Nina L. Khrushcheva
Nina L. Khrushcheva, the author of Imagining Nabokov: Russia Between Art and Politics and The Lost Khrushchev: A Journey into the Gulag of the Russian Mind,
is Professor of International Affairs and Associate Dean for Academic
Affairs at The New School and a senior fellow at the World Policy
Institu… read more
VIENNA
– What unites “America first” President Donald Trump, Poland’s
political puppet master Jarosław Kaczyński, and Russian President
Vladimir Putin? Trump and Kaczyński, chest-thumping nationalists, should
revile Russia’s revanchist leader for his expansionist policies in
ex-Soviet countries like Georgia and Ukraine. Yet Trump warmly praises
Putin, while Kaczyński increasingly emulates his autocratic methods. And
all three seem predisposed not only to believe in outlandish
conspiracies, but also to use those beliefs to shape policy and
manipulate the public.
Putin
sees clandestine plots to undermine Russian greatness everywhere,
mostly initiated by the Western spymasters, the United States and the
United Kingdom. The theories to which he subscribes often have no basis
in reality, but one can at least understand why he might believe them:
for a former KGB agent, himself a spymaster, a heightened degree of
suspicion that things may not be as they appear is not exactly shocking.
Trump’s
susceptibility to – even enthusiasm for – radical conspiracy theories
is less easy to explain. Trump is far from a master of intrigue, unless
the cutthroat world of New York real estate is even more Mafia-ridden
than outsiders imagine.
It seems clear that Trump’s chief strategist, Stephen Bannon, a life-long anti-liberal fabulist, reinforces his boss’s lumpen worldview. But not even Bannon’s influence can explain Trump’s feverish tweets, sent early last Saturday morning, accusing former US president Barack Obama of having Trump Tower’s “wires tapped” before the election.
Lacking
any evidence for his allegation, Trump has called for an investigation,
much like he demanded an investigation into widespread voter fraud (in
favor of his opponent, Hillary Clinton) that never actually took place.
So bizarre and implausible was this latest rant – extreme even for a
cable news-addled, Twitter-addicted president – that one can only wonder
(as many are) whether Trump is experiencing some sort of psychological
disturbance.
Kaczyński has his own paranoid theories.
He believes that European Council President Donald Tusk, a former
Polish prime minister, conspired with Putin to assassinate his twin
brother, then-Polish President Lech Kaczyński. The plane crash near
Smolensk in 2010 that claimed the lives of 92 Polish dignitaries,
including Lech Kaczyński, has been thoroughly investigated – and none of
the evidence supports Kaczyński’s claims. And yet, on the basis of his
morbid delusions, Kaczyński engaged in a stealth plot in Brussels to
have Tusk replaced.
What
the late historian Richard Hofstadter called the “paranoid style” has
reached the commanding heights of political power in the US and Poland.
The question is how these two democracies fell under the spell of
leaders more reminiscent of Putin than of conventional Western leaders.
Ordinary political analysis – and even psychology – may be incapable of
providing an answer.
The
novelist Joan Didion may come closest to charting a path through the
politics of Trump and Kaczyński. In her essay “Notes Toward a
Dreampolitik,” Didion describes people who move about the world “forever
felling trees in some interior wilderness.” They are “secret
frontiersmen who walk around right in the ganglia of the fantastic
electronic pulsing” that characterizes modern life, and they “continue
to receive information only through the most tenuous chains of rumor,
hearsay, haphazard trickledown.” They are “nominally literate,” yet
“they participate in the national anxieties only through a glass
darkly.”
It
is scary enough that the US president refuses most of his daily
briefings from the professionals at the State Department and in the
military and intelligence services. The fact that he relies instead on Fox News,
racist alt-right blogs, and the unhinged enragés of talk radio is
truly, even existentially, terrifying. The leader of the free world has
made his home on the manic fringes of US political discourse.
Under
Kaczyński, Poland seems to be stuck in a similar Internet and
talk-radio sinkhole. Indeed, a Roman Catholic Church radio station,
Radio Maria, is among the most notorious of the “secret frontiersmen.”
But, as Putin’s leadership has demonstrated, the paranoid style is not just some personal weakness. In his book Voodoo Histories: The Role of the Conspiracy Theory in Shaping Modern History, the
British journalist David Aaronovitch has described this political
paranoia as a kind of voodoo of our social media age. The choice of
words is telling. As the Voodoo doctor François “Papa Doc” Duvalier
showed during his nearly 15-year dictatorship in Haiti, where no basis
for political legitimacy exists, the ruler’s paranoia must be
relentless.
Papa
Doc turned fear into the blackest form of political magic. Anyone in
Haiti who questioned his rule could expect to be dispatched – often in a
public and theatrically violent manner – by Papa Doc’s dreaded Tonton Macoute. Foreign critics had their reputations trashed. Graham Greene, who witheringly dissected Papa Doc’s rule in his novel The Comedians, was called a Benzedrine addict – and worse – by the regime’s propagandists. Putin is no stranger to such tactics.
And
now the West is experiencing something similar. US President George
H.W. Bush once famously warned against “voodoo economics.” Today, we
face a form of voodoo politics: rule based on “alternative facts” and
unfounded and untestable theories that cast their own kind of spell on
citizens struggling to comprehend a globalized world and economy from
which they feel alienated.
Trump,
Kaczyński, and Putin embrace this approach because it works. Regardless
of whether, and to what extent, they believe their own claims, they can
be confident that for many of their supporters, the magic will never
wear off, no matter how badly they fail or how baldly they lie.
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