The Future Is History

I've been mercifully offline for the most part for the past few days as the missus and I have been on Puerto Rico.  It's a magical place and I'm not sure I've met friendlier people.  Which was weird because I was simultaneously reading Masha Gellen's The Future Is History, which tells the story of the return of totalitarianism to Russia by following individual's stories.

It's a sobering book in any number of ways.  First, the aggressive anger in Russia is scary. Russia is a country in the grips of a psychic, narcissistic wound stemming from the collapse of the Soviet Union.  I've always described Russia as a country that's justifiably paranoid.  They are obsessed with threats, both internal and external, but history has borne our many of these fears. There is no greater historical moment for contemporary Russia than World War II.  By any objective standards what Russia did in WWII was both impressive and appalling.  Stalin's purging of the military led to abysmal performances by Russian commanders until someone like Zhukov arose. Russian tactics showed almost no concern for casualties and millions died because of it.  And yet Stalin remains one of the most respected figure in Russia.

Gessen's book precedes from the thesis that Russia's lack of adequate humanities and social science left it without a language to speak with itself about its own past and therefore it's future. Russians don't really understand themselves and certainly don't understand the outside world. This has left them afraid, and fear is usually compensated with by a rising anger.

The parallels from Putin to any of the emerging right wing movements around the world are terrifying.  I've alway presumed that Putin helped Trump win because he had Kompromat on him. That's probably true.  But the links with Putin's political style and the modern "conservative" movement are striking.

- Racism and anti-immigrant politics. Russians are obsessed with their national/racial identity. They are demonstratively racist in their politics. Trump's "wall" would be perfect for Putin.
- Homophobia. Russian homophobia is chilling, violent and held by super-majorities of Russians. It's based on Orthodox Christianity, of which Putin has closely allied himself. Russians worked closely with American anti-gay groups in creating their policies and were praised by evangelical Americans.
- Militarized, toxic masculinity. Russian machismo is everywhere. This has led to Nazi-style hate groups. Russia was one of the leading sponsors of the NRA in the US. That's not a tactical decision on their part. It's a confluence of beliefs.
- Anti-Muslim bigotry. Muslims are considered sub-human by most Russians.  They consider Islam a cult and de facto terrorism.
- An obsessive nationalism. Russians are convinced the rest of the world is decadent trash. If it's not Russian, they aren't interested.

Of course, Putin's Russia represents the Deplorables here in America, not the whole of the Republican Party. Just like Le Pen in France or Farage in Britain, they can really only lay claim to about 30% of popular support. That, in and of itself, is terrifying.  They should be a fringe movement polling in the single digits. But so far, the West has resisted the nasty, divisive, fear-based politics of Russia. So far.

But Putin exploited - either by design or more likely by chance - Russia's disorientation after the turmoil of the '90s.  Russia's economy isn't strong; Putin is making decisions like in Ukraine that are making things worse; Putin has no real plan to improve the life of the average Russian.  It just doesn't matter.  Putin is the Strong Man. He's the guy who takes no shit from any of those soft bleeding hearts. He's an instinctual leader.  This is pretty much how the Deplorables see Trump.

Trump will use fear leading up to 2020 in every possible way. Fear is really the only thing he has to offer his followers. His followers - like Russians - have seen the world change around them and they are simply incapable of assimilating that change. Stuck in an imagined past, they cling to a sense of national greatness.  Again, I don't think Trump did these consciously; he has just been steeping in it with Fox and Friends every morning. 

Russia is broken. It's long term future looks bleak. But right now, Putin has outfoxed America by helping to install a certifiable moron with sympathies towards him and his politics. His tentacles reach into every Alt-Right movement around the world. This wave of reactionary political movements isn't limited to Russia, but Russia is its home base.  From Bolsonaro to Duterte to Trump, the politics of reaction have gripped the world in a repudiation of its history.

That history is the history of Nazism, but Nazism, even fascism is a limiting way of describing those links. Putin isn't a Nazi.  He isn't really a fascist. We need a new word to describe this new/old form of politics.  Reactionary isn't, perhaps, descriptive enough, but it gets at the basic gist of it. There was a mythic past where part of "our country" was great, but then the Others came and destroyed it, and the only way to recover from this calamity is to trust in a strong man to lead us back to the great way that things were. That's Bolsonaro and Putin, Trump and Conte as much as it is Hitler and Mussolini.  That's a demagogue making the people into sheep by telling them they are wolves.

When we throw around the word Nazi, with its inconceivable excesses and the mind-numbing horrors of the Holocaust, we lose the ability to make comparisons. Auschwitz wasn't the gulag.  But it also was. The difference is in extent and not kind. Americans are committing human rights abuses on our Southern border. We are putting people in life threatening conditions and splitting up small children from their parents. That's not Treblinka.  That's not Bergen-Belsen. It's not even a Siberian work camp. Not in scale.  But by looking at the industrial scale of the horror of the Holocaust or Stalin's Terror or the Great Leap Forward, we lose the similarities in processes between the cataclysms of the mid-20th century and Putin's pograms against LGBT people and Trump's performative cruelty towards refugees.

Hitler is incomparable; it's facile to try and compare him to anyone else. The challenge is to actually divorce the scale of horrors in Nazi Germany, Stalinist USSR, Putin's Russia and now Trump's visions for America.  The scale isn't the same, but the politics are scarily similar.