A trope that’s likely to die after the war in Ukraine is that Russian President Vladimir Putin is a "savvy genius."
Sean Illing at Vox.
Of course it was Donald Trump who described Putin in those terms. Getting a compliment from Trump is seldom something to brag about. If anything, it serves as a blinking yellow light to the rest of us.
Mr. Illing had a conversation with Prof. Brian Klaas about Putin being swept up in his own lies. He said of Putin:
What’s happened to Putin is that he’s succumbed to a fake reality that he himself created, and then he’s had that reality mirrored back at him by people who are afraid to tell him the truth.
It’s one thing to lie. If you’ve ever met somebody who never lies then you’re probably lying about it. 😉
But it’s another thing to believe your own lies and to believe them even more when your subordinates repeat them back to you.
That’s where Putin is right now. He’s living in a self-constructed zone of mendacity which is totally cut off from reality.
Putin thinks that democracies are weak because they have freedom of speech and a free press. However, you will only have a clear view of a situation if people are free to tell you exactly what is going on. You are stronger when you have an accurate and updated view of the world. That’s not what you get in Russia these days.
Putin’s contention that Ukraine is not real and is run by Nazis is as plausible as Trump’s rantings that he really won the 2020 election. They are both bigtime liars who are addicted to their own lies.
Lying, bullying, and ranting don’t make you a genius – stable, savvy, or otherwise.
Vox: A Russian newspaper editor explains how Putin made Trump his puppet
Sean Illing
Has Putin made a puppet of Trump?
Mikhail Fishman
Of course. This is certainly what the Kremlin believes, and they’re acting accordingly. They're quite obviously playing Trump. They consider him a stupid, unstrategic politician. Putin is confident that he can manipulate Trump to his advantage, and he should be.
#TrumpRussiaConspiracy #MuellerKnows
Sean Illing
Why was he so afraid of a Clinton victory?
Mikhail Fishman
Because he knew that would mean an extension of Obama's harsh orientation to Russia, perhaps even more aggressive than Obama. Putin has experienced some difficult years since his 2014 invasion of Crimea, but he didn't expect this level of isolation. He saw — and sees — Trump as an opportunity to change the dynamic.
Sam Adler-Bell on why scorched-earth radicals are winning the battle for the soul of conservatism.
So I reached out to Sam Adler-Bell, the co-host (along with Matthew Sitman) of the podcast Know Your Enemy, an indispensable listen for anyone interested in the conservative movement, and the author of a recent essay in the New Republic about the future of the American right.
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Beyond the significance of January 6, 2021, and how America got to that point, Adler-Bell and I discuss the evolution of conservative media, why American conservatism is now a counter-revolutionary movement, and where he thinks the right can go from here.
A transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for length and clarity, follows.
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In terms of what was motivating people on the ground, their willingness to be violent, their willingness to treat the moment as an existential threat — surely what happened in 2020 was an input. And I think that when you do talk to people on the right, as I do frequently, the 2020 uprisings after George Floyd’s murder have shaped their consciousness in a way that cannot be overstated.
Whether you agree with their account of why it happened and what it consisted of, which I tend not to, for them those protests and what they see as the license given to those protests by Democrats, by corporations, by all of progressive culture, felt like a real turning point, which contributes to this pervasive sense on the right that we’re at the point of no return.
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What these currents share is a sense that the conservative movement, as it operated pre-Trump, was not willing to wield state power to actually achieve conservative cultural ends and wasn’t sufficiently aware of the threat posed by the left.
This New Right no longer believes we’re in a neutral liberal contest between competing ideas and concepts of the good. They believe the progressive left have taken over every aspect of American society and wield an authoritarian power over what, in particular, white Christians are allowed to say and think in this country; therefore this kind of libertarian consensus — which has presided in American conservatism, especially since Reagan — which prescribes a kind of private traditionalism and a public-facing liberalism, is totally insufficient for this moment.
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Sean Illing
I appreciate that the New Right looks at the establishment Republican Party and concludes that they haven’t been fighting a real culture war. I know people will read that and think I’m nuts because culture war is all the GOP does now, but they haven’t been doing it earnestly. What the GOP has done is create a cultural grievance machine that functions as a laundering device for corporatist economic policies. But these New Rightists are actual culture warriors and see through the con and they’re totally transparent about it.
Sam Adler-Bell
No, it’s true. I don’t disagree. And I think one of the things about the term “culture war” in our discourse is that we tend to think of it as a sideshow, like a distraction from real politics. I think that’s wrong on the merits. Culture war is about how we define our social reality. It’s a competition over defining social reality, which is not a sideshow. And for the New Right, for these Trump-supporting culture warriors, this is the only game in town. They believe there’s no war but culture war. And the state should use materialist policies to shape the culture.
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One of the things that distinguish the New Right from the traditional Buckleyite conservative politics is that Buckley’s role in the conservative movement was to help set the guardrails. He was the one who disowned the John Birch Society. He was the one who kicked people like Joe Sobran out of acceptable conservative politics. He was the one who, if you got too racist or too anti-Semitic, you would get read out of conservatism, whether you were an activist or an intellectual or a pundit.
The perspective of the New Right, certainly people like Anton and people at Claremont Institute, is: no enemies to our right, and anything we do to shave off the aggressive or populist edges of conservatism is doing the left’s bidding for the left. And there’s enough people on MSNBC and in the pages of the New York Times who will try to demonize the rest of us by stigmatizing the right flank.
Why this Yale psychologist thinks you should be compassionate, not empathetic.
An example that one might consider is survivor’s guilt. An outsider may easily dismiss the symptoms as an irrational impulse and respond, under this deception of understanding, with shame or ridicule. The spotlight effect of empathy has its limitations. Compassion is an ongoing investment of mindfulness as well.
There is something liberating about being able to forget the #Past and reinvent yourself in the #Present. To a certain extent, #Forgetting #Online will be monetized, like everything else. Sean Illing interviews Kate Eichhorn. We just have to wonder, what form of #Inequality will arise due to this issue? #Vox http://ow.ly/m3vn50ylxYv
'What's the matter with rural white people? Don't they deserve what they get?'
In this interview with Vox’s Sean Illing, Princeton sociologist Robert Wuthnow discusses his new book about the trials and tribulations of rural America in the 21st century. It’s a classic. The reader who sent it to me, himself a Princeton graduate, writes: “I don’t necessarily disagree with everything they say, but they’re shockingly patronizing. Give me small-town America over its cultured despisers any day.”
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What sticks in my craw about that question is the idea that these rural people “have chosen not to keep up.” What does that mean? “Keep up” in what sense? I wrote an entire book about how I had “kept up” with the values of our commercial, increasingly cosmopolitan culture, moving around taking the kinds of jobs that people in Sean Illing’s and my class value — and how, when my rural-dwelling sister came down with terminal cancer, the incredible strength of those who stayed behind, who “chose not to keep up.” People who choose not to keep up with the modern world are not to be scorned if that world is, in fact, headed in the wrong direction.
That’s what’s embedded in Illing’s remark: the idea that these rural white people aren’t progressives, and they deserve their own misery.
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I guess what ticks me off about Illing’s questions is his contempt for these people, and what they’ve lost, and are losing. In my hometown, it’s now become the expected thing that people’s children will move away. There are economic reasons for this, and maybe those are the primary reasons. But there are also cultural reasons. You couldn’t get more of a homegirl than my sister, but today, her oldest daughter lives in California, and doesn’t intend to return home to live; her second daughter is off at college, but doesn’t plan to settle in Louisiana; and her third daughter, still in high school, plans to leave and not come back. Had Ruthie lived, would they see the world differently? Maybe. But Ruthie would have been fighting the tides of culture to keep her children at home. All the good things that she had, and that I wrote about in Little Way, will not likely be part of her children’s life — nor the life of my children.
Because we left.
I don’t blame my nieces for the choices they’ve made, given the hand they were dealt. I didn’t want to move away again either in 2016, but unforeseen circumstances forced our hand. Still, even if the reasons were good, we’re gone. If I were an old man living in a house down a country road in West Feliciana Parish, and I saw all my children and grandchildren had moved away, and those who stayed behind, if I saw that they weren’t forming families, but were having babies without getting married; and if I saw that even if my adult children wanted to stay, there weren’t any jobs for them; and if I saw — continued to see — people like me mocked and derided by coastal elites as backwards bigots who refuse to get woke and who deserve our suffering for preferring the Confederate flag, under which my ancestors fought, to the rainbow flag — well, yeah, I’d be inclined toward stone cold spite too.
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We have all been set free from traditional sources of authority. That has worked out for some of us. For others, it has been the freedom of the desert. What ticks me off about the Vox view of the world is that it refuses to see any tragic sense in what has happened. That’s progressives for you: history is a Grand March, and woe to the loser who can’t keep up.
