A Problem Like Putin

By Kevin D. Williamson

Sunday, March 13, 2022

 

Vladimir Putin is one man. How has it come to pass that a single man, the corrupt and banal ruler of a decadent and backward country, should be able to convulse the entire world, more or less on his own?

 

There are analogous situations in private life. A screaming baby may be the least powerful person in a room, but he can dominate the room with his screams. A heckler can momentarily interrupt a performance and command the attention of a thousand people in a theater. Criminals often are weak men, but they can impose their will on others simply by being ready to violate laws and social rules.

 

All voluntary constraints on power create advantages for those who do not accept such constraints — that is one of fascism’s genuine political insights and the reason fascists and fascist organizations reject constraints on power in principle. This is true both of the sort of fascist who calls himself a fascist and of the sort of fascist who calls himself a socialist (Lenin, Castro, etc.) and of the sort of fascist who spurns ideological language for vague promises of national greatness.

 

I have observed in the past that either socialism is the unluckiest ideology in the history of politics — inexplicably being taken up by Lenin, Stalin, Castro, Mao, Honecker, Ho Chi Minh, Pol Pot, etc. — or there is something wrong with socialism. Which, of course, there is.

 

F. A. Hayek dedicated a chapter in The Road to Serfdom to the question of why the world is so full of Putins: “Why the Worst Get on Top.” Considering the question in the context of totalitarianism generally, Hayek identified three factors that cause such systems to throw up monsters. The first is that ruling a society does not require a majority, only the support of the largest politically useful faction. “A numerous and strong group with fairly homogeneous views is not likely to be formed by the best but rather by the worst elements of any society,” Hayek observed:

 

The higher the education and intelligence of individuals becomes, the more their views and tastes are differentiated and the less likely they are to agree on a particular hierarchy of values. It is a corollary of this that if we wish to find a high degree of uniformity and similarity of outlook, we have to descend to the regions of lower moral and intellectual standards where the more primitive and “common” instincts and tastes prevail. This does not mean that the majority of people have low moral standards; it merely means that the largest group of people whose values are very similar are the people with low standards.

 

Second, the energy and the certitude of the united cretins will be enough to overwhelm the “docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own . . . [and] who will thus swell the ranks of the totalitarian party.”

 

Third, it is easier to get people to agree on a negative program than on a positive agenda, and the easiest kind of negative program to articulate is hatred — of some enemy, real or imagined. “The contrast between the ‘we’ and the ‘they,’ the common fight against those outside the group, seems to be an essential ingredient in any creed which will solidly knit together a group for common action,” Hayek writes. “It is consequently always employed by those who seek, not merely support of a policy, but the unreserved allegiance of huge masses.” Hayek observes that this explains why the socialists of his time, who were in theory internationalists, became violent nationalists upon achieving power.

 

The totalitarian environment repels moral men, but, as Hayek notes, it also creates “special opportunities for the ruthless and unscrupulous.” Which brings us to Putin and to men like Putin. Hayek writes:

 

There will be jobs to be done about the badness of which taken by themselves nobody has any doubt, but which have to be done in the service of some higher end, and which have to be executed with the same expertness and efficiency as any others. And as there will be need for actions which are bad in themselves, and which all those still influenced by traditional morals will be reluctant to perform, the readiness to do bad things becomes a path to promotion and power. The positions in a totalitarian society in which it is necessary to practice cruelty and intimidation, deliberate deception and spying, are numerous.

 

The danger, then, is not men such as Vladimir Putin. The danger is totalitarian states per se. Every society has men such as Putin, and healthy liberal societies often find useful work for them to do. In totalitarian societies, such men end up commanding armies — and, in Putin’s case, a vast nuclear arsenal.

 

It is not as though these tendencies do not exist in liberal societies. American politics often attracts the worst sort of men and women our country can cough up, and they achieve power through the same dynamic Hayek described in the totalitarian states, welding together effective factions of the low-minded but like-minded. We have the testimony of no less a totalitarian than Adolf Hitler that the greatest strength of the totalitarian states is that they force those who fear them to imitate them, a principle that can be seen at work in the distinctly autocratic and centralizing tendency of the Franklin Roosevelt administration or in the desire of the Trump administration to become Beijing’s mirror image. What liberal societies have is not better men — it is independent courts, a free press, the rule of law, checks and balances, democratic accountability, competitive elections, powerful private institutions, and vibrant civic life. There have been some men of remarkably low character elected to the American presidency, but the American system has limited the damage they could do.

 

The Russian system does not limit the damage a man such as Putin can do. It amplifies the evil he can do. And that is why, the perfervid hopes of Senator Lindsey Graham and others notwithstanding, simply removing Vladimir Putin from the scene by means of a palace coup would not solve our problem. The Praetorian guard can depose Caligula, but that doesn’t restore the republic — it just gets you Claudius and then Nero. There wasn’t anything especially wrong with the Romans. There wasn’t anything especially wrong with the Germans. There isn’t anything especially wrong with the Russians. The world has a bottomless supply of men such as Putin. Russia is ruled by them because of the character of its political and social systems. Opening a McDonald’s in Pushkin Square wasn’t enough to change all that.

 

Until and unless Russia changes, Putin and men such as Putin will be the kind of rulers Russia has. The rest of the world must plan accordingly.