“Merchants have no country.”
Thomas Jefferson
Is anyone shocked to watch Republican politicians kowtow to Vladimir Putin? Following their convicted leader (who not only admires the Russian tyrant, but obviously owes him a substantial debt) many members of the “pro-business party” are ready to let Putin conquer Ukraine by force—just for starters. It looks as if Republicans will be quite friendly to Russian interests if they win the election. Remember when conservatives were belligerently anti-Russian? Not anymore. Their new attitudes can be explained by the fact that Russia—once the leader of the communist world, the major threat to free enterprise and all other freedoms—has become a capitalist dictatorship, which is all right with most capitalists everywhere. Putin now holds absolute power over Russian citizens in the cause of private enterprise, making him and his minions the rulers American plutocrats want to be.
In today’s political world, plutocratic authoritarians are emulating and supporting Putin. Many strongmen apparently have taken to acting in each others’ interests, despite economic, strategic, and ethnic rivalries. While North Korea’s Kim Jong Un and Putin have signed an official treaty, the unofficial alliance includes Orban in Hungary, Erdogan in Turkey, Xi in China, Khamenei in Iran, MBS in Saudi Arabia, and Netanyahu in Israel—a partial list, including several who are currently out of power. Their single unifying principle is that they fear democracy more than they fear each other. These autocrats are facing domestic resistance; their constituents have been questioning their ability (or willingness) to govern effectively. Authoritarians have scant interest in governing, which requires hard work and compromise, interfering with their obsession for keeping and increasing their power. Waging war is their first option for avoiding the responsibilities of governing.
Even leaders of democracies find warfare’s effectiveness to deflect internal criticism hard to resist. Though Americans finally got tired of foreign wars (again) after the fiascos in Iraq and Afghanistan, we can still find plenty of “enemies” within. Muslims, migrants, Black Lives Matter, LGBTQ advocates, abortions, and “woke” citizens all make handy targets for the fearful citizens who empower America’s corporate rulers. Elites in the U.S. may or may not personally dislike minorities, but they need the votes of people who do. Power-hungry politicians everywhere follow the same instinctive directions: find foreign and domestic “enemies of the people,” and stoke public hatred to distract internal criticism. Today’s oligarchs, whose only common principle is fear and loathing of democracy, are instinctively cooperating across borders to strengthen their power. Democracy is threatened by foreign and domestic enemies in North America and Western Europe, where many of us, at great peril, take our liberties for granted.
Tyrants having domestic problems (worsened by their refusal to actually govern) find an escape valve in war. In democracies, maintaining an ongoing war footing eventually erodes government by the people. Strong men worldwide instinctively know that when nations engage in perpetual war, maintaining a state of “war as peace,” power concentrates in the hands of a few; eventually a single individual. Putin has never let governing get in the way of his obsession with acquiring more power; his neglect of peoples’ needs had caused many Russian citizens, feeling cheated and deprived by their ruling elites, to question his rule. By invading Ukraine he has regained the loyalty of most of his subjects, and eliminated criticism. Putin is supremely skillful at using democratic institutions to subvert Russia to his will. He keeps winning ”fair” elections, while people who oppose him tend to drink poisoned tea, fall out of tall buildings, or drop dead in far-away prisons. Putin’s talents naturally appeal to Americans who want to increase their personal wealth and power, who want to permanently eliminate anybody who dares question even their most insignificant edicts. Authoritarian-minded American politicians want to imitate Putin’s rise to absolute power.
We must remember that Putin is actually the American plutocracy’s Frankenstein’s Monster. When Russians finally got tired of living under the incompetent, intolerant “dictatorship of the proletariat,” and overthrew the Soviet Union, no one could accurately foresee what direction Russia might take. Western capitalists were fearful that Mikhail Gorbachev, the last Soviet leader, might institute real democratic socialism, which could genuinely threaten their power structure. As long as they could connect “socialism” with a foul dictatorship, capitalists could sell their subjects on the maintenance of capitalist supremacy. But if democratic socialism could successfully be installed in Russia, nothing could prevent citizens in the West from demanding the same thing, as the Russians had demanded by overthrowing their Marxist rulers. Plutocrats in the U.S. and Western Europe made sure to prevent Russia from instituting social and economic democracy, by helping midlevel communist bureaucrats take over Russian industry, to become a new capitalistic ruling class.
After helping Russian capitalistic converts install a corporate state, Western plutocrats, assuming Russia’s rulers would remain permanently in their debt, left Russia’s people to their fate. In the hubris of their Cold War victory, Western capitalists apparently forgot that Russian capitalists are just as devious, vicious, and power-hungry as capitalists anywhere. They ignored the similarity between Russia’s new overlords and themselves, as Putin, the most ruthless Russian capitalist, accrued power. They failed to remember that they had manipulated Russia into becoming a country that allowed Putin to assume absolute control over his citizens, to become the acquisitive, avaricious, all-powerful ruler they aspired to be. They overlooked the fact that Russia is a huge, resource-rich nuclear power capable of resuming its role as a formidable rival for international hegemony.
While Putin persists in his wasteful invasion of Ukraine, many Americans favor helping the Ukrainians fight for their independence. Others would turn their backs on people who do not wish to be recolonized, and let the Russian bully have his way. Putin has made it clear that he will not stop with conquering Ukraine. He has forthrightly reclaimed all the lands once dominated by the Soviet Empire. There is no reason to believe he would be satisfied if he gets them. We know by now that power is an addiction, and the powerful are never satisfied. The old saying that “No soup is served as hot as it’s cooked” regarding tyrants in the past has over the last century been amply discredited. American politicians who want to help Putin know exactly what he intends. We had better face the fact that they support Putin because they, like autocrats everywhere, want absolute power for themselves.
Putin’s American allies are in a strong position to retake the U.S. government, joining the entente of foreign dictators who are, officially or unofficially, in league to extinguish democracy everywhere. American fascists have made clear their intentions to reign unopposed and take revenge on their “enemies,” if they win election. If democracy is eliminated in America, Western Europe, and the few other places where it remains, the fragile peace between the world’s capitalistic dictators will of course dissolve. The victorious dictators will instinctively begin fighting each other, to increase their power and avoid the tiresome process of governing. Dictators in small countries will quickly be conquered—maybe dragged through the streets of their conquerors’ capitals, reviving the ancient brutal ceremonies that so grotesquely demonstrate the perverse advantages of holding absolute power. The future looks grim indeed, should Americans be insane enough to elect fascists. We can be certain that our homegrown plutocrats will enhance and strengthen their power—not relinquish it after “day one.” Americans who remain sane must face reality, and vote accordingly.