I wanted to draw the community’s attention to two recent polls in Russia, both conducted by the Levada Institute (a widely respected and independent pollster, one often in trouble with the authorities.) The first I’d imagine people here will like, but the second is unnerving for a lot of reasons...
The first is Putin’s approval rating, which has been tanking in response to his push for pension reform. Pensions are not just popular in Russia but seen as necessary for financial security, with older Russians especially sensitive to the pre-00s economic rollercoaster that variously enriched or (more often) wiped out their bank accounts. Putin’s attempts to “soften” the reforms have not met with widespread approval. He has now reached the second-lowest point of his 20-year career as a federal politician.
Now, when we say his approval has “collapsed,” we mean this relatively: he still enjoys numbers that most American politicians would envy. His approval-to-disapproval ratio is still roughly 60-30, a massive +30 that’s unheard of among our own folks this late into their careers... but consider that exactly a year ago it was 82-15. As of September, nearly 40% of Russia respondents trust Putin over any other public figure, which is pretty solid! But that number was nearly 60% this time last year, a 20-point dive in just twelve months. It’s uncertain whether this trajectory will continue, but it’s clearly got the Kremlin on edge, and what that means in coming months is anybody’s guess. The regional elections since this summer have still largely gone United Russia’s way, though not in all cases.
The second poll is the main reason I’m writing this, because 1) I don’t know how to interpret it in a way that isn’t burn-down-everything nihilistic, and 2) I wonder if this is the kind of future we might be setting ourselves up for. When asked who respondents consider the most likely culprits in the Skripal poisoning, a meager 3% (not a typo: that’s three percent) are willing to say they believe it was Russian secret services:
RESPONSE |
% OF RESPONDENTS |
Russian intelligence |
3 |
British intelligence |
28 |
“Could have been anyone” |
56 |
(hard to answer) |
13 |
I must have stared at this for a good half-hour. Three percent, especially after the absurd spectacle that has been the Kremlin’s attempt to clear the two suspects in question. (For those of you who missed this, a widely-mocked interview with the two suspects suggested they’d traveled from Russia to Salisbury for a single day in order to visit “its famous 123-meter spire,” an interview that also intimated at the two suspects were a closeted gay couple. It’s surreal, to put it mildly.)
Still, three percent is a whopper under any circumstances. The Levada center’s director Denis Volkov tried to put this in context as best he could (same link as above, translation mine):
This is how I’d interpret it: we’ve heard a lot about it, but hardly anyone is interested in this whole poisoning business, and it all fits into this idea that “The West is against us” and “They just need an excuse,” etc. etc. … People have no particular problem acknowledging that our intelligence services might poison someone. Nevertheless, the “Could have been anyone” responses largely reflect a reluctance to disagree with the official position and an underlying feeling that it could very well have been Russian intelligence.
What’s striking here is that respondents aren’t particularly reluctant to tell the same polling agency that they don’t approve of and don’t trust the president, so this isn’t fully explicable by, e.g., some fear that answering “wrong” might endanger anyone. It could be a desire not to rush to judgment, but even under Volkov’s more optimistic reading, the “Could have been anyone” response is a kind of surrender to informational static, that there are too many competing stories and thus the best stance is no stance at all. This is the not the sign of a healthy body politic.
Valery Solovei, a poli-sci professor at Moscow State Institute of International Relations, had a blunter response quoted in the same article: this poll reflects the consequences of “both successful propaganda and a psychological mechanism for dismissing unacceptable truths.”
When I said above that this might “portend” something for us, I was thinking about the wave of unacceptable truths that we are likely to face in both the short and long run. If Democrats retake the House and launch investigations, those unacceptable (to Republicans) truths will be plentiful, but what will that mean to a significant, powerful demographic that already believes the pipe bombs were both false flags and the fault of Democrats, that Trump’s constant and easily refutable lies are in fact truths, and that Kavanaugh was a good man sullied by an evil, ambitious woman? If Republicans learned anything from the Kavanaugh hearings, it's that aggressive offense is the best defense, not just in terms of immediate policy goals, but also in terms of their support from their voters. What will those investigations look like when politicians and their voters feel incentivized to reject what’s right in front of their face?
And look…. while there’s no comparison, no “both sides do it” between a party that wants universal health care and a party that wants to lock away brown and black people, the fact is that those “psychological mechanisms” can and will be used in our direction as well. Being a progressive, a liberal, a leftist or whatever, does not make us more constitutionally resistant to the allure of motivated reasoning. It’s hard work, and to some extent we’ve had to rely on a sense of trust, however fragile, in various institutions — especially the media — to help mediate between a world of conflicting facts and the truths underneath. This is maybe the greatest long-term damage that Trumpism has done to our own body politic, and I’m not sure how institutional stability can be restored under those circumstances.
Anyway, I getting into too much of a rant here: the main point is, these polls from Russia are interesting and worth discussing, and so… here they are.