Trump influence circle he’s part of, don’t truly represent an antiwar agenda. That this circle’s members have only been against the anti-Russian warmongering because they want to drive a wedge between Russia and China. This is a true assessment in itself. The issue is that Norton’s camp within the socialist movement acts like because these right-wing elites aren’t truly antiwar, we shouldn’t expand the anti-imperialist movement beyond left-liberal circles. That because the MAGA base and the libertarians are being targeted with this “anti-woke” psyop which seeks to redirect their growing anti-imperialist sentiments, communists shouldn’t try to bring them in a revolutionary direction.
I don’t emphasize the revolutionary potential among rural, religious, and non-leftist Americans because I believe these Americans are the only ones who will be part of the revolution. I emphasize it because if the communist movement remains confined to left-liberal circles, it will be able to rally neither the proto anti-imperialist element that’s emerged among conservatives; nor the even larger apolitical demographic. The anti-imperialist cause won’t be able to triumph within the United States until the country’s antiwar movement becomes no longer dominated by liberal tailism. Until it stops being kept inert by the polarized partisan culture that the elites have manufactured, and acts to rally all Americans who share an interest in the empire’s defeat. By going on Carlson’s show and defending China to his audience, Putin indicated he has hope that this can be done.
If we want to defeat the pro-war Republican psyops that Norton talks about, we’ll need to build an authentic antiwar coalition. One that includes every group which shares the goal of ending U.S. hegemony, and therefore can reach the broad masses rather than merely a political niche. What Norton’s camp does is act like there are no groups outside the left-liberal niche which are compatible in this way; like all antiwar forces beyond that zone are synonymous with Carlson, Trump, or Marjorie Taylor Greene.
The Libertarian Party hasn’t been promoting war propaganda against China. To the outrage of the obstinately anti-Chinese discourse actors, prominent voices from the party have recognized that Taiwan is part of the Chinese civilization. The party has also taken an anti-Israel stance, disappointing those same right-wing pro-imperialists. There’s a base of Americans who, even though they aren’t leftists, reject the neocon agenda. And because they lack the liberal-aligned mentality which dominates today’s “left,” they’ve been able to alarm the neocon establishment in a way which leftists have failed to do.
A crucial task of communists at this stage is to help grow the amount of libertarian or conservative-leaning individuals who’ve learned to reject Zionism, anti-Iran narratives, and Sinophobia. It’s so important to do this because during the post-October 7 era, the biggest demographic which the pro-war psyops have come to target is the element of Americans who reject wokeism. The Zionists can’t afford to lose the support of the MAGA base. If the MAGA base were to become conscious in the way that the libertarian base has in great part become, the narrative manipulation machine would be crippled.
That’s why since “Israel” started the latest escalation in its genocide of Palestine, the ruling class has shifted towards a controlled anti-woke backlash as its primary narrative tool. It needs to convince the types of people who may go down the antiwar libertarian path—and who therefore might even come to Marxism—that the solution isn’t to resist monopoly finance capital. According to the story the anti-woke psyop tells, the solution is to enact school censorship measures that ban esteemed literature about the Holocaust because it goes against puritanical new standards on unrelated topics. Or to pass laws designed to make gay people receive attention from dangerously hostile people in their communities. Or to orchestrate anti-trans outrage campaigns that lead to children’s hospitals getting bomb threats.
These are the destructive and unjust acts that come about from the social scapegoating which the ruling elites seek to advance. They want the anti-woke psyop’s targets to direct their discontent not towards the elites responsible for the country’s decline, but towards fellow community members who are probably in their own economic class.
We can defeat this reactionary effort not by retreating to a “left” bubble, and thereby surrendering the class struggle towards the forces of reaction. We can defeat it by nurturing the revolutionary impulse that’s been growing among Americans across the whole ideological spectrum. The material interests of the majority of this country’s people, including most libertarians or conservatives, are not in the imperialist war campaigns. Nor in the domestic culture war that the right-wing of the ruling class is using to advance these campaigns. Their interests also aren’t in the continuation of the organizing monopoly which the “left” wing of the ruling class holds. Both sides in this culture war are synthetic inventions of monopoly capital, two color revolutions that are made to fight each other so a real revolution gets held back.
The woke side in this culture war often tries to discredit anti-imperialist perspectives by pointing to the Russian government’s anti-LGBT stance. Whether its policies on that are correct isn’t relevant, though, to whether Russia’s geopolitical actions and stances are progressive. This is why the communists in my camp have gone further than Norton on the question of Russia, and emphasized that we support Russia’s special operation in Ukraine. We won’t be drawn away from a principled anti-imperialist stance within the new cold war; nor from supporting an authentic anti-imperialist coalition; by the attempts from bad-faith actors to weaponize the struggles of LGBT people in America.
The left side of the culture war wants us to look at the actions of right-wing elites, and of people who the anti-woke psyop has convinced to commit hate crimes, and conclude that the only ones we can trust are those within left-liberal circles. This is a self-defeating “solution.” The people in our society are not fundamentally reactionary. They have the potential to unite behind an agenda for progress, both domestically and globally. By implicitly asking Carlson’s audience to reject the lies their ruling class tells them about China, Putin recognized that such a transformation is possible.
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