Vladimir Putin’s Land of Make Believe

“Idiots of the West! Rally to me!”

This is the TL;DR of Vladimir Putin’s big decree this week. Formally titled, “On the provision of humanitarian support to persons sharing traditional Russian spiritual and moral values,” Putin proclaimed that he would be streamlining the paperwork and requirements for refugees. You don’t need to know Russian history or the Russian language—all you gotta do is write a letter explaining how you wanna move to Russia to own the libs. Or I should say, own the neo-libs.  

But that’s the gist. Write a letter explaining how you’re fleeing the “destructive neoliberal ideological attitudes” of the West and Russia will be a “safe haven” for you in a country where “traditional values reign supreme.”  

You know that feeling when you have more stuff than one piece of luggage can handle and you convince yourself that if you just pack things differently—shoes like this, jackets like that, the head of Alfredo Garcia, just so—it will all fit, like one of those woodblock puzzles? That’s how I feel about this newsletter, which is why I’ve spent the last hour moving paragraphs and sections around as if the word count will get shorter if I just rearrange things. 

Rather than continue to break the fourth wall, let me forgo the satisfaction of seamless narrative flow and just get this point out there. Lots of the people who like and admire Russia and Vladimir Putin very much believe that immigration—particularly migrants who claim refugee status—are destroying our country. Never mind that the refugees coming here are often Christians from places where traditional values are stronger and more widely held than in the United States. Putin fans think America should turn them all away. Whatever you think of that position on the merits, it’s remarkable that many who subscribe to it are celebrating Putin’s new policy as a game changer or some kind of brilliant ploy. Just for defecations and guffaws, let’s imagine the United States adopted a policy like Putin’s. Would they support it? 

While you’re noodling that, let’s get back to Putin’s attempt to supplant the old claim of Russia being a “workers’ paradise” with the claim that it’s now a Trad Shangri-La. As you might expect, this announcement went out across the globe. It was like a frequency that most just heard and dismissed like an annoying TV jingle or neighborhood leaf blower. But for some, it was like an activation signal. They weren’t sleeper agents, aliens, or Treadstone operatives, but they were—and are—what experts in the field call “idiots.”

But not any or all idiots. Putin isn’t looking for conventional fools who run with scissors or put hardwood floors in their rented apartments. He’s not even looking for people who do not like “wokeness,” “gender ideology,” or “neoliberalism.” Nor is he actually much interested in inviting devotees of traditional values.  

All of that stuff is just the sizzle not the steak. 

Putin’s idiot-bait is really designed to select people who take Vladimir Putin and his propaganda seriously. You know: the folks who think Putin is a man of peace, that his invasion of Ukraine was justified and is going perfectly according to plan, that Russia is the world’s guardian of traditional values. Most important, he wants people so unimaginably stupid (or venal) as to willingly spout this stuff uncritically in Western countries. In fact, I think that’s the real point. I doubt Putin thinks very many people will take him up on his offer. What he wants is people to broadcast the offer in Western democracies as a way to undermine them. If he gets a few dozen or few hundred actual “refugees” from Wokeness, that’s great for him (it will almost surely suck for them). Every family getting off a plane in Moscow provides more content for the propaganda mills in the West.

In short, he wants useful idiots. Like, you know, this guy:

Now, we have a rule around here. Actually, we have a lot of rules. But somewhere after “do not take a bath with a toaster” and “don’t buy bitcoin from a guy in a van” and before “don’t start a conversation with Steve about Spanish wine” is “do not take Alex Jones seriously.” And I’m going to stick to that rule. 

The problem is a lot of, well, idiots, don’t. If you read the replies to his post, you’ll see what I mean. 

Traditional values.

I do think it’s worth discussing the ideas and arguments that Putin and his useful idiots are leveraging for propaganda purposes. 

Now the devil is in the details, and much depends on the eye of the beholder, but as a general statement, I’m a fan of “traditional values.”

But “traditional values” is a funny phrase because it generally refers to second- or third-order values in the moral hierarchy. In other words, what people usually mean by “traditional values” are things like the sanctity of marriage and primacy of family, modesty, hard work, good manners, thrift, sexual restraint, etc. I should note that the louder and more shrill one gets about traditional values, the more likely it is that the speaker—or shouter—means things like rejecting homosexuality or trans ideology and embracing some very politicized version of Christianity, etc. I usually walk away from those conversations. 

My only point is that most of the stuff captured by “traditional values” refers to how to live decently, honorably, and happily. That kind of thing.  It’s important.

You can fall short of adhering to traditional values without being a criminal or, well, evil.

I am open to good faith correction from orthodox adherents of almost any faith or school of moral teaching. But, I’m pretty sure that murder is considered to be at the top of the list of what most people call “bad things.” And Vladimir Putin is a murderer. Nay, he’s a mass murderer. I don’t know whether he’s killed many people with his bare hands, but there’s no honest or serious student of Vladimir Putin who disagrees that he’s ordered the murder of a great number of people, and this doesn’t even count the mass slaughter of Ukrainians, Chechens, Syrians, et al. But that’s relevant too because he’s a warmonger. He’s also a thief, a torturer, philanderer, and a dictator. He’s also, not surprisingly, a very bad Christian, if he is one at all. He’s made the Russian Orthodox Church a party to war and a vassal of the state. He’s also a racist, who values ethnic Russian life over the more disposable ethnicities of his empire. A disproportionate share of the “meat” he’s fed to the grinder in Ukraine is not of pure Russian stock. He prefers to march his duskier subjects to the machine gun nests. 

That’s sort of what I am getting at when I say that traditional values—as important as they are—rank lower than some other values. Now, I understand that there’s a rich theological debate about some of this. I’m not going down that rabbit hole. But I will say that wherever you come out on these questions, odds are very strong that as a matter of law and commonsense, you’re with me that murder, torture, even theft, are usually worse than, say, infidelity, adultery, or some other violation of traditional values. Or at least, you recognize the obvious role of government to police crimes while being a bit more laissez-faire, or at least lenient, about policing sins—never mind bad manners. 

Most people think murderers should go to jail or death row. Few, even among the loudest proponents of “traditional values,” think adulterers or liars should (which would not bode well for Donald Trump). Heck, I think there’s a case for criminal punishments—i.e. fines—for deadbeat dads, but I don’t know anyone who thinks the penalty for abandoning your kids should be the same as for murder.

So even if you idiotically think Putin is sincere in his support of “traditional values,” your moral compass is broken if you let him off the hook for being an evil guy.

Liberalism, again.

This may seem like a bit of a digression, but I’ll try to explain its relevance. Free societies operate more or less on what is frequently called the “harm principle.” You’re free to do pretty much what you want so long as you don’t harm someone else. We can—and do, constantly—debate the edge cases. But pretty much everybody subscribes to this view to one extent or another, at least with regard to their own freedom. Right-wingers occasionally want to curtail the freedom of left-wingers to be offensive, and vice versa—hence the bipartisan asininity of “cancel culture”—but you almost never hear people demand that their speech be censored, their freedom be denied, their lifestyle—traditional or otherwise—be circumscribed. Americans, regardless of ideology, tend to be jealous guardians of their own civil and cultural liberties. 

Liberties, by the way, is just the plural of the word “liberty,” which is another word for “free.” So when I referred earlier to “free societies” I could have used the phrase “liberal societies” without changing any of the meaning. 

I do apologize for writing in a tone that sounds like I should be using simple flashcards and hand puppets, or explaining to Billy Ray Valentine that you can find bacon in a “bacon, lettuce, and tomato sandwich,” but I think it’s necessary because people like to make this stuff more complicated than it needs to be. 

Which brings me to the term “neoliberal,” which is a word people use to make liberalism—not progressivism, but free society equals liberal society liberalism—sound sinister and dangerous. I am aware that most of the people who use “neoliberalism” have a specific economic definition in mind. Suffice it to say that when you hear someone condemning “neoliberal” policies, nine times out of 10 they mean they don’t like capitalism, free trade, or, occasionally, stuff like “meritocracy.” 

But that’s not what Putin means when he declares he’s opening his doors to refugees from “neoliberalism.” He means people fleeing “gender ideology,” or otherwise morally decadent culture. That’s kind of funny, because on the far left the people who whine about “neoliberalism” think it’s a homophobic, Christian thing. It just goes to show you that when people start from the premise that capitalism is bad, they’ll hang everything else they think is bad on it as well.

Still, the more mainstream take on “neoliberalism” from its enemies on the left, and increasingly on the right, is that it is an economic doctrine that fosters inequality and alienation, rewarding the haves over the have-nots. 

Well, if your problem is with that stuff, Russia is one of the last places in the world you should want to live. Relative to the size of its economy, Russia has more billionaires than any other country. Of course America has a lot more billionaires (in 2023 we had 735 while Russia had 105), but the amount of national wealth owned by billionaires in Russia was greater. And while some studies claim that America has more economic inequality than Russia, this obscures the more practical point: Poor Americans are a lot richer than poor Russians. Household annual income in Russia is just shy of $8,000. Median household income in Mississippi, America’s poorest state, is just shy of $45,000.  

Donald Trump is fond of saying America is a “nation in decline.” Indeed, he thinks he coined the term and everyone who says it is copying him. For what it’s worth, people have, usually wrongly, been describing America as a nation in decline since the Adams administration. Regardless, the tangible arguments that America is in decline often rest on things like “deaths of despair.” This is often linked to more atmospheric cultural and economic nostrums. Whatever you make of those arguments, it’s at least worth noting that Russia’s suicide rate is markedly higher than ours (and that’s if you trust that Russia isn’t underreporting). Its rate of deaths from alcohol is nearly 300 percent higher than ours. 

Oh and by the way, Russia is shrinking. Supposedly family-friendly Russia’s birth rate is lower than ours. And ethnic Russians are bringing the fertility rate down, which is one reason Putin is feeding as many Muslim and non-Russian soldiers into the war machine. Russia is also shrinking because many of the most talented Russians are fleeing the country in droves. It’s almost as if the advantages of rhetorical support of anti-wokeness and traditional values doesn’t outweigh the hardships of a corrupt regime, tyranny, and a barbaric and unjust war. 

We hear a lot about America’s corrupt elites. Not all of those arguments are without merit. But our corruption is more metaphorical. It’s measured in our failure to live up to our ideals and liberal principles. Russia’s corruption is endemic because the regime is literally based on conventional corruption. You don’t become a billionaire in Russia by being the better businessman, you become a billionaire by being an adept supplicant of Vladimir Putin who, by the way, some have said may be the world’s richest man. That’s impressive for a lifetime public servant.  

And say what you will about Hunter Biden, but he’s being prosecuted for at least some of his crimes. But in Russia, the rule of law isn’t a thing. Here’s how one expert in 2005 described how judges reach their verdicts: 

Judicial decisions are typically made according to one of three formulas: the judge makes a decision based on the merits of the case, but then seeks bribes to issue the appropriate ruling; the judge seeks bribes from both sides and rules in favor of the highest bidder; or the judge issues a ruling based on the dictates of state officials or organized crime.

Last year, Russian political scientist Dmitry Evstafiev explained on Russian state TV that the West is trying to seduce Russians with promises of Nutella, paved roads, and indoor toilets, “a toilet bowl for every region!” No one on the show burst into laughter because in Russia this seems plausible. You know why? Well, for starters, because Russia is a backward country where the elites traffic in deranged paranoia and insecurity. But, more tangibly, because more than 1 in 5 Russian households do not have indoor plumbing. America has roughly 131.5 million households, and I found a report that almost 500,000 households lack indoor plumbing. That’s bad. But that works out to something like one out of 263 households with no indoor plumbing. So if you think being able to crap in your own home (in a functioning toilet) is desirable—and I certainly do—Russia is not the place I’d want to flee to.

Man does not live by indoor toilets alone.

Now, I suspect that a large share of those Americans without indoor plumbing are immigrants. They’re living in substandard places because that’s all they can afford and because, at least some of them, are not here legally and have little recourse to complain about their conditions. Poor immigrants have always flocked to urban tenements, historically the first rung in the ladder out of poverty. That’s a real public policy problem and always has been. But one of the reasons we’ve always had such problems is that millions upon millions of people desperately want to live in America. I’m the first to admit we can’t take them all, or even a large fraction of them. 

But why do they want to come to America? Well, to put it bluntly, for the neoliberalism. I doubt many would put it that way. But they certainly want to live in a country where if you work hard, you can get ahead. Where you can get a fair shake in a court. Where you can reap the rewards that come with living in accordance with traditional values. Sure, many just want to live in a rich country. But you know what makes America rich? The frick’n liberalism, whether you call it neoliberalism, paleoliberalism, or just plain capitalism. 

As I wrote in Suicide of the West, the biggest problem with so-called neoliberalism is that it makes us so rich that some people take prosperity for granted. Some become untethered from traditional values that make liberal democratic capitalism work. They latch onto false faiths that they believe will fill the holes in their souls, and these false faiths blame “the system” for their adherents’ own failings. Since the French Revolution, radicals and revolutionaries have been drawn from the ranks not of the poor but of the arrivistes, the prosperous, ambitious, overeducated, and bitter zealots who think they have a better way than the one offered by a system that doesn’t confer on them the status they think they deserve. Such people were Lenin’s “useful idiots” (though there’s little evidence he actually used that precise phrase). 

Some of the people celebrating Putin’s bold overture are, similarly, his useful idiots. But others are more morally and intellectually perverted. They have no desire to move to Russia. They simply want to monetize or politically exploit the idiocy of people who don’t know better by making the twisted and rotted timber of Russia into a yardstick to judge America by. Say what you will about the old left that constantly bleated about how much better Scandinavian countries are than America—at least those countries were pretty nice places to live, thanks in part to their neoliberalism. But Russia as it exists today is in every meaningful sense a craptacular country. Spare me the “but what about Russian literature!?” retorts. Russian literature is great because it turns out that oppression, misery, and brutal weather are great muses for dour prose. 

If you envy real, existing Putinism, you envy corruption, authoritarianism, fanatical militarism, and pristine anti-Americanism. If you apologize for it, you are confessing either your ignorance or your villainy. I’m not an “America: Love it or leave it” guy. But by all means if you love Russia as it is, vote with your feet and go there. You won’t be missed.