Now we know what they mean when they say “Make America Great Again.”

On Tuesday, Senator Mike Braun, a Republican from Indiana, told reporters that interracial marriage is a states’ rights issue.

Braun made the jaw-dropping remark while arguing that Roe v. Wade – the landmark Supreme Court decision that legalized abortion in 1973 – was inappropriate because it federalized reproductive rights instead of leaving individual states to make their own determination on the matter. He expressed a similar stance on Griswold v. Connecticut, which legalized contraceptives.

A reporter asked Braun if interracial marriage should also be left up to state lawmakers.

“Yes,” he replied. “I think that that’s something that if you’re not wanting the Supreme Court to weigh in on issues like that, you’re not going to be able to have your cake and eat it too. I think that’s hypocritical.”

Just to level-set here: a sitting senator is insinuating that states are within their rights to criminalize the union of two people from different races. He made these comments – and justified their logic – in 2022, fifty-five years after the Supreme Court legalized interracial marriage in Loving v. Virginia.

Braun’s office walked back his remarks later in the day, saying he misunderstood the question.

“Let me be clear on that issue — there is no question the Constitution prohibits discrimination of any kind based on race, that is not something that is even up for debate, and I condemn racism in any form, at all levels and by any states, entities, or individuals,” Braun said in a statement.

Braun’s clarification would be more believable if his track record wasn’t filled with the type of casual bigotry that has become ingrained in the modern Republican party. He opposes same sex marriage and, as a state lawmaker, he voted against several amendments to a bill that would have made it illegal to discriminate on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity. While he was campaigning for his senate seat, which he won in 2018, Braun’s GOP backers sent a mariachi band to disrupt his opponent’s events because they deemed him excessively friendly to Mexico.

Braun’s criticism of interracial marriage was a how-low-can-they-go moment, but, incredibly, it was just one of the retrograde outbursts coming from a GOP senator on Tuesday.

During Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson’s confirmation hearing, Sen. Lindsey Graham ranted that terrorists are not entitled to a vigorous legal defense, a chest-thumping argument that defies any notion of due process and America’s founding ideals. Founding father John Adams, after all, defended the British soldiers responsible for killing five colonists during the Boston Massacre.

Sen. Ted Cruz, meanwhile, tried to instigate an argument about the history curriculum at Georgetown Day School, where Jackson is a member of the board of trustees. Cruz used it as spring board for a wider discussion on race. At one point, he asked Jackson if she thought babies were racist. She sighed.

Cruz’s line of questioning was utterly bizarre, unless, of course, you’re well versed in the fabricated culture war that consumes so much of the GOP and its cheerleaders in conservative media who are bent on policing what books and what ideas are taught at America’s schools.

And then there was Sen. Josh Hawley, who tried to smear Jackson by saying she was too lenient in child pornography cases that appeared in her courtroom. Jackson explained that her sentences fell within federally prescribed guidelines.

Watching all this, one couldn’t help but wonder: what the hell is going on? Yes, the GOP has been in a free fall since they elected a womanizing, scamster as their presidential nominee in 2016 and then spent the next four years treating each of his self-serving and mean-spirited whims as their north star, even when that meant attacking the concept of democracy itself.

But Trump has been out of office for over a year (and, as a parting gift to the GOP, he tanked their chances of winning a majority in the Senate). Why hasn’t the Republican Party taken a step toward decency, or short of that, simple sanity?

Vladimir Putin’s longevity in Russia offers a clue: demagoguery works.

In fact, many aspects of the GOP’s multi-front culture war were battle-tested in Putin’s Russia.

Under the guise of “protecting children,” his government not only adopted draconian child abuse punishments that probably made Senator Hawley jealous, but they also launched a bigoted campaign that turned Russia’s LGBT community into pariahs.

In addition, Putin’s government – like the modern GOP – waged a war on children’s books, adopting the Law for the Protection of Children from Information. The law – through the self-censorship it inspired – caused publishers to pulp books about sexuality. Sound familiar?

Decades earlier, when the powers-that-be wanted to whitewash Russian history, the publisher of the Great Soviet Encyclopedia would send letters to those who bought the reference books instructing them to remove and replace certain pages. In The Future is History, an illuminating tome about the post-Soviet era, author Masha Gessen describes how an entry about Stalin’s chief executioner, Lavrentiy Beria, was replaced with an entry about the Bering Strait. Perhaps Senator Cruz can suggest similar edits on American history.

And Senator Graham may admire Putin’s show trials, where protesters and political opponents are charged with crimes that are both vague and ridiculous. Just this week, Putin critic Aleksei Navalny was convicted of embezzling money from supporters. After the verdict, his lawyers were detained, stuffed into a police truck, and held for hours. Given Graham’s macho-man comments about Jackson defending terrorists, it seems like he’d support something similar here in the U.S.

And what of interracial marriages, the subject of Sen. Braun’s recent comments?

“‘Mixed’ or ‘international’ marriages are not uncommon in today’s Russia, but they are still far from the norm. The collapse of the Soviet Union, which opened the country to foreigners, also opened the floodgates to increased national sentiment,” reports The Moscow Times. The outlet adds:

An October 2016 poll by the independent Levada Center pollster found that 52 percent of Russians support the nationalist slogan “Russia for Russians,” while only 12 percent felt that immigrants enrich Russian society.

Question: is there a big difference between “Russia for Russians” and “America First,” or for that matter “Build the Wall?” Isn’t there a direct line between “Make America Great Again” and Putin’s absolute obsession with Russia’s winning role in WWII? Can’t you see how Putin didn’t need to invade Ukraine when Trump was in office, because the American president was working to dismantle NATO from the inside in a way that Putin could never achieve?

Westerners look at Putin’s iron grip on Russia and the hatred he’s fomented there and wonder how things could have gotten so bad. We wonder how the vast majority of the Russia population believe his lies about the invasion of Ukraine. We look at Russia, our enemy for the better part of seventy-five years, and feel that we can never descend so low.

Actually, it’s happening right before our eyes.