Obsolete Ideals: The Truth Behind Putin's Eulogy for Western Liberalism

by Nomad

In Conflict with the Majority

Quite a few eyebrows were raised recently when President Vladimir Putin, in an interview with the Financial Times, declared that Western liberalism and its values were "obsolete" and have been rejected by the majority of the people in Western nations.

Much like Trump during his campaign, Putin talked about migrants running amok who are allowed to "kill, plunder and rape with impunity." Every crime, he declared, must have its punishment.
(Unless, of course, you happen to be an oligarch with lots of bigly connections.)

As Putin said in the interview:

"So, the liberal idea has become obsolete. It has come into conflict with the interests of the overwhelming majority of the population."

Even if such a pronouncement comes from the man who single-handedly runs Russia, it is still just one man's opinion. Putin is, after all, not a scholar. He studied Law- not Economics or Political Science- at the Leningrad State University.

Putin was a high-ranking KGB officer who was and is very much a product of the final humiliating decades of the Soviet era. As such, he has shown no great love for liberalism.
After discarding the promise of Russia's 1992 Constitution, Russia under Putin's control has actively supported illiberal movements. Such nationalist-populist movements have been cloned across Europe, in Austria, the Czech Republic, France, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Romania, and the United Kingdom.
So, people who have been following along would just say this is Putin's being Putin.

To Live in the Past is a Comforting Thing

In an op-ed piece for The Moscow Times, Senior fellow at the Hudson Institute, Bruno Maçães took a closer look at to learn what Putin's goal and motivations were for this declaration.

In Maçães' view, Putin was sending a message to his own people. Your hopes for a liberal democracy in Russia are officially dead. You don't want or need it. Don't bother worrying yourself about it, comrade. 

Indeed, according to the writer, Putin has a point when it comes to specific liberal values like feminism or multiculturalism. In public opinion polls, a majority have expressed reservations on such issues. The Russia leader has been quite successful at painting liberal values as something imposed on an unwilling majority.   

Russian intellectuals like to greet their visitors from the West with numerous stories about how it is still possible to speak about everything and joke about everything in Russia, while in Europe or America new cultural taboos have been created. This is true only in a very limited respect, of course, but that is the respect that Putin is interested in and where he hopes to find common cause with intellectual elites.

In Russia, one can hear jokes about sexual minorities or the public disparagement of feminism but it is not so common to hear jokes about Putin or to read journalistic investigations into the connections between the political and the business worlds.

Russia itself, writes Maçães, might be an attractive place if you do not choose to know what's actually going on with your government. If you don't care about injustice or how things can be better, Russia under Putin could be a swell place to hang your hat.
That's true for a lot of pretty backward places, an ideal travel destination for those who have an ax to grind about society today.

[I]f they want to live in the past .. Russia can offer limitless possibilities and adventures in what Putin called traditional values. No feminism, traditional gender roles and old-fashioned toughness and grit.

Between Prohibition and Permission

But what about the rule of law- the only real antidote to the widespread corruption? What about the fundamental right of assembly and the right to protest without threats from the government?

Despite the fact  that Article31 of the Russian Constitution should protect this right, legislations rubber-stamped by Putin's ruling party have it rendered null and void. With the adoption of seemingly harmless amendments to the law on public rallies, the government has put the power to say "да " or "нет" to any proposed rally. 

As one source notes, the Soviet saying that “everything is prohibited unless it is expressly permitted” certainly applies to Putin's Russia today.

Having said that, lately, the right to protest against the government- the crown jewel of any liberal democracy- has been repeatedly put to the test.

In March, protesters took to the street to call out plans to tighten state control over the Internet.
Similar protests took place in 2018 over about proposed changes to Russian pension funding. Police reportedly detain over 800 people and authorities declared most of the rallies illegal.
Despite the countrywide demonstrations,  on September 26, the pension bill passed and was signed into law by Putin a month later.
In both cases, the protests did not result in changes to policy or legislation. However, Putin's approval ratings subsequently fell to its lowest level in 13 years, according to a Russian state pollster.

Nevertheless, such illegal protests are rare and occur only when the government steps on the toes of the majority.  

The European Court of Human Rights (ECHR) paints a depressing picture of significant violations of basic rights by the Russian authorities. When it comes to the number of cases of human rights violations dealt with by the ECHR, Russia is at the top of the league.

Picking and Choosing Liberal Values

That's not to say Russians particularly like to be repressed by their government. There's plenty of gray areas.  Particular liberal values might attract some, such as "the values of a free press and the separation between politics and business, the value of the individual against the machinery of the state and a career open to talents."

Citizens from most liberal democracies would agree with those values. So, where's the problem?

By identifying liberalism with feminism and gay and transsexual politics, Putin is effectively telling Russians: this is what liberalism has become, do you still want it?

But then, that's always been a complaint of the Western style liberalism. When strictly applied, the rule of law guarantees the rights of all people, even the rights of people the majority of citizens might detest or consider "unworthy" to be considered equal by law. 

This rejection of the majority having the final say-so has been around for centuries and accepted as part of the liberal doctrine. 

Even a person roundly disliked by liberals, Ayn Rand, said:

Individual rights are not subject to a public vote; a majority has no right to vote away the rights of a minority; the political function of rights is precisely to protect minorities from oppression by majorities (and the smallest minority on earth is the individual). 

A Predicament for Putin

However, there's another good reason for Putin to herald the supposed end of liberalism. It is a distraction from Russia's current predicament. 

After holding near absolute power since 2000, Putin has been unable to modernize the Russian economy as long promised. Growth still fluctuates according to changes in oil prices. Putin might have had absolute power for nearly two decades and yet, this complex problem is, for all intents and purposes, unsolvable.

This addiction to oil as a commodity has scuttled any plan to modernize Russia’s economy. Attempts to transform the economy are resisted by home-grown bureaucracies under the control of oligarchs who are the prime beneficiaries. Whether you want to call it a stalemate or a standoff, the end result is pretty much the same. 

In turn, military adventurism in Syria and the Crimea has led to economic sanctions that have further dragged the economy down. This is, says Maçães, a predicament for Putin from which there no viable way out of.

In the face of failure, Putin's solution is to change the debate.

Putin has therefore placed all his hopes in a European change of heart. If the conservatives and reactionaries gaining ground in Europe would become the dominant force there, Russia and the European Union could join hands, without the need for any contrition in Moscow.

Thus, every step Europe, America and the rest of the world takes toward nationalist populism is one step closer to what Russia has become under Putin. 

The expectation would be 1989 in reverse, with Europe- not Russia- undergoing a traumatic conversion. 

It is not difficult to see how the prospect would please someone- like Putin- who has never really accepted the collapse of the Soviet Union. 

For a person who thinks the 1992 Constitution was a major wrong turn for his nation, seeing Europe bereft of its long-held love of liberal thought would be a dream come true. A Europe without its liberalism, says the writer, would be "a moment of salvation, rescuing it from both isolation and economic assimilation by China."

That is a bold but far-fetched idea. This chasm cannot be so easily bridged.

European nations embraced liberalism in full measure in the aftermath of World War II having barely survived its unquestioned adoption of nationalist populism. Europe knows only too well what kind of atrocities can happen when the majority is allowed to dismiss the humanity of a minority.

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