Putin, Trump, and the Attack on Democracy

The first time many of us took notice of the activities of Vladimir Putin’s Russia was when it was trying to manipulate our 2016 presidential election in order to elect Donald Trump.  And he did elect Trump.  Then it was noticed that Russia had also been active in supporting Brexit politicians and manipulating the vote on whether the UK should leave the European Union (EU).  Then the British did vote to leave the EU.  And then it was noted that Russia was supporting right-wing politicians and causes across Europe.  What was going on? 

Timothy Snyder is a noted historian and author who has focused much of his career on the history of Russia, Western Europe, and all the countries in between.  He has acquired language skills in many of the critical countries so he can read the speeches and documents in the languages used, rather than relying on random translations to English. He is in a position to provide clarity for what is essentially an ongoing attack by Putin on the US and EU.  Russia’s invasion of Ukraine was the warning of what was to come, but no one noticed.  Snyder provides his explanation in the book The Road to Unfreedom.

In Snyder’s view, nations can fall into two dangerous, but quite different, political conditions: the politics of inevitability and the politics of eternity.  The politics of the US and EU currently exist in the former, while Putin has navigated Russia into the latter and wishes to reduce others to the same condition. 

“Americans and Europeans were guided through the new century by a tale about ‘the end of history,’ by what I call the politics of inevitability, a sense that the future is just more of the present, that the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.  In the American capitalist version of this story, nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness.  In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity.”

Communism produced Russia’s politics of inevitability with its tales of prosperity to come, but it would fail.

“When this turned out not to be true, the European and American politicians of inevitability were triumphant.  Europeans busied themselves completing the creation of the European Union in 1992.  Americans reasoned that the failure of the communist story confirmed the truth of the capitalist one.” 

The danger of “inevitability” is that nothing in human history was inevitable.  Economic historians tell us that; social historians tell us that.  For inevitability to reign, facts must be suppressed or ignored, and history must be forgotten. 

“Americans and Europeans kept telling themselves their tales of inevitability for a quarter century after the end of communism, and so raised a millennial generation without history.” 

Russia, after the fall of communism, would take note of the ability of capitalism to create economic inequality, and use it to create the most unequal society on earth.  Russia would become an oligarchic kleptocracy—one with continuing dreams of empire.  Putin would establish himself as supreme leader with support from a large entourage of billionaire cronies.  As a kleptocracy, any earnings of the nation were mostly to go to the already wealthy who were allowed to move their wealth outside of Russia.  Given that type of economy, little would be done to create conditions by which the masses could acquire increased prosperity.  Given abundant fossil fuels, Russia did not need much of an economy, and its politicians never bothered to try and build one.

Putin would eventually reject the need to even appear to be constrained by any rule of law.  He would adopt for himself the fascist role of “redeemer” who was destined to return Russia to its proper place in the world.  Putin would also develop the concept of “Eurasia.”  From his perspective, the geographic center of the world is Russia.  As such, it also deserved to be the civilizational center.  It was only the repeated attacks by its enemies that kept it from attaining its deserved place in the world.  The threats to Russia would come from states who use their principles of democratic succession of power and rule of law to entice other nations to follow their example.  The US and EU would then become enemies to overcome.  The danger they presented was not military, it was cultural.  Putin would resurrect traditional antisemitism with its notions of world Jewish domination plus a peculiar new thrust.  Putin would claim the world’s democracies were intentionally trying to corrupt Russian society with their sexual deviance.  The AIDS epidemic then became a Western plot, along with the absurd notion that homosexuality was acceptable. 

Snyder summarizes Putin’s thoughts with quotes from articles he had written. 

“Russia could never become a member of the EU because of ‘the unique place of Russia on the world political map, its role in history and in the development of civilization.’  Eurasia would therefore ‘integrate’ its future members with Russia without any of the troubling burdens associated with the EU.  No dictator would have to step down; no free elections would have to be held; no laws would have to be upheld.  Eurasia was a spoiler system, designed to prevent states from joining the EU and prevent their societies from thinking that this was possible.  In the long run, Putin explained, Eurasia would overwhelm the EU in a larger ‘Union of Europe,’ a ‘space’ between the Atlantic and the Pacific, ‘from Lisbon to Vladivostok.’  Not to join Eurasia, Putin said, would be ‘to promote separatism in the broadest sense of the word’.”

“Russia would bring together states that had not proven to be plausible members of the European Union (and implicitly, in the future, states that exited a collapsing European Union).” 

A problem with this grand scheme was that Putin’s candidate states, members of the former Soviet Union, seemed more interested in joining the EU.  They wanted the discipline of rule of law imposed upon them.

“European integration was a means of transporting the idea of the rule of law from places where it functioned better to places where it functioned worse.  In the 1990s, association agreements signed between the EU and aspiring members initiated legal relationships that included the implicit promise of a deeper legal relationship, namely full membership.  The prospect of future membership made clear the benefits of the rule of law, in a way that individual citizens could understand.”

Ukraine was heading towards EU membership, which would be a supreme embarrassment for Putin and his Eurasia project.  He helped install a pro-Russian leader, a kleptocrat like himself, to forestall such a thing.  That leader was booted out and Ukraine was determined to return to a rule of law, limit corruption, and aim for EU membership.  This provoked cyberwarfare attacks and military invasion in order to destroy Ukraine as an independent nation.  Putin only slightly succeeded, and Ukraine remained a democratic nation although somewhat diminished in size. 

What Putin did accomplish with his invasion of Ukraine was the demonstration of the effectiveness of cyberwarfare and his ability to manipulate public impressions in other countries.  He spread multiple and often conflicting lies about the situation in Ukraine and managed to confuse the US and EU into inaction.  He managed, at the same time, to convince both the far left and the far right that he was the “good guy” in this blatant attempt to destroy a country.  Little lies worked; big lies often worked better; never admit a lie because some people will have taken it as truth.  The gullibility he discovered in the US and EU gave him confidence to proceed with his next projects: the exit of the UK from the EU and the election of Donald Trump as president of the US.

In order to put Trump in a position to run for president, the Russians first had to keep him from going broke by pouring money into his businesses and create the myth of Donald Trump as a successful businessman.

“By the late 1990s, Trump was generally considered to be uncreditworthy and bankrupt.  He owed about four billion dollars to more than seventy banks, of which some $800 million was personally guaranteed.  He never showed any inclination or capacity to pay back this debt.  After his 2004 bankruptcy, no American bank would lend him money.  The only bank that did so was Deutsche Bank, whose colorful history of scandal belied its staid name.  Interestingly, Deutsche Bank also laundered about $10 billion for Russian clients between 2011 and 2015.  Interestingly, Trump declined to pay back his debts to Deutsche Bank.”

“Trump’s apparent business, real estate development, had become a Russian charade.  Having realized that apartment complexes could be used to launder money, Russians used Trump’s name to build more buildings.  As Donald Trump Jr. said in 2008, ‘Russians make up a pretty disproportionate cross-section of a lot of our assets.  We see a lot of money pouring in from Russia’.”

“The Russian offers were hard to refuse: millions of dollars up front for Trump, a share of the profits for Trump, Trump’s name on a building—but no investment required from Trump.  These terms suited both sides.”

The type of hold Putin has over Trump has been a matter of conjecture.  Given his history, evidence of some embarrassing sexual escapade was first assumed. When evidence of Russian financial support appeared, it was thought that Putin could threaten him with revelations of financial dependence.  From Snyder’s account, it also appears that Trump might have admired Putin so much that he wanted to emulate him by becoming head of his country and leading it in the same way Putin led Russia.

Russian leaders have little interest in bettering the lot of Russian citizens, but they are intensely interested in keeping them under control and doing as they are told.  Russia requires a “politics of eternity.”

“Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone, eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood.  Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past.  Within inevitability, no one is responsible because we all know that the details will sort themselves out for the better; within eternity, no one is responsible because we all know that the enemy is coming no matter what we do.  Eternity politicians spread the conviction that government cannot aid society as a whole, but can only guard against threats.  Progress gives way to doom.”

“In power, eternity politicians manufacture crisis and manipulate the resultant emotion.  To distract from their inability or unwillingness to reform, eternity politicians instruct their citizens to experience elation and outrage at short intervals, drowning the future in the present.  In foreign policy, eternity politicians belittle and undo the achievements of countries that might seem like models to their own citizens.  Using technology to transmit political fiction, both at home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.”

When in power, Trump operated as if he had been personally trained by Putin.

“Trump adopted the Russian double standard: he was permitted to lie all the time, but any minor error by a journalist discredited the entire profession of journalism.  Trump made the move, copied from Putin, of claiming that it was not he but the reporters who lied.  He referred to them as an ‘enemy of the American people’ and claimed that what they produced was ‘fake news.’  Trump was proud of both these formulations, although both were Russian.  Trump’s advisor Rudy Giuliani provided an Orwellian summary: ‘Truth isn’t truth’.” 

“In the Russian model, investigative reporting must be marginalized so that news can become a daily spectacle.  The point of spectacle is to summon the emotions of both supporters and detractors and to confirm and strengthen polarization; every news cycle creates euphoria or depression, and reinforces a conviction that politics is about friends and enemies at home, rather than about policy that might improve the lives of citizens.  Trump governed just as he had run for office: as a producer of outrage rather than as a formulator of policy.”

Trump was not a formulator of policy, but he was adept at promoting policies favored by Putin: from disrupting NATO to encouraging the British to exit the EU.  And as the head of the Republican Party, he was perfectly positioned to further Putin’s goal of turning the US into a nation with the politics of eternity.  After reading Snyder’s analysis it becomes perfectly clear that the Republican Party has had that as its goal for decades now.  The threat that never goes away in its plan is race.  It has no plan to better the lives of the citizenry, it is entirely focused on maintaining power by stirring racial strife to encourage fear and loathing in its white base, while limiting voting access to disadvantaged minorities.  Putin and Republicans were thrilled with Trump’s ability to generate racial strife.

Snyder’s book came out well before the 2020 election in which Trump was defeated.  It appears at this writing that the Republican Party will continue following Trump even though he no longer is in office.  They seem perfectly happy with him as a power broker in their world.  After all, his methods demonstrated that race baiting is still good policy, and as an added bonus he helped them increase economic inequality even further.  Who could object to that?

Snyder finished with a warning; one we should take to heart.

“America will have both forms of equality, racial and economic, or it will have neither.  If it is neither, eternity politics will prevail, racial oligarchy will emerge, and American democracy will come to a close.”

  

The Fragility of the Democratic Coalition

 The Democratic Party and its candidates did well in the 2018 midterm elections, leading them to believe they would similarly do as well in the presidential election of 2020.  While they managed to defeat Trump, they did worse, sometimes much worse, than they expected.  The Democrats need to figure out exactly what happened if they wish to improve moving forward.  Thomas Chatterton Williams tries to come to their aid in the article Shades of Blue in Harper’s Magazine. 

Williams warns the Democrats that they must realize that the groups they depend on for electoral success are not monolithic entities.  Blacks, Latinos, and other minority groups have diversity in their needs and interests and the politicians must recognize this and treat these people as individuals not as a homogeneous mass.  The party can revel in its victories in Arizona (thanks to Latinos) and in Georgia (thanks to Blacks).  However, these victories must be balanced by disappointing results in the critical states of Texas and Florida where the needed minority votes never arrived.  They should be particularly troubled by the fact that the percentage of Blacks and Latinos who voted for Trump actually increased in 2020 over that in 2016.  And if that is not bad enough, the fraction of Asian, white women, and LGBT voters for Trump also increased.

Williams identifies a well-educated, somewhat wealthy white elite as the core movers in the Democratic Party universe. 

“The lives of progressive, college-educated, predominantly white ‘coastal elites’ have become far removed from those of white Republicans, but more significantly from those of the nonwhite voters their party depends on to remain electorally viable—and whose validation lends them an air of virtuousness.” 

“Fashionable narratives about the Democratic coalition and its members’ goals and ambitions can efface what many minorities think is in their best interest. Such misreadings are not just insensitive but dangerous. They can lead Democrats to pursue ill-conceived, poorly articulated policies that backfire to the benefit of conservatives, or worse, inflict harm on vulnerable communities.”

Williams presented two examples of the Democrats’ cluelessness in dealing with people they presume to represent.  Party personalities have taken to using the term Latinx to avoid the need for a gender specific ending believing this is politically correct in their world and thus appropriate for all.  Choosing a new term and applying it to all Latinos can also be seen as lumping together the diverse cultures one finds in California, Arizona, Florida, Texas, and New York—not the appropriate strategy for winning votes.

“In fact, not only is ‘Latinx’ decidedly not the term most Latinos choose, but a significant number—about three fourths of the Latino population—have never even heard of it. A bilingual national survey conducted in December 2019 by the Pew Research Center found that a mere 3 percent of Latinos use the descriptor. And yet, the ‘new, gender-neutral, pan-ethnic label, Latinx, has emerged as an alternative,’ the report observes. It is what prominent progressives—from Elizabeth Warren to Ibram X. Kendi—insist on using to describe a community to which they do not themselves belong. During the Democratic primaries, Senator Warren tweeted, ‘When I become president, Latinx families will have a champion in the White House’.”

Ruben Gallego, a Democratic congressman from Arizona, had this comment about the use of that term. 

“’When [Latinx] is used I feel someone is taking away some of my culture,’ Gallego wrote…’Instead of trying to understand my culture they decided to change it to fit their perspective’.” 

The passionate response of Blacks to police killings led to taunts of “defund the police” or “abolish the police.”  These phrases were picked up and used by party leaders without contemplating what the response might be by the entire Black community.

“Like the niche semantic preference for ‘Latinx,’ but with far more direct and dire consequences, viral slogans such as ‘abolish the police’—created by people of color, but powerfully amplified by whites situated at a considerable remove—have been foisted on black communities that have a far more equivocal relationship with policing than is often acknowledged.”

Black families live in communities with criminals who are black.  In some areas the threat from these criminals is constant, not episodic.  They may not like the police and their methods, but they realize that they need them.

“…countless black Americans are forced to confront the harsh inadequacy of stark rhetorical binaries. They are overpoliced and underpoliced at the same time. Outside the brutal videotaped killings by police that fill our news feeds, or the numbing grind of quotidian degradations like stop-and-frisk, it is underpolicing that causes the most harm.” 

Williams, a black man, provides this perspective on those who might not be seduced by Democratic politicians and their mission to support minority groups.

“Americans of all backgrounds—from Tea Party whites who despise the Obamacare they’ve come to depend on, to Latinos and Asians of immigrant backgrounds who support a strongman who scapegoats foreigners as parasitic invaders—are united by one trait: no one wants to see himself as a hapless victim who must be protected from higher-caste oppressors and invisible systemic forces. In my own experience, whenever I’ve tried to make the point that racial groups are not and cannot possibly be monolithic, I’ve been accused (often by white progressives) of proximity to whiteness, of having lost touch with authentic marginalized reality. In that case, there seem to be significant numbers of black, Latino, and Asian voters who have lost touch alongside me.”

The Democratic mission is an important one.  It must be done better if it is to succeed.

 

Conspiracy Belief and Religion: The Need for an Explanation

As this is being written, we are less than a week past the invasion of the US Capital building on January 6, 2021 by a collection of right-wing groups.  On the surface, the motivation of the attackers was to invalidate the election that Trump claimed had been stolen from him, but with various other themes driving the actions of the attackers.  Fundamentally, this was a large group of believers in conspiracy theories who wished to destroy something that they found personally threatening, assisted by the ever-present white supremacists and anti-Semites.  Particularly troubling is the fraction of our society who believe in such conspiracies.  Why are people so susceptible to claims for which there seems to be no supporting proof? 

The most startling and seemingly the most incredible of these conspiracies goes by the name QAnon.  From Wikipedia one obtains this description of the associated beliefs.

“QAnon is a disproven and discredited far-right conspiracy theory alleging that a cabal of Satan-worshipping cannibalistic pedophiles is running a global child sex-trafficking ring and plotting against U.S. president Donald Trump who is fighting the cabal.”

This seems to be the fever dream of a very disturbed mind, but nevertheless an astonishing number of people either believe it is true or that it might be true.  An NPR/Ipsos poll (12/30/2020) taken just before the insurrection is summarized by Joel Rose in Even If It's 'Bonkers,' Poll Finds Many Believe QAnon And Other Conspiracy Theories.  When asked if “A group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media,” 17% of the public said it was true, 37% said they didn’t know, and only 47% said the statement was false.  If you look at the breakdown by political party of responses to the statement “There is a deep state working to undermine President Trump,” 71% of Republicans agreed with the claim, against 37% for independents, and 15% for Democrats.  And as for Trump’s false claims of voter fraud, the majority of Republicans believe him. 

“The NPR/Ipsos poll suggests those claims are having an impact. Two-thirds of Republicans surveyed said they believe that voter fraud helped Biden win the election, and fewer than half of Republicans said they accept the outcome of the election.”

“In contrast, only 11% of Democrats think voter fraud helped Biden win the election, and 93% accept the outcome.” 

How can this happen?  In an article for the London Review of Books, Red Pill, Blue Pill: James Meek on the conspiracist mind, James Meek sought to address this question.  He begins by telling US readers that they have not cornered the market on crazies.

“In the spring​ of 2020, while the world stayed indoors to suppress Covid-19, arsonists attacked mobile phone masts in Britain, Ireland, the Netherlands, Australia and New Zealand. They set fire to nearly a hundred masts in the UK, or tried to; there were twenty attacks over the Easter weekend alone, including one on a mast serving a Birmingham hospital. The arsonists believed that the latest mobile phone technology, 5G, was the real cause of the pandemic. They imagined a worldwide conspiracy: either the unexpectedly genocidal effects of the 5G rollout were being covered up by faking a pandemic, or 5G was being used deliberately to kill huge numbers of people and help enslave whoever was left.”

The arrival of the Covid virus and the often confusing but always intrusive responses demanded by governments to contain it activated a range of conspiracists to claim that whatever secret forces were at work are finally showing their hand.

“Now that its existence, nature and power have been proved to us, why shouldn’t we believe that the members of this group arranged 9/11? Or that Bill Gates is planning to kill us with vaccines, or inject us with nanochips hidden in vaccines, or both? Why shouldn’t the entire course of world events have been planned by a group of elite families hundreds, even thousands, of years ago? Why shouldn’t there be a link between the bounds to individual freedoms that governments have drawn up to slow climate change and the restrictions they’re carrying out in the name of beating Covid? Surely these two hoaxes are cooked up by the same firm, with the same agenda? Why, as followers of the American conspiracy theory known as QAnon insist, shouldn’t a group of politicians, tycoons and celebrities be kidnapping and torturing children on a massive scale?”

And QAnon is not just a US insanity.

“There’s​ a danger that in writing about QAnon – a social phenomenon not just in the US but in Britain, Germany and many other countries, and endorsed by a number of Republican candidates – you make it sound more interesting and mysterious than it is. It is interesting, but in the way hitting yourself in the face with a hammer is interesting: novel, painful and incredibly stupid.”

It is important to realize that the large number of believers in conspiracy theories exist in other countries as well.  One must consider that the current situation is telling us something fundamental about human nature. 

“A large survey in May conducted by researchers in Oxford found that only about half of English adults were free of what they termed ‘conspiracy thinking.’ Three-quarters of the population have doubts about the official explanations of the cause of the pandemic; most people think there’s at least a chance it was man-made. Almost half think it may have been deliberately engineered by China against ‘the West’. Between a fifth and a quarter are ready to blame Jews, Muslims or Bill Gates, or to give credence to the idea that ‘the elite have created the virus in order to establish a one-world government’; 21 per cent believe – a little, moderately, a lot or definitely – that 5G is to blame, about the same number who think it is ‘an alien weapon to destroy humanity’. Conspiracy beliefs, the researchers concluded, were ‘likely to be both indexes and drivers of societal corrosion ... Fringe beliefs may now be mainstream. A previously defining element that the beliefs are typically only held by a minority may require revision ... Healthy scepticism may have tipped over into a breakdown of trust’.” 

What exactly is it that we should take away from all this?  Meek makes an intriguing suggestion but then chooses not to follow up on it. 

“Karl Popper​ coined the phrase ‘conspiracy theory’ in 1952, in his book The Open Society and Its Enemies.” 

“Popper saw conspiracy theory as something very old, connected to the religious impulse. ‘The belief in the Homeric gods whose conspiracies explain the history of the Trojan War is gone,’ he writes. ‘The gods are abandoned. But their place is filled by powerful men or groups – sinister pressure groups whose wickedness is responsible for all the evils we suffer from – such as the Learned Elders of Zion, or the monopolists, or the capitalists, or the imperialists’.”  

The evolution of religion is an aspect of the evolution of society.  Humans have a need to try and understand why things happen, and they have an understandable desire to be able to control what happens.  The earliest societies were totally dependent on nature for sustenance.  It is natural that they would try to understand why a tree might bear more or less fruit by assigning a capricious spirit to that tree.  They might consider providing gifts or offerings to the spirit in hope that it will behave.  As humans learned more about nature and the behavior of trees, there was less need for a spirit to explain behavior.  The next step might be to assign a spirit, or god, to control the entire forest, and maybe one for rivers and another for the sky.  As cultures became more complicated a hierarchical social structure would evolve.  The gods would need a leader, just as people would need a leader.  

The most serviceable form of religion in complex societies appears to be monotheism: societies with a strong leader supported by a strong God.  The constraints God imposes on human action tend to be those that support a stable society.  Religious obedience then will tend to produce beneficial results for society, helping to reinforce the necessity for its existence.  And when good things happen to bad people or bad things happen to good people or some catastrophe occurs, the explanation “It was God’s will” always seems to provide solace.

One can, with no malice intended, describe a religion as a belief system in which members are asked to believe things for which no objective proof can be provided.  It is merely necessary that the acceptance of these beliefs provides comfort to its members.  One can, with malice intended, describe a conspiracy theory as one which asks believers to participate according to those beliefs even though there is no objective proof to support them.  This suggests that belief in conspiracy theories and religious belief rely on the same human characteristics.  And if belief in a given conspiracy theory provides comfort in the form of a needed explanation, the hold on the believer could be as strong as the hold provided by religious belief.  Meek spends much of his article describing interactions with those who have succumbed to conspiracy theories.  Arguing with them is no more fruitful than trying to convince a religious person that his or her beliefs make no sense. 

There are likely a number of reasons why conspiracy theories have become so widespread.  We are compelled to figure out the causes and eliminate them—if possible—because a resort to reason will not work.  Given that the conspiracists are becoming organized and violent, our near future seems fraught with peril.