This Is What ‘Regime’ ‘Tyranny’ Looks Like

By Noah Rothman

Friday, February 16, 2024

 

Russian strongman Vladimir Putin’s foremost domestic rival, Alexei Navalny, died in prison on Friday. Moscow’s explanation for his death is hideously comic in its vagueness. Navalny “felt unwell after a walk, almost immediately losing consciousness,” after which he promptly expired. Navalny had been sentenced to serve a 30-year sentence in Russia’s penal colonies after returning to his native country from exile in 2021. He endured multiple poisonings both before and after his arrest. In the interim, Russian authorities would periodically disappear the opposition figure, depriving him of access to his counsel for weeks on end. Still, Navalny appeared relatively healthy and in good spirits within days before his mysterious death. His loss is the worst blow to Putin’s opposition since another rival, Boris Nemtsov, was mysteriously shot to death within sight of the Kremlin in 2015.

 

If all this sounds to you like a story that might as well have occurred in Joe Biden’s America, then you have been tragically misled. Sadly, many of the American president’s domestic critics have adopted a bad habit of hyperbolizing their often-justified criticisms of Biden’s administration, festooning their arguments with lurid tales of the treachery of Joe Biden’s “regime.” Often implicitly, sometimes explicitly, these critics elide the distinctions between America’s lawful and legitimate executive and the one-man rule under which Russians suffer. Perhaps they’re deluded. Maybe they’re just cynical. Either way, they’re deeply misguided.

 

This framework was on display in the work of American Greatness contributor Josiah Lippincott, who, on the very day Russian forces cascaded across Ukraine’s borders at the outset of Russia’s war of cultural conquest and subjugation, deemed Joe Biden “worse than Putin.” Putin “never mandated that I submit to nonconsensual medical treatment to keep my livelihood,” he wrote. “Putin didn’t ban me from social media,” he added. And against whom is he really aggressing? “Foreign policy ‘experts’ with Georgetown master’s degrees?” It’s the left and their pathological “hatred of Putin” that is truly suspect, insofar as it is “an offshoot of their boiling resentment of Donald Trump.” Rarely do we encounter such a pristine example of psychological projection in the wild.

 

In pursuit of substance to retroactively justify this pathological rationalization, those on the right who sought parallels between Biden and Putin eventually landed on his Justice Department’s prosecution of the January 6 rioters. As the Federalist’s Larry Taunton wrote following Tucker Carlson’s sit-down interview with Putin last week, Biden and his functionaries are not “troubled by Putin’s tyranny.” After all, they are “election-rigging tyrant wannabees” themselves. In a parenthetical Taunton thought explicated his point, he noted that “Putin imprisoned his chief rival Alexei Navalny just as Democrats are trying to imprison Donald Trump, and Jan. 6 is about as Putin as it gets.” Just two days after this grotesquery was published, Russia demonstrated that “it gets” so much worse.

 

The rationale — we can’t call it logic — that establishes moral equivalences between the lawful conduct of a constitutional republic and Putin’s autocracy finds its way into the mouths of loons as much as it does America’s foremost politicians. How else are we to describe the portrayal of the January 6 defendants as “hostages” of the “regime.” That is the word used by Trump acolytes such as Elise Stefanik, among others, who have deployed the language used to describe cruel despotisms to support the false allegation that rioters have been treated as unjustly as the political prisoners who rot away inside Russia’s work camps.

 

Of course, Stefanik, J. D. Vance, and the rest of Trump’s courtiers were only mimicking the former president’s rhetorical excesses. After all, it was Trump who gave them permission to call those who were lawfully convicted of statutory violations “hostages.” It was he who deemed Biden’s government not an elected administration but an illegitimate “regime.” It was he who rejected condemnations of Russia’s lawless brutality because America is just as bad. “You think our country’s so innocent?” he asked rhetorically. After all, “there are a lot of killers” here, too. For some of Trump’s most slavish sycophants, Navalny’s experience is still not enough to impose on them a crisis of conscience. “Navalny=Trump,” the documentarian Dinesh D’Souza insisted in reaction to the Putin critic’s suspicious death. “The plan of the Biden regime and the Democrats is to ensure their leading political opponent dies in prison. There’s no real difference between the two cases.”

 

They don’t believe it. If they did, they wouldn’t dare publish their or speak their calumnies in fear that they, too, might accidentally fall backward into a hail of bullets or somehow stumble out of a fourth-floor window. To assume they would is to confuse bravery with opportunism. It’s all a game to them — a means to an end that itself justifies every odious moral compromise along the way. It’s a gimmick, a work, a ruse designed to manipulate their constituents, whose intelligence they hold in abject contempt.

 

Navalny’s fate should shame those who establish defamatory equivalences between modern America and Putin’s Russia, but it won’t. If they had the capacity for that corrective emotion, they long ago subordinated it to their desire for political influence. After all, they’re free to say and think what they like — an aspiration Alexei Navalny shared and for which he gave his life. If we still can recognize courage, that’s what it really looks like.