[View here as a Twitter thread]
What do you do when facts don’t matter? Here are my takeaways from Yale professor @TimothyDSnyder‘s disturbing book, the Road to Unfreedom. Liberal democracy is based on the idea that society evolves & improves. Putin’s brand of fascism, OTOH, is based on the static idea that the government does not improve the life of the citizens—it guards them against external enemies.
Under Putin’s system, wealth is best concentrated in the hands of the ruling few, who are entrusted with protecting the people from external threats.
Putin came to power following the classic fascist playbook: identify an enemy, evoke the mystical destiny of the nation, and create a culture in which wellbeing relies on force and violence (instead of reason and law).
Putin solidified his power by declaring a war of revenge against Muslims in Chechnya. In response to a 2002 attack at a Moscow theater, he seized control of Russian private TV & henceforth controlled all media coverage.
When news is entertainment, & when people can’t tell truth from fiction, they conclude truth is unknowable, and they stop looking for facts. He also understood that the more outrageous the lie, the better.
Bannon, too, understands the effectiveness of a barrage of lies.
“The real opposition is the media,” Bannon said, “And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit.” https://twitter.com/brianstelter/status/963076380505370624?lang=en …
Once in power, Putin attacked the EU through Brexit, & masterminded the US 2016 election by means of a disinformation war. He sought to undermine faith in the US and UE governments through a “cyberwar” to sow “confusion to our enemies.”
Trump followed Putin’s playbook: He told his followers, “Look, your hardship is not your fault. It’s the fault of our national enemies.” He pined for a mythic past when things were better. (The way to fight liberal democracy is to move backwards.)
On Trump’s behalf, Russia infiltrated our politics & exploited American “gullibility,” working closely with Americans like Bannon & Manafort, who believe Putin-style authoritarianism works better than liberal democracy (with all its messiness and gridlock and compromise).
