Politics makes strange bedfellows, and no public menage in our time is odder than the one in which liberals have united with far-right online LARPers in pretending that both President Trump and Russia's Vladimir Putin are ferocious reactionaries. There is nothing reactionary or particularly supervillainous about Putin or his regime. Far from being a kind of theocratic neo-tsar who seeks to revive the glorious dream of the Rus' in the hearts of his post-Soviet countrymen and bring the decadent neoliberal West to heel, he is actually a cheap grifter, the head of an international mafia of oilmen and mineral tycoons who starve their fellow citizens in order to purchase luxury condos in the various major cities of Western Europe.