Political Culture

In our Comp Gov course, we talk a lot about political culture.  Basically - like most uses of the word "culture" - it's a very broad term for accepted political norms and behaviors.  Fareed Zakaria comes very close to acknowledging that Russian political culture is basically anathema to democracy, which is my position.

This does not mean that there are no Russians who want democracy in their country.  There are millions who do, mostly in St. Petersburg and Moscow, its most globally intergrated cities.  Most Russians, however, simpy don't see the "liberal order" as important.  That liberal order is not about how we define "liberal" in our political theater, but rather the idea of civil rights and liberties, the rule of law and the importance of representative government.  Russians simply don't seem to care about those things.  They care about strength.  Russia has always felt besieged on all sides by enemies.  Their incredibly long borders and flat, defenseless terrain has made their history a history of invasions and conquests.  The Russians still feel the scars of the Golden Horde. 

Britain and America, where this liberal order evolved, did not feel those pressures.  Britain was last successfully invaded in 1066, America was last significantly attacked inside its borders in 1814.  This meant little need for a standing, peacetime army and the large state apparatus needed to support it.  The absent need for a strong, domineering state meant that there was room for the respect for republican institutions, the rule of law and civil rights and liberties to grow.  France struggled to remain true to republican desires because of it's neighbors, running through four Republics before getting it right.  Germany, too, never really institutionalized democratic ideals until they were forcefully grafted onto them by the devastation of World War II and the necessity of US Cold War policy.

A certain political culture evolved for certain geographical and geopolitical reasons in Britain and her colonies.  Despite the Continental support for humanistic individualism, Europe had to solve its violence problem before it could embrace democratic political culture.

Which brings us to today.

Russia's political culture means that it can never really be "our friend."  We certainly screwed the opportunity up in the early '90s, but that was always going to be a long shot.  An analogous situation would be Germany after 1918.  Germany lost World War I, but like Russia in the Cold War, there wasn't the same devastating loss that required them to reassess their political culture.  So, Germany grafted the Weimar Republic onto a culture that still revered the Junker class of Prussian militarism.  Hitler exploited that in his rise to power. 

American political culture is being severely tested.  At least some of that, I think, is a legacy of 9/11.  America's historical security was punctured dramatically and on everyone's television.  The result has been that a certain segment of American society has gravitated towards a more militaristic and authoritarian political culture.  There was always a latent authoritarianism in certain parts of America, but the key was that it remained latent.  Wars could stir it up, obviously. Ask the Socialists of World War I, Japanese in World War II, Leftists in the McCarthy Era, peace activists during Vietnam... Wars are corrosive of the liberal order. 

Trump's rise is an expression of this new fearfulness in a certain segment of American political culture. His constant invocation of threat was the biggest consistent hallmark of his campaign.  "The Wall" was his policy prescription to this nebulous sense of threat.  It was stupid, because fear makes you stupid.  His supporters are fearful of Muslims, Mexicans, Gays, Hipsters, Blacks, Asians...because they no longer feel in control.  Some of this is the advent of a more dynamically diverse American population, but I also think 9/11 created some sort of psychological crisis in a certain group of people.  MS-13 is simply a shorthanded for not-white people coming to kill me.

In that environment, Trump's pompous, ridiculous bloviating strong man routine is going to find fertile ground. Willard Romney was never going to exploit that, nor was Marco Rubio or Jeb Bush.  Fearful people want a bully.  The Russian people are fearful, so they want Putin.  The source of both Putin and Trump's legitimacy is their autocratic promise of order based on white supremacy.

There are essentially two kinds of racists.  The first are people who choose to hate, basically hateful people.  There is something fundamentally broken in these people, basically sociopaths.  The other types are created by the culture they are in.  I don't hold with the presentist pattern of expressing outrage at the racism of Woodrow Wilson or Thomas Jefferson, because you would be hard pressed to find more than a handful of white people during their eras who weren't outright racists by today's standards.  Acknowledging their racism should be more about acknowledging the racism at the hear of that time in our country.

Trump has the support of the David Duke first-type of racists.  The sociopathic neo-Nazis.  But he also has the support of the cultural racists.  That racism, I believe, comes from a place of fear.  Stoked and nurtured by Fox News, these people are saturated by stories about Ebola and MS13 and ISIS and pedophile human trafficking.  Their fear makes them susceptible to the bluster of a braggart, even (perhaps especially) when that bluster is empty.

Trump's performance this week has been disastrous, because it cuts across American political culture.  A third of the population will stick by him regardless.  They are so steeped in their fear and their need for an authoritarian Daddy that logic or facts simply won't penetrate their Fox addled brains.  The broader culture, however, is recoiling at this fundamental violation of America's political heritage and legacy.  This is why even GOP-friendly polling outfits like Rasmussen have Trump at a -9 approval rating, despite a strong economy and international peace.

America has a large and diverse polity.  We contain Marxists, democratic Socialists, "sensible centrists", libertarians, theocrats and we contain those who crave a Strong Man to soothe their fears of a swarthy-skinned boogeymen who live in the fever swamps of their minds. 

The challenge of Trumpistan is to insure that the authoritarian roots being sunk into American political soil do not "take."  We are, in fact, fighting to keep America true to its historical culture as the bulwark of a liberal order that guarantees at least the promise, if not always the practice, of providing measures of both freedom and equality and the space in which that promise might be more fulfilled.

No pressure...