Why does a substantial portion of the US political right support Vladimir Putin? Richard Hanania reflects on the topic in the short essay linked below. His analysis is libertarian in nature. The short form is that a certain kind of Alt Right supporters are against both democracy, free markets and economic growth (which includes an opposition to open borders). So obviously they prefer a closed conservative society such as Russia to the current United States, where the number of transsexuals rise even faster than the GNP.
In other words: the current far right in the US is more like Pat Buchanan (a paleo-conservative or fascist LARP-ing as a strict constitutionalist and minimal government guy) than like, say, Ayn Rand, Murray Rothbard or even the Tea Party. As an explanation, this isn´t terribly exciting, but I admit that I assumed for a long time that most of the far right in the US to a large extent were "conservative libertarians" rather than statist populists. And even a statist populist *in America* doesn´t have to be pro-Russian!
So there is still some kind of X factor going around. But yes, Hanania is probably on to something.
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