Jacobin ran a
dumb fucking article saying that Russian leftists should co-opt the movement of Alexander Navalny (a Nazi turned liberal activist) in order to overthrow Putin's corrupt order and turn Russia into a more progressive contry. The problem is that even though Alexander Navalny says nice things about democracy and is becoming Russia's foremost LGBT activist, Naziism isn't something you can just leave behind. Even though Putin is a right-wing nationalist, many ethnic minorities are unwilling to trade him for Navalny, who hates immigrants and
advocated for the mass deportation of Chechen people. Trying to participate in a movement centered around this man is going to advance the dangerous parts of his agenda, and can potentially kill a left-wing momentum better used elsewhere.
This is not too unusual for Jacobin, because their particular brand of democratic socialism leads them to
regularly praise bloodthirsty right-wing forces who happen to oppose autocratic left-wing governments. Their coverage of Venezuela and the Syrian Civil War has been terrible, with all the pro-US bias you'd expect of CNN or Fox News. They put out a
pretty good take on Navalny earlier last month, but giving free press to a white nationalist -- even one who opposes Putin -- is completely unacceptable.
While I agree with you, this is a far bigger problem with liberal organizations. When leftists support far-right demagogues abroad, it's as a scandal. When liberals do this, nobody notices. Hillary's guy Peter Daou spent his teenage years gunning down Palestinian refugees as a fascist militant in Lebanon. Some of her other colleagues have supported
Neo-Nazis in Ukraine, who came to power with US assistance in their 2014 overthrow of the Putin-aligned government. This is pretty standard for American politics, because securing global hegemony regularly requires our politicians to make alliances with unsavory figures they'd never want to share a taxi with.