Russia stands up for the international Putinist movement.
And, yeah, sadly, I’m not joking or being ironic. Putin sees Trump, like other nationalist, antidemocratic pro-oligarchy movements, as ideological allies in an international movement.
Its easy and dangerously tempting to see everything that happens as being consistent with what you already believe, but it does. In the Putinist model, we’re facing with the next great transnational ideological threat to liberal democracy here, and one of or two main parties’ presidential nominee is part of that movement.
Well, to be fair, not a commie. Rather, he’s a tool of an emerging new ideology that has already taken control of the governments of multiple nations but that has yet to acquire a name or be recognized as such. “Putinism” is probably the best name, but maybe “Pseudodemocracy” or “Shamocracy” would be the closest if you don’t want to personalize it.
It’s authoritarianism supported by kleptocratic regime vassals veiled and legitimated by the offices, forms and civic rituals of a subverted ex-de…
Honestly, I’ve been worrying about it for a while now. Rove made it abundantly clear that when he spoke of making the Republican Party the “permanent governing party,” what he was talking about was a Putinized sham democracy supported by plutocratic vassals and cowed, if not entirely subservient, media and a bit of vote rigging. When that all fell apart for them, after Katrina, my concern eased. But when Putin shoved Medvedev aside and took back the reins, it became a matter of growing concer…
It’s been listening to the media talk about UKIP, Front Nationale, Golden Dawn, and whatever they call themselves in Denmark and the Netherlands without connecting the godamn dots and seeing the pattern that has been most worrying to me.
Americans in the 19th century had no trouble seeing monarchism as an ideology separate and apart from the intensely nationalistic form it took in each country where it existed. They looked at Europe and saw a continent where everyone in government wore a fancy…
By “of a piece,” I mean we identified the governing parties of Germany, Italy, Spain, Hungary, Romania, and the various fascistic movements arising in other nations as being ideologically aligned and interrelated, even if each (by definition) had purely national aspects not shared by some of the others. We didn’t identify Nazism as a thing that happened in isolation from what had happened in Italy, even if the mysticism,antisemitism and extreme racism of Nazism were not central, defining featur…
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