In my last post, Quagmire for Whom, I discussed the Western strategy in Ukraine to create a quagmire for Putin, with the aim of forcing regime change. I predict that this will not work since Putin's Russia can trade with its neighbor, the enormously powerful country of China. Meanwhile, western culture is being undermined by a cancerous system, bloated with trillions of dollars which are doled out to propagandists, weapons manufacturers, politicians, think tanks, media conglomerates, and anyone else willing to do the bidding of the military industrial complex. By contrast, Putin, in my view, is something of a philosopher king -- an intelligent man able to run his country coherently. This post expands on the cultural themes underlying this worldview.
My understanding of Putin's worldview has been shaped by the following:
- Russia's Nationalist Turn, by Anatoly Karlin, 9/28/2021
- Regathering of the Russian Lands, by Anatoly Karlin, 2/16/2022
- President Putin’s February 21, 2022 speech to the nation – full text
- Transcript: Vladimir Putin’s Televised Address on Ukraine, 2/24/2022
The Clash of Civilizations is a thesis that people's cultural and religious identities will be the primary source of conflict in the post–Cold War world... Huntington began his thinking by surveying the diverse theories about the nature of global politics in the post–Cold War period. Some theorists and writers argued that human rights, liberal democracy, and the capitalist free market economy had become the only remaining ideological alternative for nations in the post–Cold War world... Huntington posits that the concept of different civilizations, as the highest category of cultural identity, will become increasingly useful in analyzing the potential for conflict.
Examining China in the midst of Deng’s rapid opening to the world, Wang perceived a country “in a state of transformation” from “an economy of production to an economy of consumption,” while evolving “from a spiritually oriented culture to a materially oriented culture,” and “from a collectivist culture to an individualistic culture.” ...
Wang Huning appears to have won a long-running debate within the Chinese system about what’s now required for the People’s Republic of China to endure. The era of tolerance for unfettered economic and cultural liberalism in China is over... Wang has now seemingly convinced Xi that they have no choice but to take drastic action to head off existential threats to social order being generated by Western-style economic and cultural liberal-capitalism—threats nearly identical to those that scourge the U.S.
And Putin is taking Russia in a similar direction:
Putinism has developed into ethno-aware nationalism.. For the first time in more than a century, the Russians have a state that they can call their own, a state run by and for the Russian people... So broad and all-encompassing is the shift that, just as academics came to classify what happened between Putin’s rejection of Western moral supremacism in the Munich speech of 2007 to the gay propaganda law in 2013 as a “Conservative Turn” (Nicolai Petro), so I believe future historians will classify the 2018-21 period as a “Nationalist Turn.” Thus, just as the First Age of Putinism in the 2000s was marked by unideological technocracy, and its Second Age during the 2010s was defined by conservative retrenchment, so I believe that the Third Age, the 2020s, will be defined by the political ascent of ethno-aware (as distinct from ethno-nationalist) Russian nationalism.
So a backlash to Fukuyama's The End of History is on the ascent, with multiple superpowers standing up to the West along with stalwarts such as Iran and Venezuela. Huntington appears to have the more prescient world view, and Putin is on board.
Meanwhile, the West is facing a crisis as described by Martin Gurri in The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium. From Trump to Brexit to the Yellow Vests in France, the west is increasingly divided against itself, with a strong reaction against globalist liberal democracy. It is certainly conceivable that Putin and Xi are evolutionarily ahead of the West in using ethno-nationalism to restrain global capitalism.
Coca Cola, McDonald's, Ford, Tesla, Facebook, Google, and Amazon may be on the wane globally, with sanctions accelerating this trend. Ethnonationalism may serve an important purpose for the foreseeable future as a check against cultural decay. Confucianism, Islam, and Christianity may no longer be symbols of backwardness, but rather signs of cultural strength as they were in previous eras. The Hegelian dialect, in which cultural tradition competes with technological advance, lives on and the woke West may be forced to come to terms with this new modernity.
Liberal values, as manifested in woke, cancel culture politics, have been coopted by the cancer of the military industrial complex. Anti-Putin liberalism is an extension of corrupt liberal intolerance. Incoherently, liberals militarily and morally support the Neo-Nazis and white supremacists that have invaded Ukraine in recent years. Putin has called their bluff.
Liberal, enlightenment, values must balance majority rule with minority rights. The corrupt West vilifies majority rule when it suits their purposes, as during Trump's presidency, and vilifies minority rights when it suits their purposes, as in Ukraine. We must reclaim balance in both foreign and domestic affairs, which means that we must resist cooptation by the "intelligence agencies".
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