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.”