Authoritiarians

Marc Fisher at WP:

Though hardly a champion of democracy, Russian President Vladimir Putin late last month delivered an address that would sound familiar — and, to many people, attractive — in democracies from the United States to much of Europe. Putin railed against expansive definitions of gender, calling the idea a “perversion,” part of a “complete denial of man [and an] overthrow of faith and traditional values” by “Western elites.”

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Recent years have brought a sharp reaction in many parts of the world, as globalization, political polarization, the rise of social media and a collapse of trust in major institutions have left many people feeling betrayed by their governments, torn apart from their careers and alone in their communities, according to historians, political scientists and sociologists who have studied these shifts in the world’s economies and governments.

The result has been a similar quest for nationalist solutions in country after country, and a growing bond among the far-right autocrats in those places. For example, Hungary’s prime minister, Victor Orban, and Italy’s likely new prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, have spoken to acclaim at gatherings of the Conservative Political Action Coalition — a group that has helped propel Trump’s movement in the United States.

“The trend we are seeing reflects a disillusionment around the world that the democratic process fails to produce effective, charismatic leaders,” said Nikolas Gvosdev, a professor of national security studies at the U.S. Naval War College. “In country after country, the idea spreads that we need strong leaders who get things done. And it’s not just in politics: We see the valorization of tech CEOs like Elon Musk as problem solvers who get the job done.”

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 What the authoritarian regimes have in common is their roots in what Moisés Naím, a former Venezuelan cabinet minister who is now a fellow at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace in Washington, calls the three P’s: populism, polarization and post-truth

Assassination

Is there a Brutus in Russia? Is there a more successful Colonel Stauffenberg in the Russian military?

The only way this ends is for somebody in Russia to take this guy out.

You would be doing your country - and the world - a great service.

— Lindsey Graham (@LindseyGrahamSC) March 4, 2022

 Many Americans want to assassinate Putin.  At Politico, Steven Kinzer writes:

We’ve tried it repeatedly. Often we have failed, but even when we seem to have succeeded, the long-term consequences have been terrible. An order from the Oval Office to assassinate a foreign leader would not break a taboo. It would only be the latest in a series of self-defeating blunders.

So far as is known, Dwight Eisenhower was the first president to order such assassinations. He began by targeting Premier Zhou Enlai of China. During the 1950s, Eisenhower and nearly every other policymaker in Washington considered the “Red Chinese” to be maniacal fanatics bent on world conquest. When Zhou announced in 1955 that he would travel to Bandung, Indonesia, for a momentous conference of Asian and African leaders, the CIA saw a chance to kill him. Zhou chartered an Air India jet for his flight to Bandung. It exploded in midair, killing 16 passengers. But Zhou had not boarded. China called it “murder by the special service organizations of the United States.”

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Americans are impatient by nature. We want quick solutions, even to complex problems. That makes killing a foreign leader seem like a good way to end a war. Every time we have tried it, though, we’ve failed — whether or not the target falls. Morality and legality aside, it doesn’t work. Castro thrived on his ability to survive American plots. In the Congo, almost everything that has happened since Lumumba’s murder has been awful.

Christianity, Ukraine, and Putin's Amen Corner

Lots of folks sharing this photo of the Jesus Christ statue from the Armenian cathedral in Lviv #ukraine being taken to a bunker for the first time since WWII, unfortunately without attribution to the photographer who captured it. Thank you, André Luís Alves.
📸: @andrealvesphoto pic.twitter.com/IAtDBK244d

— Mari Manoogian (@MariManoogian) March 6, 2022

Anthea Butler at MSNBC:

In 2014, Putin made the cover of the evangelical magazine Decision in a piece in which Graham's son Franklin lauded his handling of the Winter Olympics and his protection of Christians. Franklin visited Russia in 2015, and ever since, has promoted Putin as a godly leader. A few days before the invasion of Ukraine, he asked people to “pray for Putin” but not for Ukrainians, creating a decent amount of backlash.

David French:

In the years since his rise, Putin has been admired as a defender of Christian civilization, as a man at the “heart” of the “post-Soviet revival of Christianity in Russia.” In 2017 Christopher Caldwell, a senior fellow at the Claremont Institute, delivered an address to the Hillsdale College National Leadership Seminar, entitled “How to Think About Vladimir Putin.” Hillsdale, for those who don’t know, is arguably the premier conservative college in America. It reprinted Caldwell’s remarks in Imprimis, a monthly digest that reaches more than five million Americans.

Caldwell’s words are worth remembering because they describe—perhaps more eloquently than anyone else in the west—not just why Putin built a following abroad, but also how he became (at least for a time) popular at home. These three paragraphs are key:

Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his country’s prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international system that seeks to erode sovereignty in general and views Russia’s sovereignty in particular as a threat.

After noting that Putin committed atrocities in his rise to power, Caldwell continues:

Yet if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time. On the world stage, who can vie with him? Only perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey.

When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that. In the first decade of this century, he did what Kemal Atatürk had done in Turkey in the 1920s. Out of a crumbling empire, he rescued a nation-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country.

As Caldwell notes in his essay, Putin’s fans have not been limited to right-wing figures outside Russia. One should view public opinion polls in authoritarian countries with deep suspicion, but the available evidence indicates he’s been broadly popular in Russia for two decades. One wonders how long this popularity can hold as Russian forces struggle on the battlefield, but the bottom line is still clear—tens of millions of people (including some of the most influential people in the west) have admired an objectively evil man. Why?

Throughout history we see familiar patterns, in times of stress and confusion, people cry out for salvation and strength. Success—including military success—builds a bond with the people. The victorious ruler connects not just with human pride, but also with profound human longings for protection, purpose, and identity.