Category Archives: Death of Democracy

Managed Democracy

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022),

 

After Vladimir Putin was in power he ushered in a new system that was called managed democracy. Russia became so skilled at this they began to export the system to its satellites such as Belarus and even, for a while Ukraine. The basic technique was derived from the Nazis of Germany. As Snyder explained, it involved “a mysterious candidate who used manufactured crises to assemble real power.  This technique really started with Hitler in Nazi Germany when the Nazis who had been elected took advantage of the burning of the Reichstag to consolidate tyrannical power. Many thought they had started the fire to do that.

 

Ivan Ilyin like the fascist he was, used a similar technique. As Snyder explained it:

 

“Ilyin had performed the same trick: he called his redeemer a “democratic dictator” since he supposedly represented the people. Surkov’s pillars of Russian statehood were ‘centralization, personification, and idealization’: the state must be unified, its authority granted to an individual, and that individual glorified. Citing Ilyin, Surkov concluded that the Russian people should have as much freedom as they were ready to have. Of course, what he meant by “freedom” was the freedom of the individual to submerge himself in a collectivity that subjugates itself to a leader.”

 

Snyder would not call that freedom. He would call that “unfreedom,” because that is what it is.

Surkov, first on behalf of Yeltsin, later on behalf of Putin, helped deliver to the Russian people things they liked, such as an average increase in the Russian economy of 7% per annum and a successful war in Chechnya in the first 8 years of the 21st century.  High prices for oil and gas provided the grease needed to keep the machine well-oiled. Some of those profits were even shared with the people of Russia not just oligarchs. Everybody was happy. To many Russians, a little loss of freedom, as they saw it, was worth what they got in exchange. All of this helped Putin secure  support to remain in power. In the long run of course, it helped the country to slide into fascism with Putin at the controls.

 

The Russian election of 2012 appeared to be democratic, but  was controlled by Putin. Like before he cheated and when he was caught, he even admitted it. After all he was now identified with the institution thanks to Surkov. Putin was able to convince enough people that more democracy than they had was not necessary.

 

This election proved important for many reasons. It taught Putin that there was more than one way to control “democracy.” As Snyder said,

“The fakery was repeated during the March 4, 2012 presidential election. Putin was accorded the majority that he needed to be named president after one round of balloting. This time most of the electoral manipulation was digital rather than manual. Tens of millions of cybervotes were added, diluting the vote cast by human beings, and giving Putin a fictional majority.”

 

Digital manipulation techniques featured prominently in subsequent Putin campaigns, first in Ukraine in 2014 and then in the UK and the United States in 2016.  He or his team were becoming increasingly sophisticated in producing the electoral results that they wanted.

 

Timothy Snyder summed up Putin’s victories in Russia this way:

“Putin chose to regard the transient illusion of winning on the first ballot as more important than law, and his own hurt feelings as more important than the convictions of his fellow citizens. Putin casually accepted that there had been fraud; Medvedev helpfully added that all Russian elections had been fraudulent. By dismissing the principle of “one person, one vote” while insisting that elections would continue, Putin was disregarding the choice of citizens while expecting them to take part in future rituals of support. He thereby accepted Ilyin’s attitude to democracy, rejecting what Ilyin had called “blind faith in the number of votes and its political significance,” not only in deed but in word. A claim to power was staked: he who fakes wins.

If Putin came to the office of president in 2000 as a mysterious hero from the realm of fiction, he returned in 2012 as a the vengeful destroyer of the rule of law.”

 

As was required by any Russian political leaders, Putin always claimed to be against Nazism, since their experience of Nazism in the Second World War was so horrific, but in reality, he learned the techniques of the Nazis and used them well. Like the magic elixir with which he could turn democracy into fascism and the people would accept it. It happened in Germany, then Russia and he tried it again in Ukraine in 2014, UK in 2016, and the US in 2016.

What is astonishing is how close he came to achieving his goals in the mature democracies.

The Big Lie and Putin as Redeemer

Books, Death of Democracy, The Sleep of Reason, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Vladimir Putin began his political career claiming to champion democracy.  That was how he persuaded Yeltsin to appoint him his successor.  Putin saw himself as the only person who could fill the position of the purely innocent redeemer.  Putin started off by discrediting democracy and its institutions. As timothy  Snyder said,

“In discrediting democratic elections in 2011 and 2012, Vladimir Putin took on the mantle of the heroic redeemer and placed his country on the horns of Ilyin’s dilemma. No one can change Russia for the better so long as he lives, and no one in Russia knows what will happen when he dies.”

 

The Soviet Union started out as a world revolution that failed.  After the collapse of Communism Russia, established a constitutional republic, legitimated by democracy. It would have a parliament with free elections. All of that was on paper.  But in Russia paper rarely matters.

Ivan Ilyin had thought that when the Soviet Union collapsed it would be replaced by a fascist dictatorship. What else would a Christian fascist propose? Although his ideas did nothing after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the oligarchs thought his ideas might be useful. Ilyin had thought a pure redeemer would emerge from a realm of fiction and act from a spirit of totality—i.e. the totality of Russia. The pure redeemer for the pure nation.  That miracle never happened, yet, as Timothy Snyder explained,

“Yet a feat of scenography by skilled propagandists (or, in the Russian phrase, “political technologists” might create the appearance of such an earthly miracle. The myth of a redeemer would have to be founded on lies so enormous that they could not be doubted, because doubting them would mean doubting everything.”

 

This is the fundamental insight of the autocrat. It was endorsed by Hitler then Putin and later Trump. A big lie could usher in big power. As Snyder said,

“It was not so much elections as fictions that allowed a transition of power a decade after the end of the Soviet Union, from Boris Yeltsin to Vladimir Putin. Then Ilyin and Putin rose together, the philosopher and the politician of fiction.“

 

Sadly, democracy never took hold in Russia.  Power never changed hands after an election.  This is exactly what Trump tried in 2020, but he failed, because the US had enough democratic institutions with enough believers in democracy to thwart his grab for power, but this apparent stability seems more illusory than real.

Ivan Ilyin did not foresee one development of the transfer of power in Russia, namely, that the extremely wealthy would choose Russia’s redeemer. Snyder described that scramble for power this way:

“The wealthy few around Yeltsin, christened the “oligarchs” wished to manage democracy in his favor and theirs. The end of Soviet economic planning created a violent rush for profitable industries and resources and inspired arbitrage schemes, quickly creating a new class of wealthy men. Wild privatization was not all the same thing as a market economy, at least as conventionally understood. Markets require the rule of law, which was the most demanding aspect of the  post-Soviet transformation. Americans, taking the rule of law for granted, could fantasize that markets would create the necessary institutions. This was an error. It mattered whether newly independent states established the rule of law, and above all whether they managed a legal transition of power through free elections.”

 

The western countries, led by the GeorgeH.W.  Bush regime was incredibly naïve about this.  Putin was not. The redeemer was far from innocent. And as a result everyone was left with a mess. And now we are all paying a hefty price for that.

 

Fiction Written in blood: Managed Democracy

Corruption, Death of Democracy, The Sleep of Reason, Tyranny and Fascism,

 

President Yeltsin was for a while considered the savior of Russia. That did not last long. Too many considered him a drunkard and buffoon. Briefly he was the hero of the anti-communist revolution. In 1996 his own team admitted that he had faked an election in which he won another term as president.

 

In 1999 it was recognized that he was in ill health and a successor should be chosen. By this time, they had a lot of power.  Vast amounts of money will do that. The oligarchs of course wanted to manage this process so that someone who would be sympathetic to their cause would come to power. They wanted to manage the process for their own benefit. They wanted someone who would allow them to retain their gains, maintain their wealth, and keep them alive.

 

It took a while for Yeltsin to choose his successor but eventually picked  Putin. Later, he told Bill Clinton it was a big mistake. Vladimir Putin was hardly a likely prospect because he was so little known. Putin held a meaningless KGB post in East Germany. From there he took a post as assistant to the mayor of St. Petersburg and used that position to enrich himself. After all that was the Russian way.

Putin was considered to be a team player in the Kremlin. When Yeltsin appointed Putin as his prime minister he was not a plausible candidate because his approval rate was only 2%. That was not because so many despised him. That was because so few people knew him.

That all changed in 1999 after a series of bombs exploded in Russian cities killing hundreds of Russians.  It was possible that the perpetrators were FSB officers. The FSB was the new Russian intelligence service that succeeded the well-known KGB. Some thought the FSB had engineered the attacks for their own private gain. Timothy Snyder described the situation this way:

“Though the possibility of self-terrorism was noticed at the time, the factual questions were overwhelmed by righteous patriotism as Putin ordered a new war against the part of Russia deemed responsible for the bombings: the Chechen republic of southwestern Russia, in the Caucasus region, which had declared independence in 1993 and then fought the Russian army to a standstill.   Thanks to the Second Chechen War, Putin’s approval rating reached 45% in 1993. In December, Yeltsin announced his resignation and endorsed Putin as his successor. Thanks to unequal television coverage, manipulation of the vote-tally, and the atmosphere of terrorism and war, Putin was accorded the absolute majority needed to win the presidential election of March 2000. The ink of political fiction is blood.”

This launched Putin into a career of what was then called “managed democracy.” That  of course, was fiction written in blood. There seems to be an endless supply of blood.

 

Demolishing Factuality

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Death of Truth, The Sleep of Reason, Trust and Distrust, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

Why do oligarchs prefer fascism?  There can be little doubt that oligarchs like fascism. There are very few fascisms of the left. Why is that?

 

Oligarchs naturally turns to fascism because it is so congenial to their outlook.

 

Timothy Snyder described Russia at the time this way:

“Russia in the 2010s was a kleptocratic regime that sought to export the politics of eternity to demolish factuality, to preserve inequality, and to accelerate similar tendencies in Europe and the United States.”

 

The Russians wanted to disrupt American democracy for decades, but for decades lacked any success at all, and found instead only derision for their efforts. But in the 2010s they found remarkable success. In large part that was because Russians efforts found such fertile soil for confusion and American minds astonishingly receptive to the most incredible stories. The soil in America had been fertilized through generations by credulity. In America the death of truth had laid the groundwork for successful interference in their election to such an extent that they were like lambs being led to the slaughter.

 

Snyder posits the following as political virtues: individuality, endurance, cooperation, novelty, honesty, and justice.  He claims these are not merely platitudes, but actual facts of history.  All of these virtues are important, but one of them has proven particularly significant in the age in which we live—honesty. When all is lies all is permitted. That’s what we must avoid at all costs. We discovered that in American politics, in the pandemic, and significantly, but little understood, in both wars of Ukraine in 2014 and again in 2022.  However, “virtues are inseparable from the institutions they inspire and nourish.” Without trust in those institutions it is very difficult for truth to grow to avoid being crowded out by lies.

 

Sadly, those institutions are no longer robust anywhere. They are covered in rust from years of abuse. Yet those institutions are needed to preserve democracy. As Snyder said,

“An institution might cultivate certain ideas of the good, and it also depends upon them. If institutions are to flourish, they need virtues; if virtues are to be cultivated, they need institutions.”

 

Since those institutions in the west are under merciless attack by the forces of unfreedom (both inevitability and eternity in Snyder’s terminology) it is difficult for one to remain optimistic about the future of freedom and democracy in the west. When people suggest fascism in the west is a real possibility one can only harbour grim humility. As Snyder said,

“It is the politics of inevitability and eternity that make virtues seem irrelevant or even laughable: inevitability by assuring that the good is what already exists and must predictably expand, and eternity by assuring that the evil is always external and that we are forever its innocent victims. If we want to have a better account of good and evil, we will have to resuscitate history.”

 

We will certainly have to resuscitate truth. We desperately need honesty and truth.

 

The Politics of Eternity

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Trump, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014)

Timothy Snyder’s second difficult concept in his book The Road to Unfreedom was the politics of eternity.  This was the successor to the politics of inevitability.

As Snyder said,

“The collapse of inevitability ushers in another experience of time: the 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 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 home and abroad, eternity politicians deny truth and seek to reduce life to spectacle and feeling.”

 

The politics of eternity follows closely behind the politics of inevitability. There are two versions of it one western the other from eastern Europe, though the lines of separation can be porous. The politics of inevitability come first. After that,

“Eternity arises from inevitability like a ghost from a corpse. The capitalist version of the politics of inevitability, the market as a substitute for policy, generates economic inequality that undermines belief in progress. As social mobility halts, inevitability gives way to eternity, and democracy gives way to oligarchy. An oligarchy spinning a tale of an innocent past, perhaps with the help of fascist ideas, offers fake protection to people with real pain. Faith that technology serves freedom opens the way to his spectacle.  As distraction replaces concentration, the future dissolves in the frustrations of the present, and eternity becomes daily life. The oligarch crosses into real politics from a world of fiction, and governs by invoking myth and manufacturing crisis. In the 2010s, one such person, Vladimir Putin escorted another, Donald Trump from fiction to power.”

 

Putin was Russia’s eternity leader and Trump was America’s version.

I don’t think it is fair to characterize Donald Trump as a fascist. Not quite anyway. He was an authoritarian who wanted to be a fascist, but he was held back, so far at least, and just barely, by the institutions of American democracy and honest government officials who thwarted his intentions in 2020 when he spelled out for the world to see that he wanted tyranny. The frightening thing is that more than 73 million Americans voted for him, after he made his intentions clear. After 4 years in power no American who paid any attention at all could honestly say they did not know the real Trump. Trump put himself front and forward at all times for all to see. He did not hide, he announced his intentions for all to hear. No one in the history of the world has been more in the public eye than Trump.

 

Yet America escaped tyranny by the thinnest of margins. It took a courageous Supreme Court packed with 3 members of Trump’s personal choosing, stalwart Republican and Democrat officials who refused to give in to his claims of a fraudulent election, solid lower courts, and a determined party of Democrats to hold Trump back from his goal—i.e. tyranny.

 

Of course, as we all know, Trump did not die. He is still hanging around. He could come back and realize his dreams of fascist power and there are many enablers, many in the Republican party, doing all they can do to bring about that result. We don’t know what will happen.

Oligarch-in-Chief: The Road to Unfreedom

Books, Capitalism, Death of Democracy, Politics & Religion, Tyranny and Fascism, War in Ukraine (2014), War in Ukraine (2022)

 

The end of the Cold War saw a slowdown in such foreign interventions.  But it did not mean the end of autocracy of the beginning of democracy around the world. There was a lot of hope that Russia would become a democracy, but it did not happen.

 

The collapse of the Soviet Union saw the country transformed from socialism into a chaotic form of capitalism, presided over by then-president, Boris Yeltsin. It had a free market economy but it never achieved democracy. It was a near anarchic state where all kinds of groups in varying states of criminality competed for dominance. It was a free market free for all.

 

In 2000, Yeltsin was replaced by Vladimir Putin a former KGB agent. His first goal was to stabilize the country, something it urgently needed.  Putin did not affirm a competitive oligarchy, but he did facilitate an oligarchy nonetheless. As Yale historian Timothy Snyder said, “it was a form of oligarchy. What some people would call autocracy.”

 

“So under President Yeltsin in the 90s, Russia was a much freer country,” says Snyder. It was by no means a liberal democracy. As Timothy Snyder said,

There was much greater freedom of press. And there were rival clans of oligarchs. What Mr. Putin has done is assert himself as the oligarch-in-chief and use the organs of the state to crowd out all the oligarchs who didn’t come to an acceptable deal with him.”

Oligarchs were acceptable provided they acknowledged the supremacy of Putin. As Snyder said,

“He’s created a semi-permanent form of oligarchy where there’s just one clan rather than competing clans and that one clan controls both politics and the economy. I would characterize it as an oligarchy with moments of Christian fascism.”

 

Ivan Ilyin was an interesting Christian fascist thinker of the first half of the twentieth century. He is no longer very known. I had never heard of him before I  read Timothy Snyder’s book, the Road to Unfreedom and listened to the CBC Ideas show “Money Rules: How capitalism is destroying democracy”. I think if you want to understand what is happening in Russia and Ukraine this book would be worth a read. I read it a couple of years ago and have recently been perusing it again. It is worth it.   Snyder argued in the 20s and 30s that Russian was going to save the world. He saw the west as a place of fragmentation exemplified by its mess pluralism and that Russia would bring it back to unity. That view, of course, was very attractive decades later to Vladimir Putin. Russia was the country that would return God to earth. Everything would become perfect and total. To me that seems like the roots of totalitarianism.

 

Snyder characterized the society that Putin has created in Russia this way:

“He’s created a semi-permanent form of oligarchy where there’s just one clan rather than competing clans and that one clan controls both politics and the economy. I would characterize it as an oligarchy with moments of Christian fascism.”

 

It is a society that mobilizes capitalist technology such as the television and the internet to support the authoritarian rulers. Putin became surprisingly efficient with such technology as shown in the Ukraine in 2014 and later in what one would have thought the most unlikely place, namely,  the United States in 2016. We are seeing more of it again in Ukraine in 2022. Snyder also called it “an oligarchy with moments of imperialism…and  a media centred oligarchy which has some fascist moments and which has some imperial moments.”

That is what we are seeing now Russia and Ukraine. It ain’t pretty.

 

 

Hating Facts

Death of Democracy, Death of Truth, Epidemics/Pandemics, Politics & Religion, The Sleep of Reason

 

Sometimes facts are uncomfortable. Sometimes we don’t want to face the facts. And sometimes the facts are so bad that we hate them.

Recently more and more people seem to hate the facts so much they won’t accept them as true. When that happens we are in trouble. As Paul Krugman, an opinion writer in the New York Times and Nobel Prize winning economist said,

“Republicans spent most of 2020 rejecting science in the face of a runaway pandemic; now they’re rejecting democracy in the face of a clear election loss.

What do these rejections have in common? In each case, one of America’s two major parties simply refused to accept facts it didn’t like.”

 

Of course, many in Canada are the same. This is not just an American phenomenon. Many people claim that they don’t believe that wearing a mask to protect against the coronavirus that causes Covid-19 is effective or necessary even though the overwhelming scientific consensus is that they are wrong. Many people in the US claim that the 2020 presidential election was stolen even though there is no evidence to support that claim and even though there is a lot of evidence that tends to debunk it. Paul Krugman said this about the die hard Republicans who still believe the election was stolen:

“the point isn’t that the G.O.P. believes untrue things. It is, rather, that the party has become hostile to the very idea that there’s an objective reality that might conflict with its political goals.”

 

It is like a strong religious faith. It cannot be overturned by any facts. Faith works that way. That is why it is so dangerous. In the US, as Krugman also said, “At this point, you aren’t considered a proper Republican unless you hate facts.” It seems to me it is the same with the coronavirus among the deeply evangelical right in southern Manitoba. When Kyle Penner, a Mennonite Pastor in Steinbach gently asked the faithful to get vaccinated because they wanted to see them in church again, he was called a “traitor against Christ.”

In the United States conservatives venerate Ronald Reagan pretty much like a saint. As Krugman said,

“The main point, however, is that under Reagan, irrationality and hatred for facts began to take over the G.O.P. There has always been a conspiracy-theorizing, science-hating, anti-democratic faction in America. Before Reagan, however, mainstream conservatives and the Republican establishment refused to make alliance with that faction, keeping it on the political fringe. Reagan, by contrast, brought the crazies inside the tent. Many people are, I think, aware that Reagan embraced a crank economic doctrine — belief in the magical power of tax cuts. I’m not sure how many remember that the Reagan administration was also remarkably hostile to science.

Reagan’s ability to act on this hostility was limited by Democratic control of the House and the fact that the Senate still contained a number of genuinely moderate Republicans. Still, Reagan and his officials spent years denying the threat from acid rain while insisting that evolution was just a theory and promoting the teaching of creationism in schools. This rejection of science partly reflected deference to special interests that didn’t want science-based regulation. Even more important, however, was the influence of the religious right, which first became a major political force under Reagan, has become ever more central to the Republican coalition and is now a major driver of the party’s rejection of facts — and democracy.”

 

In this blog I have been trying to show that too many of the religious people, though not all, have been content to cast reasoning and evidence based reasoning aside in favour of blind faith. I think that is very dangerous. This is being proved right now during this pandemic. Giving up on critical thinking in favour of faith is dangerous. We do so at our peril. But it is difficult for some people to avoid this tendency. As Krugman said, in reference to the crazy lawsuit that was launched by Texans to challenge the 2021 presidential election won by Joe Biden,

 

“For rejecting facts comes naturally to people who insist that they’re acting on behalf of God. So does refusing to accept election results that don’t go their way. After all, if liberals are servants of Satan trying to destroy America’s soul, they shouldn’t be allowed to exercise power even if they should happen to win more votes. Sure enough, a few days ago the televangelist Pat Robertson — who first became politically influential under Reagan — pronounced the Texas lawsuit a “miracle,” an intervention by God that would keep Trump in office.”

 

I am deeply troubled that a significant part of our population holds so tightly to their convictions that nothing —no conceivable facts–can shake them loose from their beliefs. When beliefs reach such a state, we are in deep trouble. It seems to me we have reached this stage. The rejection of facts by the Christian alt right has been conspicuous during this pandemic. We may yet pay a heavy price for it.

As one of my favourite poets,  W. B. Yeats said, “The Best Lack All Conviction While the Worst Are Full of Passionate Intensity.”

Blood and Apocalypse: Christian White Nationalism

American Fascism, Death of Democracy, Evangelical Christianity, Extremism, Politics & Religion, True Believer

 

Philip Gorski, a professor of sociology at Yale and the author of the book American Covenant: A History of Civil Religion From the Puritans to the Present, also noted that many of the insurrectionists at the Washington Capitol on January 6, 2021 made it clear by their actions and signs that they supported Christian nationalism. This is what he told Thomas Edsall of the New York Times in a personal email to him:

“Many observers commented on the jarring mixture of Christian, nationalist and racist symbolism amongst the insurrectionists: there were Christian crosses and Jesus Saves banners, Trump flags and American flags, fascist insignia and a ‘Camp Auschwitz’ hoodie. Some saw apples and oranges. But it was really a fruit cocktail: White Christian Nationalism.”

You put them all together and you get Christian Nationalism.

Professor Gorski did not claim that he could tell by watching that a majority of the insurrectionists were Christian nationalists. That would be very difficult to discern from a distance. Yet, there is no denying that they were a substantial presence. Professor Gorski told Edsall in his email that the Christian nationalist movement was a loose confederation of people and institutions that shared,

“a certain narrative about American history. In rough outline: America was founded as a Christian nation; the Founding Fathers were evangelical Christians; the Nation’s laws and founding documents were indirectly based on “biblical” principles, or even directly inspired by God, Himself. America’s power and prosperity are due to its piety and obedience.”

 

Professor Gorski had some disturbing things to say about Christian Nationalists. He distinguished them from more traditional Christians. As he said in his email to Edsall,

“Christian nationalists use a language of blood and apocalypse. They talk about blood conquest, blood sacrifice, and blood belonging, and also about cosmic battles between good and evil. The blood talk comes from the Old Testament; the apocalyptic talk from the Book of Revelation.”

Anyone who watched and listened to the Christians on the hill during the insurrection would, I think, find the above description apt. And disturbing. That sounds more like Christian Nationalists than Sunday school at the local Baptist Church.

Is that your kind of Christianity? I don’t know about you, but I find it disturbing.