Putin the Intellectual?
Back at the beginning of the Ukraine debacle the Russians published an essay by Vladimir Putin "On the Historical Unity of Russians and Ukrainians." I wrote about it in “Putin’s Russian History Lesson.”
Of course, I wrote, Putin didn’t write the article. Give me a break. Later, I learned about “far-right” philosopher Alexandr Dugin, said to be “Putin’s Brain.” Oh, so that was it!
But then I saw the performance put on by Putin in his 2/6/24 interview on X/Twitter with Tucker Carlson in the Kremlin.
I tell you, Putin may not have written that article, but he certainly knows what it was all about, and he could tell the history of Russia and Ukraine on live TV for half an hour in a coherent and intelligent manner.
I happen to have been reading a bunch about the history of Eastern Europe in the past months, including The Other Europe: Eastern Europe to 1945 by E. Garrison Walters. And Putin’s narrative did not contradict Waters. I knew about Galicia, once part of the Austrian Empire, now part of Ukraine: Lviv used to be called Lemberg. I knew about the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. And so on. If you are interested, check out the “Territorial Evolution of Poland” at La Wik. Check out the GIF on the page with the ever changing borders of the area of western Russia, eastern Poland, and Ukraine. It ain’t pretty.
Let’s just say that Joe Biden or Donald Trump could never hold forth on American history in the way that Putin talked about Russian history. Putin even snuck in a reference to Dostoevsky.
A couple of other points. Putin suggested that the Russians were promised, or at least hoped, that after the fall of the Soviet Union the hostility between east and west would be ended. Obviously that did not happen.
Was that Russia’s fault? Was it the fault of the US and Western Europe?
Or was it the fault of the Deep State that has been organized and dedicated to oppose Russia since 1945, and there has been nobody in political power with the vision and the cojones to change things? Napoleon Bonaparte: “Never ascribe to malice that which is adequately explained by incompetence.”
Maybe that is just as well. Napoleon, they say, had a vision of a united Europe. Lenin had a vision of a world of communism. Hitler had a vision of a Reich that would last a thousand years. Our present rulers have a vision of a universal society devoted to diversity, equity, and inclusion, and clean, renewable energy.
Probably, with that kind of vision, it is just as well if our present rulers stumble into the future, mumbling their wokey responses, without really thinking what they are doing, and are dumbfounded every time they stub their toe on some Trumpian pebble on the road.
My faith is that the future is organic. Not food-wise, but in the sense of the billions of humans adapting individually and voluntarily to the challenges of life, and surprising us with the remarkable ideas and adaptations they invent. As the strategic geniuses surprise us with their foolishness and stupidity.
| perm | 02/09/24 9:05 pm ET | comments |
Politics and Morality
I am reading Henry Kissinger’s Diplomacy, published in 1994, which is Kissinger’s magisterial judgment on the foreign policy of all nations for the last couple centuries, starting with the Congress of Vienna that met in 1814-15 after the defeat of Napoleon Bonaparte.
He makes it clear in Chapter Two that the analysis will be the interplay of Theodore Roosevelt’s Reallpolitik approach, centering on the balance of power and America’s national interest, and Woodrow Wilson’s moral approach,
that peace depends on the spread of democracy, that states should be judged by the same ethical criteria as individuals, and that the national interest consists of adhering to a universal system of law.
Thus, the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, dominated by Wilson, was driven by the moral principles of “collective security” and “self-determination.” Collective Security imagines a League of Nations that would organize nations to fight back against an aggressor, and Self Determination means that people can be governed only by their own consent.
Kissinger makes it clear that he believes that the Wilsonian approach of Versailles was a failure, and the Truman Doctrine after World War II, which involved a return to Realpolitik and setting up a balance of power against Stalin and the Soviet Union, was a success. However, he notes, the Cold War was sold to the American people by the ruling class in moral terms. Secretary of State Dean Acheson on the Atlantic Alliance:
it has advanced international cooperation to maintain the peace, to advance human rights, to raise standards of living, and to promote respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples.
And if you listen to politicians and commentators they are always mixing politics and morality.
You’ll notice what this means. It means that every war is justified as a moral crusade — as in holy war or religious war.
Now I have a bit of a problem with that, starting with my association with Michael Novak in The Spirit of Democratic Capitalism that I developed into what I call “The Greater Separation of Powers.” I said we ought to expand the concept of the separation of powers — described by Montesquieu in The Spirit of the Laws as the separation of the legislative, executive, and judicial powers in government — to establish a greater separation of powers between the economy, politics, and the moral-cultural. The Greater Separation of Powers is described in my book An American Manifesto.
But then I read Nazi jurist Carl Schmitt and The Concept of the Political.
Let us suppose that in the field of morality the ultimate distinctions are good and evil; in the aesthetic, beautiful and ugly; in the economic, useful and harmful, or, for example, profitable and nonprofitable.
What then is the political?
The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be traced is the distinction between friend and enemy.
I would say that Schmitt rather starkly separates these four human distinctions into separate lanes: friend-enemy; good-evil; beautiful-ugly; useful-harmful.
Now, I would say that totalitarianism means the collapse of the Greater Separation of Power into the executive, that all human affairs are reduced to the political. And thus reduced to the distinction between friend and enemy. That is why Curtis Yarvin writes: “there is no politics without an enemy.”
I think that we all agree that totalitarianism, at least in principle, is bad.
We can see that, for a start, totalitarianism collapses the three branches of government into one. But it is also clear, from the experience of Communism and Fascism — and also the current experience of today’s upper-class activism that we disparage as “wokism” — that it is always a convenience for political actors to fold the moral into the political. That is what Henry Kissinger was describing when he noted how the US government sold the Cold War to the American people as a moral crusade. USG didn’t think it could persuade the American people on Realpolitik or balance of power arguments, probably because they thought that the American people wouldn’t understand the arguments; so it had to be a moral argument.
You can see how this tendency drenches politics. We don’t think of Hitler just as an enemy that we had to fight, but as evil incarnate. We don’t think of murderers as domestic enemies so much as evil monsters. And politicians Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin Delano Roosevelt liked to think of rich corporate chieftains as “malefactors of great wealth” and “economic royalists.”
But I think it is important to separate these concepts. In the economic, if a businessman makes a fortune, good luck to him. If his business fails, we feel sorry for him.
Now, if the businessman cheats his customers, then we are getting into the moral realm. To a certain extent, the public condemnation of cheating, as an evil act, enters the moral realm. And if the businessman won’t repay his customers and won’t say he’s sorry, that’s when the state comes in with its policemen and laws and penalties to impose its will. At this point the cheating businessman becomes an enemy of society.
You can see that in a perfect world the businessman would volunteer to make his customers whole. In a decent world it takes a bit of encouragement to get the businessman to do the right thing. In the real world, it often takes the state to step in and force the businessman to do the right thing.
But if we work from the opposite end, we can see that, if “there is no politics without an enemy” then all politicians are on the hunt for that enemy behind the tree so his can lead his people to victory against the enemy. Because the political is the friend-enemy distinction. And they are always tempted to escalate a moral issue into a fight against the enemy. And they are always tempted to escalate the normal disappointments of economic transactions into a fight against “economic royalists” as FDR did in his renomination speech in 1936 after failing to get the US out of the Great Depression.
So I would say that politicians are always on the hunt for an enemy, and that’s a problem.
If we look at this in the middle, we see that ordinary people tend to judge the events of their life in moral terms. And this makes sense, for in the ordinary face-to-face world, the Life World, we expect people to behave in a certain way, and if they disappoint us, we judge them: maybe as rude, maybe as nasty, maybe as evil. So when prices go up at the supermarket we are tempted to blame the market, or the supermarket chain, or even business in general.
Ordinary people are quick to judge other people when things go wrong.
I think it is telling that, to justify the Cold War, the Truman administration decided it was not enough to say: hey, we need to balance the power of the Soviet Union, and we need to form a military alliance, and we need to resurrect the US and British and French occupation zones of Germany into the Bundesrepublik Deutschland as a counterweight to the Soviet satellite states in Eastern Europe. No, it had to be a moral argument.
I suspect this is partly because ordinary people don’t understand interstate rivalries and Realpolitik. Thus politicians have to communicate in a language that ordinary people understand. It is not the language of rival urban criminal gangs, but the language of ordinary people in their day-to-day relationships.
But in my view, in a better world politicians would stay in their lane and shut up unless there was a real enemy. The problem is that we live in the real world. And that means, if you ask me, that we need to be very severe on politicians that overstep from the political world into the moral world and the economic world. Unless there’s a real enemy involved.
| perm | 02/09/24 12:12 am ET | comments |
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Christopher Chantrill
He runs usgovernmentspending.com, the go-to resource for government finance data, and is a frequent contributor to the American Thinker. He lives in Seattle, Washington. Click for more.
“I love this guy.” — Steve Ballmer
A Commoner Manifesto
Commoners have nothing to lose but their shame
Soft power is gifting friends; hard power is fighting enemies.
Everything should be made as simple as possible, but no simpler. — attr. to Einstein
The simplest way to understand human society is as Three Layers such as Nobles, Yeomen, and Serfs.
My take on Three Layers is my Three Peoples Theory of Creatives, Responsibles, and Subordinates.
I believe that we moderns live in Three Worlds: the War World of politics, the Market World of the economy, and the Life World of family and neighborhood.
The world that we all live in today is the one created by the German Turn in philosophy, psychology, science, and meaning.
But our modern elite, the educated elite, has taken, I believe, a Wrong Turn and has imposed a cultural Great Reaction on the world, a lurch back to the primitive. This manifests in the elite’s conceited Activism Culture and its patronage of Subordinate people as its Little Darlings.
The principal reason for the elite’s Wrong Turn has been that it does not understand and does not want to understand how the Three Peoples’ Religions are necessarily different.
The root of the educated elite’s Wrong Turn is its conceit that it knows what the world needs. I think there is a better way; I call it “A Good Life Better than the Left”.
ABC of Politics – Activism Culture – “Anatomy of Revolution” – Allyism – Critical Theory – Downstream-ism – Dutch Finance – German Turn – Good Life – Great Reaction – Little Darlings – Perfect Plan – Women in the Public Square – Ruling Class – Three Layers – Three Peoples – Three Peoples Religion – Tribalism – Two Cultures – Wrong Turn
Today’s topic: Deirdre McCloskey and her Bourgeois Era books
