Paradoxes of Democracy II: Deeper Truths than Facts, Research Time, 22/03/2018

The research I’ve been doing this month for the democratic governance white paper dovetails with interests for my larger projects on political philosophy. I’m also writing today’s post to get through a sharp turn in my paper’s argument.

Let’s start with my example from yesterday – the dedicated movement Trumpist. Let’s call him TD. He watches FOX, reads Breitbart, listens to talk radio no his commute, enthusiastically follows The Donald’s Twitter feed.

How dare you, TJ? How very dare you?! Do not use the Satan image
from a much under-appreciated but a personal favourite Doctor Who
story of mine from the Russell T Davies era. This is not for you!

TD considers Barack Obama an authoritarian socialist, the climate justice movement a hoax to enrich Al Gore and other investors connected to the Democratic Party, and the Clinton Global Initiative a money laundering and influence peddling scheme for Democratic Party interests around the world.

Given all this, TD is actually a very virtuous person. He believes that a culture of corruption and kleptocracy has grown around the Democratic Party, and that Donald Trump’s Republicans are the crew to drain the swamp.

The problem is, these are conspiracy theories, propaganda, and extremist lies. They have just enough basis in reality to be believable, or at least plausible, even though it’s become nearly impossible to tell whether the suspicion of corruption or actual corruption came first to justify the investigation.

TD lives in a media ecology in which these ideas about the moneyed progressive left are explored and repeated regularly as if they were true. The ethical centre of his heart isn’t the problem – it’s the input he uses to guide it.

The question becomes how you orient a person to recognize the greater corruption – that Trump’s family and administration is the real kleptocracy. TD’s entire thinking is informed by messaging that constructs a pretty comprehensive understanding of the world. It’s just that they’re based on alternative facts – alternative facts with enough rootedness in real history to be plausible.

I think I've found my new favourite image of Vladimir
Putin. Art by Pete Kirill

I'm not sure how to break into the worldview of people like TD. A basic principle of TD’s political thinking is that any progressive message is the idiocy of liberals or the lies of the corrupt (or communist) Democratic Party.

One article I found in my research helped me situate where such people sit as ideological objects. Timothy Snyder is a historian/philosopher of the culture and politics of eastern Europe and Russia. He wrote about Ivan Ilyin, one of the most innovative and complete fascist political philosophers.

Ilyin was a new name to me, and one I’d like to explore more of. Especially since several of his principles of governance have become explicit policies and approaches of Vladimir Putin’s government.

What stood out to me was Ilyin’s idea of how a fascist leader treats history. I think I’m safe saying that folks with progressive politics have a specific understanding of history. Orienting politics toward justice means identifying, understanding, and healing after old crimes.

So the past is a field for investigation, exploring all the gritty detail of history as you can. You must understand precisely what was done and how if any of us can have a profound enough cultural conversation to overcome our mutual hatreds, break the social/racial castes that make global human civilization so hateful.

But if you don’t want to do any of that awesome shit, then history becomes something else. You don’t have to investigate the real unfolding of history – if anything, you want to obscure, bury, and deny it. Repackage history as a lost golden age that only our fearless leader’s will and power can restore.

An image to illuminate your ideal. A utopia.
• • •
Ilyin’s work seems like the most multidimensional exploration of fascism as a political philosophy – in Snyder’s telling, makes me want to get hold of Snyder’s new book to ground myself in Ilyin’s thought before seeing if I want to engage it in any detail for Utopias.

Maybe a more sustained engagement with Russian fascism is for another project. I’m doing enough with Utopias already. I don’t want to add more and more to it.

Memories of an Anniversary, A History Boy, 12/09/2016

This one is about September 11 and its strange mythology. The event doesn’t even really seem to exist in the American collective social memory, as far as I can tell. Yes, we talk about it. The ceremonies are there. But a real reckoning with that horrifying day and its meaning remain absent from our society. At least on the aggregate level.

September 11 is an erased presence, constantly hovering in the American cultural psyche, but never directly confronted. 

I don't know that any one day’s events have been so traumatizing to American (and wider Western) society in generations. Pearl Harbour is, I think, comparable, but it doesn’t have the same international resonance as the social-psychological horror-blast of the World Trade Center’s destruction.

When Pearl Harbour was bombed, most of the world was already at war – continental Europe under Nazi German occupation, China and southeast Asia under the boots of the Japanese Empire. The rest of the world’s trauma was ongoing.

September 11’s trauma was not just through the shock and surreality of the event itself – the crumbling towers and dust overcoming ordinary peaceful Manhattan – but the immediately visibility of the event around the world through our media. Hundreds of millions of people saw the towers fall as it happened.

But the American people were traumatized most of all – it was an attack on their country. I remember the shock and horror of the event, but I remained a little separate from it. The attacks happened to my neighbour. However close America and Canada may be in many ways, I am not an American.

Rudy Giuliani and George W Bush at Ground Zero,
overseeing rescue and recovery efforts after the
September 11 attacks.

Americans have the most to work through and confront in themselves and their own culture about what that mass trauma did to them. Yet Americans have done the least reflection on the cultural soul that was scarred so deeply 15 years ago. 

In the immediate aftermath, Americans turned to revenge – the hunt for Osama Bin Laden and the war on Al Qaeda was a matter of retribution to them. George W Bush, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, and the rest of the administration then used the hunt for Al Qaeda and its allies into an excuse to pursue the invasion of Iraq.

That war in Iraq was motivated by neoconservative dreams of an American military empire, and the belief in the necessity of an American war machine to guarantee the freedom of their allies, or the perverse utopian dreams of Project for a New American Century that a mass-scale military invasion could install a thriving democratic political culture.

Yet that war was little more than an orgy of violence – prisoner abuse; the use of white phosphorous weapons in Fallujah, where thousands of civilians were burned alive and its pollution continues to ruin lives with birth defects and kill with cancer; the constant brutality of the American mercenary armies. 

Through all the Bush years, America as a wide culture turned away from reckoning with the damage September 11 caused the national psyche.

That looked to change with the prospect of the Obama Presidency. But the Republican Party quickly turned from its defeat into ignorance of their leadership’s horrifying blunders and intentions. 

They instead turned to a single-minded dedication – vilify, delegitimize, and destroy Barack Obama no matter the cost. By doubling down on the racist opposition to the Obama Presidency – the popular attitude among a vocal minority of Americans that a black President was inherently illegitimate because of his blackness – Republicans saw a route to electoral victory.

The Nisour Square Massacre in Iraq, when US-
employed mercenaries at Blackwater killed 17 and
wounded 20 after starting a shootout when they saw
a woman and her son driving a car suspiciously. Just an
average day in the American occupation.

So instead of turning the collective conversation of American conservatism to grow from the mistakes and horrors of the Bush years, that whole society of conservative America turned to an aggressive campaign against Obama.

That turn in conservative America has now become an aggressive campaign of white nationalism. The Republican Party, having embraced racially motivated hatred of Obama to regain state power, facilitated the rise of Donald Trump to the Presidency. 

Ironically, it will be the staunchly America First Republican party who installs a stooge of Vladimir Putin in the White House as they embrace the white nationalism of Trump and the alt-right. 

Trump’s campaign has been run by pro-Putin political consultant Paul Manafort (still an influential foreign policy voice, though he was forced out of his campaign leadership role). His aggressive white nationalist agenda is the American equivalent of the Russian white nationalism that Putin’s foreign policy encourages to undermine democratic governments and movements in former Soviet Bloc states. 

One of their major funders is Peter Thiel, the immortality-obsessed oligarch who has worked for years – with growing success – to destroy a free press, and who declared democracy incompatible with freedom. 

Trump’s campaign is likely using former FOX News head Roger Ailes’ dossier of damaging info on many influential media figures to strongarm them into favourable coverage. Meanwhile, his campaign manager Steve Bannon runs the white nationalist news site Brietbart, which has cultivated the alt-right and its online bullying culture to explode onto mainstream America.

Trump launches his campaign to become President. The
most infamous escalator ride in history.

In all of this is a refusal. The refusal to consider what September 11 did to American culture and self-consciousness. It culminated in what I consider one of the most revealing moments of madness the Trump campaign has produced.

This August, Rudy Giuliani said in a live media interview that there had been no radical Islamist terror attacks in the United States before the Obama Presidency. Giuliani had been mayor of New York City on September 11, and worked with President George W Bush at the Ground Zero site. 

While the context of Giuliani’s interview made it clear that he was referring to the years under the Bush Presidency after the World Trade Center attacks, the message was still an erasure. 

September 11 became something to be avoided, fought against, a matter of pain and fear. All the ceremonies and anniversary solemnity can’t achieve a genuine reckoning with its meaning. What matters is that there must never be another September 11, that the event inspire fear of its repetition. 

The fear and hatred American politics has used September 11 to build has erased the event’s own meaning and significance. America is still trembling even as the culture believes itself strong and growing stronger. Americans’ refusal to face the terror of that day in its fullness has seen them embrace the politics of perpetuating terror themselves. 

As I’ve grown from age 18 to now, that descent is what I’ve seen of America. And it terrifies me.

When Collapse Becomes Humiliation, Composing, 03/09/2016

Today, I want to talk a little more about Vladimir Putin and modern Russia. Reading back over the post I wrote last night, about how Etienne Balibar seems to be the only one who anticipated Russia’s current return to oppressive geopolitics, I didn’t really like what I wrote. 

It was basically just a reiteration of what Putin’s Russia had been up to, and wondering exasperated why no one else could have seen this coming. I admit, I wrote it rather late in the evening. So I couldn’t quite make the ideas clear. 

We saw this moment as a great victory for democracy,
and it was. But victory wasn't finished yet. The symbol
is always easier to deal with than millions of real lives.

Let’s do that today. 

I could make a pretty strong case that this failure of geopolitical prediction is at heart a failure of empathy. In two short years, all the most powerful symbols and the central political institutions of Soviet and European communism had fallen. Figuratively and literally.

The actual political phenomena are so complex that it could take hundreds of history books to give a truly comprehensive account. But in the context of this argument, here’s how I’ll lay it out. With the Soviet economy in crisis, Russian leaders tried liberalizing the economy a little, opening up more flexibility than the crumbling bureaucracy of the Brezhnev era could have allowed.

Economic unrest and a more liberalized political atmosphere provoked protest across the Eastern Bloc, Hungary opened its borders to Austria and East Germany, East German dictator Erich Honecker stepped down, and the government opened talks on reunification. There was a party at the Berlin Wall, and it hasn’t stopped since.

On the Russian side, Mikhail Gorbechev’s economic and political liberalizations weren’t sitting well with hardline communists in the government and army, who deposed him in a military coup. But a protest movement in Moscow encouraged many in the Soviet army to turn against the plotters.

At the front of this protest was former Politburo member turned democratic activist Boris Yeltsin. With Gorbachev under lock and key the entire time, Yeltsin became the public face of the democratic movement in Russia. 

Since most of the anti-Soviet opposition in the other 15 republics was nationalist, the Soviet state collapsed into 16 different countries. Most of them remained autocratic dictatorships – Belarus, Moldova, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, and Kyrgyzstan. 

The democratic revolution in Russia was genuinely
mind-blowing – an event that we long considered
impossible in the West. Our problem is that our
leaders (and us too) learned all the wrong lessons
from this wonderful moment.

Some of them transitioned to democracies – Armenia, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Ukraine, and most importantly Russia. Georgia democratized about ten years after independence. Ukraine’s was a difficult transition, having spent 15 years after independence as a Russian client state, then a democratic revolution interrupted by Viktor Yanukovich’s resurgent nationalism with Paul Manafort’s public relations team.

How did we understand the fall of European communism popularly in the West? Ronald Reagan demanded that they tear down the Berlin Wall, and we did. Reagan wins!

I mean, I oversimplify it to make sense of it here, but that’s basically what the popular Western belief amounts to. That triumphalism – in the wider context of the 1990s’ generally booming Western economy and gung-ho spirit – led no political leaders in the West to question the wisdom of liberalizing the Russian economy by selling off trillions of dollars worth of state assets to a small group of businessmen, even though most of them were former leaders in the Soviet military, communist party, or espionage agency.

Within only a few years of independence, Russia was a basket case. Its economy was in tatters, its people having lost so much of the financial support systems they could once rely on for basic dignity. Unable to contain or control the looting of his country or the downward spiral of his society, Yeltsin became a broken man living at the bottom of a vodka bottle.

We in the West saw the triumph of democracy – blind to the authoritarianism of countries most of us English speakers can barely spell and to the collective depression of the Russian people. 

All we saw, popularly speaking, when we thought of the new Russia, was the triumph of democracy. We saw Yeltsin’s greatest moment standing on a tank in the middle of Moscow, marking an end to dictatorship and Russia’s first experiment in democracy.

Frankly, we should put off asking why so many
Russian people prefer authoritarianism to democracy.
First, figure out and accept a good answer to the
question of what made us such a lousy ally in the
most important democratic transition on Earth
since 1776 and 1832. Why we let Russian
democracy fail.

We’d watch spy movies filled with Russian gangsters and – as a society anyway – never connect the explosion of the mafia in Russia’s economy with what we’d enabled in the name of freedom. 

Even the espionage leadership of the United States – who had the intelligence capacity to have known better – had its focus drawn to the Middle East instead. The political leadership of the United States as the 21st century started were all democratic triumphalists. 

They saw the fall of the Soviet Union as vindication of America’s right to dominate the world – Earth itself would run according to the model of the American market and business society. The American military would be its police force and missionary unit – first stop, Iraq. Our leaders were driven by ego and arrogance. 

Reagan spoke, and the wall fell. It was almost biblical to so many Americans, unfortunately even the ones in the White House. Now Bush would speak, and hundreds of democracies would bloom across the world.

We were idiots. Our minds were narrow. Our eyes were closed.

They and so many of us presumed the Russian story was over – the Soviet empire had fallen, so they were a democracy now. The thought of a democratic country returning to dictatorship on its own was senseless to them. So they took their eye off Russia, even as that country’s own espionage agency led a coup against their deflated democrats.

The scattered person could see it happening, could see the failures of understanding, the neglect, the condescension that was turning millions of people against democracy and back toward life under authoritarianism. But no one would listen to an aging academic like Etienne Balibar in his speeches and essays on European nationalism in the late 1990s.

Vladimir Putin surprised Western popular culture two years ago with his invasion and subversion of Ukraine, his intervention in Syria on behalf of a neo-Stalinist dictator. I find most disturbing his military flights into Swedish airspace, purposely intimidating a Scandinavian social democracy as they consider an explicit alliance with NATO against just such Russian military agitation.

If we had been partners to the Russian people instead of looters and arrogant masters, we could have avoided this whole mess. That would have required empathy and understanding the society that had been our enemy for generations. I think we could have done it.

If we’d bothered to try.

In Soviet Russia Victory Wins You! Research Time, 02/09/2016

One thing that strikes me about reading Balibar’s essays on nationalism is how prescient they are about modern politics in Europe. I’ve spent the past week waxing on (and waxing off) about his insights into the still-embryonic European nationalist movements of the late 1990s and early 2000s.

But I find the historical insight that strikes me most is how well he understands that there’s more to the end of the Cold War than anyone in any influential position in the West understood at the time.

Etienne Balibar seems to have been the only one in the
West who never got played by Vladimir Putin.

I’m reading this book at a time when Russian petty imperialism is in a new resurgence. They’ve literally invaded a core ally of the European Union, and wouldn’t have been long for joining NATO either. They invaded and conquered the Crimean peninsula, having already occupied several borderlands in countries like Georgia that used to be folded inside the Soviet Union. 

All this in response to these former Soviet border countries installing more liberal democratic governments – Mikhail Saakashvili in Georgia, Viktor Yushchenko and Yulia Tymoshenko in Ukraine – who aligned more with the European Union and United States. 

They’ve encouraged nationalist movements to destabilize democratic governments in their traditional sphere of influence as well. Russian nationalists in Donetsk have split Ukraine with a civil war. Transnistria has been a semi-recognized non-entity state on the eastern slivers of Moldova, with Russian support. And Vladimir Putin is trying to encourage Russian nationalism in the Baltic region.

This is not how a defeated power acts. Balibar is one of the few, writing in one essay shortly after Putin took over the Russian Presidency, to describe that change as a takeover by the political police – the mean who once led the KGB, in other words. 

Despite all Putin’s shenanigans – interventions, destabilizations, stirring up nationalist movements in newly or soon-to-be democratic regimes in his neighbourhood – pretty much every mainstream commentator and political actor with any real influence was totally surprised by Russian meddling in Ukraine. And every Western leader was powerless to stop Putin’s support of Bashar Assad in Syria.

All the people whose job it was to know enough never to be surprised were completely surprised. It’s the most intense expression of the immense failure the end of the Cold War really was.

Since I was a small child watching the Soviet Union fall on cable news, I’ve been told that the West won the Cold War. And that’s certainly how everyone acted. Balibar, along with many left-leaning critics today, describe the modern European Union as having pushed all the Europe into the global marketplace, where globalized corporations and their leaders can enjoy those regions’ wealth.

Not really how to lead a transition to democracy.

The European Union is thankfully far more than this, and has far more potential than this crude co-optation. But the critics aren’t wrong either. 

This was exactly the wrong way to treat the end of the Cold War. The European Eastern bloc and almost all of Europe’s former Soviet states transitioned to democracy, and Western leaders thought this meant total capitulation to everything about the Western way of life.

Balibar rightly argues that this democratic transition should have been a period to build a new vision of Europe and a new model of Western democracy together. A time when we could have learned from the ideals of socialist Eastern Europe before their corruption by dictatorships. And when the East could have learned from the more experience democracies of the West.

Instead, to the victors go the power. That’s how it went. And I believed for a long time that this was the right order of things. But it certainly didn’t work out.

The mass privatizations – more like mass looting – of the Russian state ended up creating one of the most horribly unjust societies. A mega-elite of oligarchical billionaires owned almost all the wealth in Russia, and the other hundred million or so Russians were left adrift. Putin’s nationalism at least gave them the promise of being part of a feared nation again.

To them, the end of the Cold War wasn't any victory for democracy, but a national humiliation. Russians could never have built anything from being forced into the economic system of the countries they considered enemies for decades.

Our apparent victory blinded the thought leaders and political leaders of pretty much all the West into a massive blunder of overreach and condescension. Who knows what promising philosophical, political, and ethical creativity could have come out of a meeting of the minds and moralities of two Europes after the Cold War's end? 

We’ll never really know. Maybe one day, I’ll imagine and write a book about it.

Get Real I: Clashes of Four Civilizations, Research Time, 14/10/2015

When I’m reading a book that was epically influential on mainstream politics – like Francis Fukuyama’s The End of History – I find the ignored chapters to have some of the more interesting stuff. Today, I want to talk about his less rosy predictions about future politics – his own take on the clash of civilizations.

About two-thirds of the way into The End of History, there are a few chapters on what his theory means for international relations theory. How will states relate to each other in a world that’s inevitably rolling toward universal capitalist liberal democracy? 

It’s a critique of realist IR theory, that war, suspicion, and power games are the inevitable way states relate to each other. International institutions are only really useful as dispute-settling arenas, and diplomacy is the job of working out compromises between great powers to avoid mutually devastating war.

Fukuyama's book never anticipated that China would
become a global power and the leader among Asia's
authoritarian states. He concentrated more on
Singapore as the key example. But China has made
the world bipolar (for now) again, and its leader Xi
Jinping rules not by straight Confucian principles, but
with ideas from the Legalist schools like Shang Yang's
writings. An innovator in authoritarianism.

Fukuyama thinks that the spread of democracy will change this, because pressure from the people will drive their leaders to peace. It’s the kind of optimism Fukuyama is famous for.

But he also considers a very pessimistic possible future. In this scenario, capitalism successfully spreads throughout the world, but economic freedom doesn’t carry democratic political culture with it. Instead, the world breaks down into three blocs, according to their cultural heritages that resist democracy.

1) There’s the West, with its cultural heritage of liberalism (and the liberatory drive that animated socialist and social democratic movements, though Fukuyama underplays these). This is straight-up liberal democracy.

2) The Islamic world, which Fukuyama describes in simplistic (and borderline racist) terms as fundamentalist. If Fukuyama had any deep knowledge of Muslim cultural heritage, he’d talk about the traditional union of social, political, religious, and state concerns through the concept of the unified community of all Muslims.

Islam’s first wave of expansion was as an empire, and its Prophet Muhammad was the political leader of this empire as well as a religious leader. The legitimacy of contemporary Arab monarchies – especially the most brutal ones like Saudi Arabia – are rooted in their embrace and export of their favoured branch of Islam.

3) Asian authoritarianism. Fukuyama discusses this as East Asia’s Confucian heritage. It’s a political culture that privileges group and community loyalty and deference to established authority over individual assertion and liberties. You can be a business leader, and a powerful one. But a top priority must always be loyalty to your country’s leaders.

It's easy to laugh at Vladimir Putin from a place like
Canada. But he's made Russia one of the most
dangerous and unpredictable states and armies in
the world. And world maps let us forget this, but
Russia is the state along our northern border.

If we want to carry Fukuyama’s analysis into our current world, you can add a fourth great power bloc to the two resisters of democracy.

4) Russia’s Czarist Petty Imperialism, which has been resurrected under Vladimir Putin. He’s returned to the power games of occupying territory along border states to subjugate them into obedience. 

We never stood up to him over the annexation of Georgian territory, and now he’s done the same with Crimea and Donbas in Ukraine. And he’s threatening Sweden and the Baltic states to leave their pro-European stances. Putin hasn’t brought Russia back to communism. He revived the Great Game of the 19th century instead.

In the 21st century, it looked as though Fukuyama’s more pessimistic picture of the future – which he didn’t even endorse in The End of History because he was so certain of democracy’s triumph – came true. 

But there’s one problem in the mix, which I kept coming back to last week.

The Arab Spring happened. Why? To be continued . . . 

Europe’s Fall? Advocate, 15/07/2015

All the ideas I have for non-fiction books are fundamentally political. Ecology, Ethics, and the Future of Humanity is a philosophical exploration of how environmental activism can literally forge a new self-image for our species. The Utopias project will explore how our dreams of building a perfect society inevitably fuel our most destructive politics. 

This photo was taken during Greece's rioting in late 2013.
If the government falls and the economy continues to crash,
there will be more violence in the future.

So all my writing has to speak to the fundamental political conflicts of my time. And in general, I think we should all think more about the political conflicts that span the globe. It’s easy to read a few quick articles about the Greek crisis, the war in Syria, or the American election and consider yourself informed. But have you thought?

I watched the humiliation of Alexis Tsipras and the people of Greece with terrible dismay and sadness. I felt crushed. It wasn’t just because the terms of the new agreement – mass privatization, new taxes, slashing pensions, no true debt relief – are so harsh, even the International Monetary Fund is critical. It wasn’t just that Anglea Merkel framed the harsh terms explicitly as punishment to the Greek people for defying the terms of EU technocrats. 

The history of Europe had long been about war, domination, violence, and empire. The European Union was founded as a way to overcome that heritage and build a political culture of brotherhood across the continent. Instead, it’s become the engine of one country’s dominance over the continent. The idea of European solidarity, after last weekend, is a joke, and the world is worse off because of it.

Even worse, the collapse of European solidarity has left its economically depressed countries (Greece, and also Spain, Portugal, Italy, the rest of the southeast) vulnerable to home-grown violent political movements. Racist government has already taken hold in Hungary, whose government plans to build a wall along its eastern border to stop the flow of refugees from the Syrian war and Serbian migrants. As Syriza falls, Golden Dawn will almost surely rise, and the politics of racism and violence against minorities will become a major force in European society again.

Vladimir Putin may look ridiculous to us, but his comical
propaganda is received as the word of a national hero in
his own country. A lot of us in the West have to face the
fact that we're completely ignorant about Russian culture.

All of this comes as Russia is growing increasingly aggressive in Europe. I’m not just talking about the civil war in Ukraine, but general belligerence toward countries near its border. Russian officials have threatened that Sweden will face consequences if its government joins the NATO alliance, as it’s considering. The Russian air force regularly flies military planes over Estonia.

Max Fisher’s investigation for Vox.com of Russia’s foreign and military policy influencers is enlightening about the genuine danger Europe faces. Putin and his circle among the military, his party, and ex-KGB businessmen and politicians genuinely feel threatened by the United States. 

Returning to the new century’s biggest fool, their fear goes back to the Bush Administration. The invasion of Iraq to cause regime change and build democracy at the barrel of a gun in the Middle East terrified Vladimir Putin. He knows he isn’t a democrat, and he remembers the Cold War. There’s a general presumption, Fisher discovered, in Russia’s political and military elite that the only reason the United States isn’t similarly destabilizing or attacking Russia for regime change is because of the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile. 

Russia’s current imperialist destabilization of independently-minded border states (Ukraine, Georgia) is about building a buffer of friendly, controllable regimes to keep the United States army from going after them directly. For Putin, Russia’s greatness depends on the military and economic subjugation of Europe, because he believes that Europe’s goal for its east is the collapse of Russia.

We in Western democracies forgot that Russia was a powerful, dangerous country since the end of the Cold War. Not only did Francis Fukuyama temporarily convince us that History had ended, but Russia in the 1990s was a basket case country whose economy had collapsed, whose state assets were in the hands of decadent oligarchs, and whose President Boris Yeltsin was a drunken buffoon.

We North Americans also forget that militarized, racist,
violent nationalism never went away in Europe. In
Eastern Europe, it continued to thrive, fostered by
economic and cultural isolation and the belligerent
influence of its national Orthodox Churches.

But Russians never stopped being afraid of the United States, never really considered Western democracies allies. This is why Russia is seriously considering the use of tactical nuclear weapons if NATO were to send its armies to defend its Baltic members from attack. The war that would result from this kind of brinksmanship would set the continent on fire and kill millions of people in months. 

However much Merkel’s government might be concerned with the growth of Russian hostility and paranoia toward Europe and the United States, she’s doing a terrible job of managing it. A fallen, chaotic Greece would be the perfect place for a Golden Dawn government to install itself as a military dictatorship after Syriza falls. 

Their white supremacist values would see the Golden Dawn Greek government likely withdraw from the EU and NATO (a Western, democratic alliance), disappear Syriza members and supporters, suppress more moderate opposition figures, and either deport or massacre Syrian refugees and Greek ethnic minorities. Such a belligerent, anti-EU government would be a perfect ally for Putin’s Russia.

The last century’s totalitarian movement arose, in part, from popular disgust with democracy’s inability to fight economic depression. We should be serious about the possibility that it could happen again. That’s why I’m writing my next book of political philosophy, to grapple with how easily democratic freedom can fall.