The bromance between Russian leader Vladimir Putin and Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump has been discussed in the US media all year. Putin praised Trump early in his election campaign, and Trump has been returning the compliment ever since.
The connection between those two was described by The New Yorker editor David Remnick as a “humid political embrace”. Remnick says it is a matter of kindred temperament and in fact the two men, despite their vastly dissimilar background, reveal remarkable similarities in attitudes, interests and styles. Writing in the New York Review of Books Timothy Snyder stated that “Putin is the real-world version of the person Trump pretends to be on television.”
Neither Putin nor Trump is, to borrow a word used by Trump in the last debate, a good hombre. But for either of them to become a global villain required blind adoration by their followers. Putin’s popularity among large swathes of Russian society is genuine. He has seduced even elderly and fairly respectable cultural figures who are putting their reputation and legacy on the line to express their respect for the national leader.
Trump is a relatively new love object for his followers: none was aware of him until he raised the issue of Barack Obama’s birth certificate in 2011, and most current acolytes saw the light only after his speech about Mexican rapists, which inaugurated his presidential bid. Yet, support for Trump promptly became a cult reminiscent of the love for some strongman in a Third World country. His rightwing supporters have borrowed some tactics from radical terrorist movements such as al Qaeda and ISIS: their attacks on Trump critics are for now mostly restricted to social media, but the hatred they breathe is no less passionate than that of religious fanatics.
Some Hillary Clinton supporters now fear the “enthusiasm gap”, meaning that Trump voters are more eager to get out and vote for their man than the Democrats are for their woman.
At first glance it may seem strange that the United State and Russia both went for two-bit dictators and elevated them to the status of national saviors. In reality, there has been a long-standing link between the two superpowers.
The pivot on which J.K. Rowling’s magical saga about Harry Potter turns is a supernatural bond between good and evil, between Harry and Voldemort, created when the Dark Lord tried to kill the boy. The United States and the Soviet Union were similarly locked in mortal combat during the Cold War, in which one foe was defeated but not destroyed – just like Voldemort who both died and didn’t when the curse he had meant for Harry rebounded upon himself.
Without debating which side was good, the point I’m making is that the two nations became a mirror image of each other – the US and the SU – and in some strange way forever linked.
Until recently, he symbol of their symbiosis was Afghanistan, a country known as “the graveyard of empires.” But now, with the emergence of two leader cults, we can analyze the similarities more closely.
Russia is a country with a chip on its shoulder. It felt humiliated after its defeat in the Cold War and relegated to international backwaters. It now dreams of a revanche over the United States.
The situation in the United States is trickier. It is still the richest country in the world and, by some measures, it is more powerful than ever. But its wealth is distributed extremely unevenly, being almost as catastrophically skewed as it is in Russia. There is a nation within a nation – the white lower middle class without a college degree or with a narrowly focused professional education – that has become, to use Hillary Clinton’s word, a lumpenized social stratum of “deplorables.”
Both Russians and this part of the United States have an exaggerated sense of self-worth, inculcated in them by their respective countries’ propaganda machines, as well as a strong sense of entitlement. Russians aspire to rule and lead other nations while white Americans believe in their exclusivity, which entitles them to govern their own country and enjoy middle-class living standards while performing low-skilled work.
Russians therefore want their national greatness back while Americans want to take back their own country which they see dominated by nonwhites, feminists, immigrants, gays and eggheads.
As is often the case with right-wing radical movements, both groups are rebelling against the complexity of the modern world and developments in science and technology that left them confused and irrelevant – an underemployed and pauperized underclass on the sidelines of the global economy, venting their impotent rage on the political arena.
This is why Putin’s Russia has been gripped by Eastern Orthodox Christianity of the extreme obscurantist kind. America is also enjoying a revival of religious fundamentalism as well as a revolt against modern science – if not yet technology – expressed in he dogged denial of global warming in the face of incontrovertible facts.
This new social strata of deplorables arising in the two superpowers yearn for the putative simplicity of yesteryear and demands simple solutions: just bring the world back to the way it used to be – rebuild the Soviet Union and reconstitute the Gosplan state planning agency, or get rid of immigrants and curb international trade – and everything will fall into place.
Simple solutions go hand-in-hand with a strong leader – someone who can disregard laws and due process and cut through all the crap. Putin constantly gets requests from citizens to see to minor tasks such as fill potholes on their street, while Trump, pounding himself on the chest, declares that he alone can fix everything that is wrong with the United States.
Naturally it’s nonsense. Simple solutions don’t work and Putin in particular is finding that they can’t be implemented. His revival of the Soviet Union has stumbled even in the heavily pro-Russian eastern Ukraine.
More to the point, the leaders the new class of deplorables has chosen to bestow their love on are not only professional swindlers, but they mostly come from the very same ruling elites that have been thriving at their expense. Putin is a billionaire many times over and has created a kleptocracy at all levels of Russian society. His power base consists of government officials who pilfer billions, sending their wealth as well as their family members to the West. They have absolutely no interest in rebuilding the Soviet Union – and certainly not in bringing back communism.
Trump is a billionaire and a narcissist whose sole interest has always been his personal enrichment and self-promotion. His various transgressions, self-indulgence and excesses are extensively documented. But the deplorables wouldn’t have acted in character if they hadn’t fallen for populist demagoguery.
Just like the Age of Dictators in the 1930s, the phenomenon of the Age of Deplorables is not limited to the two superpowers. We see a populist member of the ruling class being supported by a majority of over 90 percent in the Philippines. In Hungary, its own mini-version of Russia’s right-wing kleptocracy, is being constructed by Viktor Orban under similarly populist and nationalist banners. Brexit, voted in by deplorables in the U.K., is being implemented by Tory mandarins.
The fact that the deplorables are being yet again swindled by their beloved leaders is the good news. The bad news is that the Age of Deplorables and their backlash against modernity has just begun.
