In reply to my recent post on the shortcomings of Vladimir Putin's repressive regime in Russia, one commenter suggests that the Russian people are "getting precisely the kind of government they deserve." This is a very common point of view: that people who live under repressive or corrupt governments are in some sense responsible for their own fate. After all, why don't they act to improve the regime or replace it with a different one? My purpose in this post is not to attack an individual commenter, but to point out some major flaws in the widespread view underlying the saying that "people get the government they deserve." The problem is not just that the saying oversimplifies; all sayings do that. The problem is that it is fundamentally misleading. This is one case where liberal strictures against "blaming the victim" should be taken to heart.
I. The Impact of Repression.
If it has a relatively loyal army and secret police, a highly repressive government can survive for decades even if the vast majority of its subjects disapprove of it. Indeed, as economist Timur Kuran explains in an excellent book, such governments can often prevent both their people and outside observers from even realizing the full extent of the regime's unpopularity. Repression can make it dangerous for ordinary people to express their antigovernment views, much less act on them. As Kuran shows, such dynamics enabled communist governments in Russia and elsewhere to persist for many years despite widespread popular distaste for them. Only the regime's own efforts at partial liberalization finally gave the people an opportunity to overthrow it. Some communist regimes, such as Cuba and North Korea, persist to this day because their leaders wisely (from their point of view) chose not to imitate Glasnost and Perestroika.
To be sure, even a totalitarian state would fall apart if all or most of the population ceased to cooperate with it simultaneously. However, organizing such concerted resistance is a classic collective action problem, in which each individual has strong and understandable incentives to free ride on the efforts of others. Not to mention the fact that efforts to organize against the govenrment are likely to be ruthlessly suppressed and punished by the authorities. In light of these facts, I think it is wrong to assume that people living under a repressive regime necessarily approve of its policies. It is even more wrong to blame them for their supposed cowardice in failing to engage in active resistance. Given the dire risks to dissidents and their families, it is understandable if many are unwilling to take them. How many of us would be so brave if we were in their place?
II. Bad Government and Cultural Values.
Perhaps, however, the saying that "people get the government they deserve" is true in the weaker sense that corrupt or repressive regimes in some sense reflect the cultural values of the societies they rule over. Even if the people disapprove of the regime, their culture may be responsible for keeping it in place.
There is, of course, some truth to this, but far less than is often believed. Often, institutions matter far more than cultural values in causing repression and corruption. East and West Germany had similar cultures, and the same is true of North and South Korea. It was political institutions, not cultural values, that turned two of these countries into oppressive nightmares, and the two others into relatively successful democracies. Similarly, the large number of Russian immigrants living in the West or in Israel do not engage in nearly as much crime and corruption as Russians living in Russia, and are much more willing to criticize their government. Again, the difference is caused more by institutions than by cultural values. On average, Russians living in the West are not significantly better people than Russians living in Russia and do not have fundamentally different values. Rather, they face a different structure of incentives created by differing political institutions.
To some extent, of course, repressive societies often do have differing cultural values from freer ones. Yet these differences may be as much the result of repression as the cause of it. Living in an oppressive society reduces trust, "normalizes" corruption, and habituates people to government domination of the economy and civil society. In addition, repressive regimes often engage in extensive indoctrination of their subjects, while suppressing opposing points of view. Even in a society like East Germany, which existed in close proximity to to a freer society with a similar ethnic background, indoctrination had a major impact. People may not buy the government line all the way, but it is hard to avoid being influenced by it when it is constantly drummed into you and is the only viewpoint that can be publicly expressed. If all of this tends to warp cultural values over time, that is not surprising and is not primarily the fault of the people themselves.
Cultural values do have at least some impact. But it is easy to overstate their effects, while downplaying the ways in which political institutions often matter much more and indeed alter the culture itself.
Finally, I do acknowledge that the saying that "people get the government they deserve" has somewhat greater validity in democracies than in authoritarian states. Even here, however, it misleads at least as much as it enlightens. If time permits, I will take up the case of democracy in a follow-up post.
UPDATE: Various commenters note that Putin came to power in a (relatively) free election and is popular with the majority of Russians. Both points are true, and they do make Putin different from, say, Lenin, who took power despite the opposition of the vast majority of the Russian population. But neither point necessarily undermines my broader argument. After seizing power, Putin soon began to repress political opponents and shut down opposition media, making it very difficult for effective opposition to his policies to arise in the future. Moreover, the authoritarian and nationalistic political instincts that led many Russians to support Putin's initial ascension to power were conditioned by decades of Soviet indoctrination, and before that by the repressive policies of the czars. The Russian "values" that help maintain support for Putin are as much the product of repression as they are its cause.
UPDATE #2: Other commenters note that my comparison between Russian immigrants abroad and Russians in Russia is flawed because the former are in part self-selected for their distaste for Russian authoritarianism and totalitarianism. This is true, and I decided not to consider this issue in the original post only because of space constraints (in retrospect, a mistake). I don't think it completely invalidates the comparison, however. While it is fair to say that many Russian emigrants are indeed more liberal than those who remained at home, there are some groups of emigrants who can't be characterized that way. The many nobles and right-wing nationalists who fled to the West after the Bolshevik Revolution (along with many liberals and socialists) certainly did not lack for authoritarian instincts. Yet they and their descendants have behaved far differently in the West than they did in Russia. The political institutions of the West had a far bigger impact on their behavior than the dysfunctional cultural values that they brought with them.
Related Posts (on one page):
- Why People Get Much Worse Government than they Deserve:
- Gary Kasparov on Putin's Russia and the Godfather:
You mistakenly assume that they in fact did go along with Lenin in 1917. To the contrary, Lenin and the Bolshevik Party decisively LOST the only free election held at that time (the November 1917 election for the Constituent Assembly that was supposed to write Russia's new constitution. in which 76% of the vote went to other parties). The Bolsheviks closed down the CA by force - the same way that they seized power and eventually retained it after a bloody civil war.
Even the 24% of the vote that the Bolsheviks did get in the CA election overstates their true level of support because they ran on a deliberately deceitful platform that was very different from their true intent. For example, they announced that they were in favor of transferring landlord-owned property to peasants as private plots (hugely popular among the peasant class), whereas in reality they intended to use the land to create collective farms in which peasants would be reduced to virtual serfdom (as in fact occurred after the Communists won the Civil War).
Otherwise, I think it's instructive to remember some other sayings (or in this case, mottoes) that have come down to us, such as Ense petit placidam sub libertate quietem, or Audemus jura nostra defendere, or Regnat populus, or State Sovereignty, National Union, or, my personal favorite for its vernacular concision, Live Free or Die. One might think these (and others) to be quaint, corny reminders of Yankee Doodle Dandy and all that, but such sayings matter; they recall to us--or at least, should--why we're different; they ground us in the historical reality of our common public life and the virtues required to maintain it. Perhaps such sayings exist in Russia; perhaps every oblast has one, though I somehow doubt the words mean anything more than something vague and aspirational.
I do not dispute that people--and peoples--are often conditioned by factors outside of their direct control. This seems sufficiently plausible without going into a longwinded illustration of the facts. Perhaps Russia's political and cultural dysfunction is an accident of geography? Of Mongol swarms and Islamic hordes? Of a long, cold border and never knowing quite what disaster awaits over its horizon?
Who's to say? But it's not as if the English-speaking peoples began their collective histories with a full slate of constitutional rights and a developed sense of public virtue with which to defend said rights.
There is a cast of mind, a temperament, a willingness to evolve and take charge of and responsibility for one's affairs that Russians sorely lack. And this, a century after transatlantic cables and telegraphs, centuries after the printing press, is no one's fault but their own.
Putin, so far as I can tell, has no such cachet. I don't know of anyone, Russian or otherwise, who imputes either wisdom or virtue to anyone connected with the Putin regime.
Americans loved Washington for his strength, modesty, and wisdom, but I can't think of another American politician similarly adulated during his lifetime.
And isn't Stalin growing in popularity in Russia?
So, to that limited extent, I can see The Divagator's point. We are fortunate to have inherited a system that we (justly) regard as far more important than any individual; Russians have not been so lucky.
And it's not just Russians, but Slavs in general: Estonians, Letts, Latvians -- and even Georgians -- seem to be adjusting to the post-Communist world rather better than Russians. Cf. Ukrainians, Serbs, Croats, Slovaks, etc. Counterexamples may be Bulgarians, Poles, and Czechs. Of course, Central Asia's a basket case, but that has more to do with the Islam/Christian &post-Christian axis than the Slav/non-Slav axis.
Best regards!
Perhaps so, though the peasants often revolted when they got the chance. But belief in a good Czar surely had a great deal to do with centuries of indoctrination by the czar's agents, combined with suppression of anti-czarist views.
As I noted in the post, my purpose was not so much to criticize one comment, as to expose the weaknesses of the broader viewpoint underlying the saying used in the comment. That saying is not just oversimplified, but deeply misleading. Causally, it misconstrues the true dynamics of repressive societies. Morally, it comes close to blaming the victims of tyranny for their own oppression.
No, Kuran goes well beyond Milosz. If you're interested in these issues, you should definitely read his book.
Not a one of the people whom you name are Slavs (except the Russians). By language at least the Letts and Lithuanians are Balts, the Estonians are Uralic (closely akin to the Finns who do not seem to have a penchant for dictators) and the Georgians are Kartvelians, a very small Caucasus ethno-linguistic group consisting mostly of them. Meanwhile you also left out the Poles and Czechs, be who are Slavs, but who have no affinity for tyrants. And what about the Ukrainians who recently resisted an attempt by a would-be strongman to steal an election?
Our country is full of slouches, but in a democracy they deserve representation. That's how we get leaders like Bush. We get the government our ever-increasing ignorance deserves. That's why my money is on Clinton.
And I did mention the Poles and Czechs -- I did not, however, mention that they are Catholic rather than Orthodox in their religious background. I wonder if this makes a difference? But see Michael Novak's _Spirit of Democratic Capitalism_ on the effects of Iberian (SE Europe, not the Caucasus) Catholic culture on Latin America.
Does the Othodox temperament lend itself more easily to 'rendering unto Caesar'? But the Georgians are Orthodox ... albeit with an intense desire not to be like their fellow Orthodox Christian to the north.
I wish the Ukrainians -- in fact, all these various peoples -- well, but the jury's still out on the Orange Revolution.
I think that people tend to say things like "they get what they deserved" because they have a very weak understanding of history and cross-generational change. It's easy to blame Russians living in 2007 for the poorly-informed choices made (out of a very limited assortment of options) by their ancestors and predecessors in 1866, or 1917, or whatever. It's easy to forget how the number of major decision-makers numbered in the hundreds at the best of times, how hard a dedicated band of fanatics worked to convince the general population to go along (and often relied on confusion, starvation, and vanilla terror to get it done,) and how many years of civil war overtook the country in the wake of these reforms. It's easy to say "Russia" and conflate people living in Moscow with people living in St. Petersburg with people who'd actually been in exile for five, ten, or twenty years and were largely trained by German and French revolutionaries. It's easy to put modern Russian Army veterans in the exact same mental category as 19th-century serfs. It's also easy to pretend we all live in Story Book Land, where all times are one and every person who ever lived ought to be a fully modernized post-feminist champion of liberty, regardless of their circumstances (which included things like three-year famines and whole years without summers and invasions by massive armies and the rest of it.) It's also easy to sit in a country full of the descendants of people who voluntarily crossed an ocean to get there, and pass judgment on the folks they left behind back home.
These kinds of systems (tyrannical, democratic, whatever) don't just appear overnight, and they're not typically generated by committee. It's a risky business, meant to replace something else, which seemed pretty bad at the time. America, the UK, and most of the former British colonies have had a run of great luck in terms of things like leadership, the timing of storms, and geography -- Russia, not so much. And it was a matter of luck that the Protectorate died when and how it did, that the original American Revolution succeeded, that the American Civil War went the way it did, that Elizabeth I and James I kept things together (for the most part) long enough that hardly anyone knew what a real war was by the 1630s, that England had close neighbors who thought it was a great idea to clothe, house and feed alternate candidates for the British crown (dozens of times!,) that random selfish British nobles chose to get concessions from their King in a written "look, the King is subjected to laws too" kind of way...
Saying it's "their fault" also means it's not up to anyone else to try and intervene. Fifty years ago we as a people generally thought it wasn't the fault of oppressed peoples that they had the governments they had, and were busily trying to figure out ways of convincing those people that it's worth resisting and we'd support them if they fought back. But seventy years ago we really hoped imperialists would keep things contained and manage their wars cleanly so we could stay at home. And, well, our actual track record on supporting internal uprisings has been somewhat spotty, thanks in part to the fact that this stuff is hellishly complicated.
What do you offer in support of that assertion? Or what it be more correct to say that you allow the possibility of "some impact" rather than that you assert it?
I don't think you really disposed of "culture" as having very great impact with West Germany vs East Germany, North Korea vs South Korea, or ex-pat Russians vs those still in Russia.
The military background of the German and Korean divides, with the influence of others on the outcomes and support for the regimes in each, was so great that I don't see how anyone could infer much about the role of "culture" in them. One can let it go at "some impact" without fear of contradiction, but what exactly is to be understood by "some impact" without much more development?
As for ex-pat Russians vs those still in Russia, I don't see that as much of an "experiment of nature" on which to base inferences about how "culture" does or does not influence or determine the sorts of governments that they live under. Did a representative population of Russians land on some uninhabited island and form a government, so we might see whether it resembled the one they left behind, and thus perhaps the role of "culture"? As for decreased and corruption among Russians living outside Russia, if that is true, you say "the difference is caused more by institutions than by cultural values." That strikes me more as assertion than proof. It seems to me that when one ex-patriates themselves for whatever reasons and lives as a minority among those not of the same "culture," so again not very telling, if at all meaningful, as far as the putative relationship between "culture" and the form of government. (Russian Jews in Israel are something of a special case for purposes of this discussion, just as they were a special case back in Russia.)
Speaking of extensive indocrination by repressive regimes, you say, "(i)f...this tends to warp cultural values over time, that is not surprising and is not primarily the fault of the people themselves." So that would be your explanation of "residual" values and attitudes among East Germans after re-unification. Again, as with "some impact," I don't necessarily disagree with you about intense indocrination warping cultural values over time, but if you are trying to parse the various determinants of what sort of government different groups wind up with, your examples and analysis of them is problematic. Nothing like a controlled scientific experiment in any of this, with every thing the same between two groups save for the "intervention" are variable of interest.
I am most surprised that in a discussion of how "culture" may influence the government people get, you make no specific mention of religion, especially Islam. Religion is part of "culture" isn't it, potentially a huge part, as it is in most Islamic countries. (Any where it is only incidental?) If I were going to make the case that "culture" can have a great deal more than just "some impact," I would serve up lots of examples from the Islamic world. To ignore those countries with their wide geographic expanse, huge populations, different histories, and ethnic/racial diversity strikes me as the equivalent of overlooking the proverbial elephant in the room, if not a herd of elephants.
If people can get worse than they "deserve," and it would be hard to argue that can't happen, is it impossible for some of them to get better than what they "deserve"? Maybe citizens of the Axis powers, Germans especially, got much better than they deserved when the US and Britain defeated them and occupied their countries. (I would suggest that those living in the West Bank and Gaza got better than they deserved in the years immediately after 1967, but that would too greatly agitated some and take us way OT.)
Unfortunately this fear is well justified by history, as even well-intentioned revolutions have a nasty habit of being hijacked by megalomaniacs and thugs. (See Robespierre and Stalin, for two examples.)
Probably not. And once upon a time people theorized that Catholicism "corrupted" culture, making people inacpable of democracy (Franco's Spain, Salazar's Portugal, Latin America). Also, note that the Greeks are also Orthodox, as are the Bulgarians and Macedonians who are doing OK as far as democracy goes.
I have to agree with Somin's original post. Like many political acts (particularly voting), rebellion in a properly totalitarian state is inexplicable in any rationalist model of human behaviour.
In a related note, I was going to post some quotes from Weber's Wirtschaft und Geselschaft on sources of legitimacy, etc., but I couldn't find an English translation online.
Zimbabwe - that's a country that really is a prime exemplar of H.L. Mencken's definition of democracy:
Zimbabweans chose to end the relatively benign rule of Ian Smith and the white settlers who civilized the place and swapped Smith for a bunch of Marxist inspired kleptocrats. While personal stories of the innocent inspire sympathy, those who voted for Mugabe, and most especially the whites who backed his government, are most assuredly getting precisely what they deserve good and hard.
I suppose as I get older and less idealistic, I think more and more that there really is something to the notion of national characters. Rather like differences between men and women (other than the pure equipment) which it was once fashionable to deny, differences in national characters seem to be fairly enduring. Of course, like differences in men and women, not every member of a national group fully shares the 'national character' - rather like men and women often don't fully embody the attitudes, interests, and abilities usually associated with their physical gender.
That said, the more I see of the world and the more history I read (and I've been a serious student of history for over 40 years and am all-but-dissertation in the Enlightenment), the more convinced I become of Anglo-Saxon-Scots exceptionalism and the uniqueness and workability of the institutions created in the countries primarily inhabited at their crucial states by Anglo-Saxons and Scots.
Other peoples, notably the Greeks and Romans, made great contributions to our ideas of liberty, though those experiments were ultimately unsuccessful - and it's often plausibly argued as a result of a loss of the fundamental virtues of the national characters that built them.
The Poles are a special case worthy of mention - a country in the early modern period of great enlightenment and character - but whose ability to preserve their liberties was fatally weakened by the librium veto - perhaps an example worthy of our consideration of a constitution becoming a suicide pact.
I agree with Ilya's post.
Let me shift the focus slightly and since, as Ilya mentions, repressive regimes are difficult to dislodge, ask the question what culural values need to be present to not get a bad government in the first place? Perhaps in another post, Ilya?
Is this one of the cultural values leading to a government people deserve?
I think so. What to do to initiate cultural change? Education, for sure. But not public education. Why should government-run institutions undermine their own policies? Remains private education, at the dinner table, at the water cooler, through media, blogs.
Cultural change is spontaneous.
They generally do not subscribe to (what I believe is uniquelly Russian) notion that Russia is the Third Rome, and must therefore "follow her own way" (as if it ever did otherwise) making Western values inapplicable. This "Third Rome view" is rather prevalent in Russia, and in part is responsible for the success of authoritarian government. For if the Western values are inapplicable to Russia, and Western values include liberal democracy, then liberal democracy is inapplicable to Russia.
Russians who left, on the other hand, left precisely because they wish to enjoy the very Western values that their former compatriots reject.
An interesting historical question. Related to the equally important question:
But, to return to Ilya's original point: No one with any historical sense would suggest that it is easy to overthrow a repressive regime. However, the historical record indicates that it has been done, in almost all cases by groups who valued liberty above security and were willing to risk everything - including their lives - to maintain or attain liberty. Hence the interesting question, why do some peoples seem to suffer tyrants with relative equanimity and other peoples resist them to death or liberation.
Recall that Franklin, approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the Constitutional Convention had given the United States, said:
How, then, can the Russian electorate be absolved of responsibility for his actions, when they elected him in an actual free election?
An interesting and profound observation. One of the most interesting aspects of Sarte's existentialism, which suggested that each of us was responsible for everything, was that it made the concept of responsibility meaningless by removing the requirement of some more or less immediate agency on the part of the person ostensibly responsible (for acting or failing to act).
Of course, literature, and especially the not so respectable genres of science fiction and pornography, is full of speculation that some people are naturally followers or slaves for whom responsibility for themselves is anathema. Such ideas are typically dismissed as the self-justification by oppressors for their repression of the oppressed, but perhaps there is a kernel (however small) of truth there.
We're in the midst of an administration hell bent on shredding the Constitution and destroying any remaining notions that this is a "free" representative democracy. Of course, those who support this admin. deserve it.
But what about the rest of us, the roughly 75% of the population that know the sky's blue and earth is round? That's a little less clear. Let's not forget the children and unborn who will suffer for decades to come from the irreversible damage. They certaintly don't deserve it, which I guess is why I choose not to procreate.
When comparing us Russian emigrants to those who live there, the author misses an important point: we left because we didn't like it there. We didn't fit in, and we didn't like the Russian way of life as we knew it. We had different values, which is exactly what allows us to achieve success in places like America.
Russians don't get the government they deserve. They do, however, have the government they have chosen (the decision that many westerners refuse to respect or even admit)
Putin's popularity with over 50% of Russians makes it clear that they want a strong, centralized government. Putin's, Western critics, however, refuse to understand, that nobody in Russia is capable of governing it in a different manner - civilized and democratic. People like Kasparov, who make it sound like everything bad in Russia is Putin's fault, are a joke at best, and professional "oppositioners" at worst, who suck on western money by creating an illusion that they can somehow come to power and make Russian democratic.
Just because the South Korea was liberated by the US doesn't mean North Korea can be liberated now by overthrowing the Kim dynasty. Same is true for Russia: if you get rid of Putin, the relationship between the government and the society will be the same. That is, until new generations of Russians with different values and beliefs come to the stage.
It's easy to make fun of people from behind a computer monitor. But that's OK, b/c as we crazy libs like to say, to each his own. I forgive you.
If you wanna pretend that this administration is not a disaster: that it's not trying to concentrate power within one branch of government, that it doesn't attempt to destroy the careers of those who don't tow its line, that its interests are identical to those of the common citizen, that the country's not bankrupt, etc. etc. go right ahead. Reasonable people can assess who is more correct. And when people like Bruce Fein go around the country saying that this president must be impeached, I'm fairly confident about my position on this issue. But self-parody? Brother, get off my dick.
Yeah, Putin does appear to be physically fit, so maybe a "good heart" from a cardiologist's perspective, but not in the metaphoric sense Bush meant us to understand. (Surely Bush is not that stupid, so it must be that he thinks the public at large is that stupid and speaks to us as though we were all simpletons.)
Was that a deal which served long-term American interests? In the past, we have overly-focused our fears on the Russians while ignoring other dangers, such as the mujahadeen in Afghanistan. Perhaps we've made the opposite mistake this time around. Perhaps not. Only time will tell.
People get the government that logically follows from their basic moral and political ideas. The question of moral dessert pertains to each individual in question when faced with these ideas: did they bother to understand them? Did they fight them, surrender and acquiesce, rationalize, or actively support?
A culture that stresses the subjugation of the individual to something "greater" -- be it God, race, nation, collective, whatever -- must eventually end up as a tyranny; the particulars of the process affect only the speed and shape of the path taken, not its end. Similarly, a culture that fundamentally espouses the opposite idea -- individual rights -- will reach the opposing end, a free capitalist society, eventually.
The results we see now in the world proceed from the interplay and expression of these opposing principles, in the culture of each nation and the world at large. Individual sovereignty never really "took" in Europe, and that is the grain of truth ultimately underlying the wry observation that "the dark night of fascism is always descending in America, but always lands on Europe."
As to the mechanisms of actual tyranny, it is definitely important, in a positive-feedback loop sort of way; observe the thousand-year plus ideological rule of the Church when coupled with the power of State in the West; it was only broken because certain elements in the Church itself rediscovered Aristotle's ideas on reason and logic, and attempted to graft them into Christianity -- only to ideologically empower the voices of liberty. If that hadn't happened, the Iraq war might really *be* a crusade.
But notice that *all* tyrannies require control of ideas, that suppression of free thought and communication is the first and foremost characteristic of tyranny -- because they know that's where the real power is! How long do you think a tyranny could last if it rigidly controlled everything *except* ideas? I'd give it one generation.
So, to get back to the original question of whether people get the government they deserve: it ultimately depends on the extent to which you hold each individual responsible for the ideas they hold *and* for knowing where those ideas must lead. I am one who holds everyone responsible for knowing those things.
And yes, living under a tyranny does restrict one's options; that is why I assign the greatest responsibility for the future tyranny to those who possess freedom *today*, but do not understand the true nature or ethical roots of either, as seen in the muddle made out of any discussion of tyranny versus freedom, even against the backdrop of the the most clearcut proof of socialism's identity with tyranny that history has to offer.
Regarding Putin's election, I recall there were large bombs going off in apartment blocks at the time. The Russian army, which had been a dark cloud over Western Europe for fifty years, had just been soundly defeated by a ragtag army of Chechens in Grozny.
Russia was facing the prospect of dissolution into anarchy. You can't really blame ordinary Russians for wanting to insure the territorial integrity of their state, and for wanting, well, order. That's what Putin offered, and that's what he delivered.
In any event, Putin is scheduled to step down in 2008, right? If he actually does it will be no small victory for Russian democracy, especially if he retires into relative political obscurity. I remain optomistic, as he hasn't taken the steps he needs to take to remain in power.
I am fairly resistant to seeing history as morality play. Yes, I'm sure culture plays a role, but we should be careful not to ignore the role played by other factors, such as the limits imposed by the available technology (a biggie when we start talking about ancient peoples), and the accidents and contingencies of history (i.e., plain old dumb luck). And this latter, I think, played a huge role in British history enabling democratic institutions to begin to take root and grow at the precise era when the rest of Euerope (inclduing Russia) was turning toward absolutism: The War of the Roses which killed off most of the hereditary nobility and saw their replacement from the upper ranks of the middle classs gentry (including the Tudors themselves); Edward VI's youthful death from TB and sister Elizabeth I's disinclination to marry; the spectacular political incompetence of the Stuarts and their replacement by a dynasty of dull witted Germans who cared little for their new realm and did not even speak its language.
Re: This "Third Rome view" is rather prevalent in Russia, and in part is responsible for the success of authoritarian government.
Why? Our Founding Fathers were intensely interested in ancient history and very self-consciously adopted Roman symbolism and even Roman nicknames. Why didn't they end up recreating Roman autarky too?
The Founders were great students and admirers of classical models, but of Roman Republic, not the Empire, and they consciously sought to create institutions with the virtues but not the flaws of the classical republics. Rome was built largely on the notion of civic virtue, and our Founders, too, believed civic virtue was necessary for the survival of a republic.
I do not think it matters much as I find it difficult to imagine Russia being the threat to Europe that it was pre-1990. Militarily, Russia is a third world country with a bunch of nuclear missiles. Putin is perhaps the most able leader in the country right now and if he was unable to turn that around, none of the mediocrities who follow him will.
The Founders were great students and admirers of classical models, but of Roman Republic, not the Empire, and they consciously sought to create institutions with the virtues but not the flaws of the classical republics. Rome was built largely on the notion of civic virtue, and our Founders, too, believed civic virtue was necessary for the survival of a republic.
How are you defining "civic virtue"? If it's what I think it is, the founders probably intended "civic virtue" to be practiced within the parameters of their other framework. If they witnessed what is going on today, I doubt they would be recommending "civic virtue" as the solution.
I hope Codger doesn't mind me butting in. A common feature of 18th C republicanism stressed the need for virtue in republics (as they did honor in aristocracy). Virtue, in this context, meant basically the willingness to support your country's interests instead of your own.
There certainly were many Founders who believed this. A good many, however -- notably Madison -- did not.
In the Ecolitan Enigma, the gov't of Tinhorn is trying to provoke a war between two of its enemies. The moral heroes decide that the only way to keep this from happening again is to make an example of the Tinhorn, and destroy the command center and a surrounding fifteen million people. The justification is that no government ever did anything that its people were really and truly opposed to. In his view, one is required to attack your government if it is immoral, or when others attack your government, and blow your house up as collateral damage you have nothing to complain about because you did not do your duty.
Not sure I agree with that view. I'm sure Ilya doesn't agree with that view.
I think you make very good arguments in the Updates, and they do make your post more persuasive and complete. While I think that the biggest enemy of Russian opposition media are Russian opposition media themselves, it is important to remember that no nation is pathologically masochistic, and there is no excuse for chauvinistic hatred of Russians or any other ethnicity.
On the other hand, Russians HATE to be patronized, and this is something many American well-wishers rarely consider. They think it's normal for American leaders to teach democracy to Russians. As a result, people like Putin have plenty of fodder for their Cold War-like rhetoric, because to the Russian people, such lecturing shows nothing but disrespect. It's a lose-lose strategy that our State Department has adopted.
(Many epidemiologic studies have been done comparing and contrasting the health of those who remain in their native countries with that of those who have emigrated, e.g., incidence of breast cancer in Japanese women living in Japan, living in Hawaii, and living in mainland US. In that way scientifically valid conclusions can be reached about the role of "environmental" factors, like nutrition, in causing disease, since the genetic component does not change when people relocate. The question you are attempting is not whether our genes determine the sorts of government we get, but rather whether our "cultures" are major determinants thereof. Your comparison of ex-pat Russians to those remaining in Russia may superficially resemble those epidemiologic studies, but it cannot produce very reliable data, at least not for the purposes you would put the comparison to. The incidence of heart disease in those who stayed vs those who left, yes; the amount of criminality or corruption in one vs the other, no.)
Also, I still wonder how you can theorize about the role of "culture" in shaping governments and ignore altogether the Islamic world. I trust you will agree that corruption and repression are not uncharacteristic of Muslim governments, and religion, which must be counted as a cultural component, is a very strong force in most of them. Your focus in this thread seems to be a decidedly Eurocentric one, though you made quick mention of Korea. Would your conclusions be different if the Islamic world were included, with far more weight given to "culture" as influencing the sort of governments people live under?
Thanks for continuing to participate in the threads you initiate. It adds much to their value.