Two days ago, I published a post headed “Right and Left, and Up and Down.” Here is a slice of it:

Mike Lee is citing Seymour Hersh against the Ukrainians. Candace Owens is calling Hollywood a CIA creation. Marjorie Taylor Greene and others are saying, “Defund the FBI!” Fox News hosts are calling the pop star Taylor Swift a “Pentagon psy-op.” What’s next for the Right? Che Guevara T-shirts?

Or Putin T-shirts? Matteo Salvini has been known to wear them. He is the deputy prime minister of Italy and a darling of the populist Right everywhere — including our own country. He wore a Putin T-shirt in the European Parliament. He wore one in Red Square itself. He was openly pro-Putin before it was cool on the Western right.

In 2014, his party established a “Friends of Putin” group in the Italian parliament. Three years later, they signed a “friendship and cooperation” agreement with Putin. Salvini called it a “historic deal.” In 2020, he was scheduled to be a star speaker at the “National Conservatism Conference” in Rome. This conference included many luminaries of the populist Right in America and Britain. In the end, Salvini begged off — and the star speaker was the usual: Hungary’s Orbán.

In recent days, there has been interesting reporting on Salvini and the FSB (the Kremlin’s intelligence service): here.

So far, the American Right has not gone as far as Salvini when it comes to open admiration of Putin. I don’t think they are wearing Putin T-shirts at CPAC yet. Neither have we gone as far as Marine Le Pen, in France — remember this?

But I think that we Americans are getting ever closer. Orbán may be, in a sense, a gateway to Putin. Here is Senator Tommy Tuberville, generally regarded as a “conservative” Republican:

I remember this very well from the Left — the Left that I saw in Soviet days. The warmongers were in Washington, D.C. — Reagan, Bush, and the rest. The peace-lovers were in Moscow and Havana. Live long enough and you will see the Right become the Left. It has been head-snapping.

That is a phrase that Charles Krauthammer used. In the summer of 2017, he wrote a piece called “The Authoritarian Temptation.” It would prove the last essay he ever wrote. He thought the topic was burning. He adapted his title from Jean-François Revel — who, in 1976, wrote The Totalitarian Temptation.

Said Krauthammer,

In what would have been unimaginable 25 years ago, mature Western democracies are experiencing a surge of ethno-nationalism, a blood-and-soil patriotism tinged with xenophobia, a weariness with parliamentary dysfunction and an attraction — still only an attraction, not yet a commitment — to strongman rule.

Krauthammer continued,

Its most conspicuous symptom is a curious and growing affinity for Vladimir Putin, Czar of all the Russias. Remarkably, this tendency is most pronounced on the right. The reversal is head-snapping.

Yes. Very much so.

More Krauthammer:

Today, some on the right have begun to profess a certain admiration of and attraction to Putin and his brand of Russian authoritarianism.

The result is jarring. After decades of left-wing apologists for Russia, it is now lifelong conservatives who are asking: What’s so bad about Putin anyway? . . .

Sure he emasculated the political opposition, shut down independent media and regularly kills political opponents and journalists. But he’s got omelets to make. Moreover, as President Trump said when asked about the killings, “There are a lot of killers. We’ve got a lot of killers. What, you think our country is so innocent?”

Moral equivalence so shocking, emanating from the elected leader of the United States, is not to be ignored.

Things have gotten much worse since Krauthammer wrote those words seven years ago. Question: What kind of welcome would Putin receive at CPAC, or Turning Point, or the Republican convention? What kind of welcome would Volodymyr Zelensky receive? Would it be a welcome at all?

Vladimir Kara-Murza is a great man, a Russian defender of freedom, democracy, and human rights. He is, of course, a political prisoner — kept in isolation in Siberia. The Republicans I grew up with, so to speak, championed such prisoners. John McCain championed Kara-Murza. In fact, he asked Kara-Murza to be a pallbearer at his funeral. (Kara-Murza was not yet in prison, though FSB agents had tried to kill him, twice.) McCain wanted to honor dissidents at large. He also thought that “visibility” might help keep Kara-Murza alive.

(When McCain was a POW in Vietnam, Ronald Reagan wore a POW bracelet in his honor.)

What is the spirit of the Republican Party, and the American Right, today? The last several years have been clarifying, if dismayingly so, for us old Reaganites. Coming years are apt to be yet more clarifying, for better or worse.