Zaza Bibilashvili and Tom G. Palmer in conversation at The Unpopulist:

Zaza Bibilashvili: Over the last decades we’ve witnessed the rise of authoritarianism and a worldwide crisis of liberal democracy. What caused such developments and what should be done to reverse the trend?

Tom G. Palmer: Most prognoses focus on demographics, technological changes, economic structures, and so on, which gives an air of inevitability to trends. I think that there are such contributing factors, notably the rise of media fragmentation due to the internet and social media, but the rise of authoritarianism was not an inevitable consequence of some autonomous “forces” of technology or demography.

I think that we should pay attention to the deliberate cultivation of a multi-purpose ideology of authoritarianism in Russia. Putin consolidated his authority when he understood that with oil money, he no longer needed anything approaching the rule of law for society to generate surpluses sufficient for him to expropriate. The rise in oil prices at the start of his reign, with the very steep rise from 2004 to 2008, freed him to be the tyrant he wanted to be. He had begun to reestablish state control—that is, his control over oil and gas—rather dramatically with the arrest of Mikhail Khodorkovsky at the end of 2003.

A convenient ideology of power was also on the shelf, so to speak. It’s also worth paying attention to the bizarre neo-Nazi ideologue Alexandr Dugin, who published his book Foundations of Geopolitics in 1997. That book was widely circulated among leading Russian military and political elites around Putin. To be sure, Dugin is an authentic kook, but a smart one, and his books and efforts had a very large impact in Russia. He boldly resurrected fascist ideology and he called for a global jihad against the U.S., as a liberal state, as well as on liberalism generally. In 1997 he had called on the Russian state, “to introduce geopolitical disorder into internal American activity, encouraging all kinds of separatism and ethnic, social, and racial conflicts, actively supporting all dissident movements— extremist, racist, and sectarian groups, thus destabilizing internal political processes in the U.S.” That strategy was later deployed through such entities as the St. Petersburg-based Internet Research Agency (IRA) that was set up by Yevgeny Prigozhin, who founded it for information warfare and the Wagner Group for brutal kinetic warfare against liberal societies and movements.

Dugin and others on both the far right and the far left have been busy resurrecting the ideas of Carl Schmitt and other Nazi and Nazi-facilitating thinkers of what was called the “Conservative Revolution” in Germany from the 1920s to the 1940s. Schmitt’s systemic attacks on liberalism generally, and specifically on deliberative democracy, the market economy, and the rule of law—that is, on law based on rules—have been undergoing a renaissance. His theory of geopolitics, or Großraumordnung, is foundational for Putin’s strategy. It was a core element of Dugin’s book on geopolitics.

A key moment for the Russian regime was the challenge to its grip on power in 2011 during the Russian opposition’s marches for fair elections. Putin saw liberalism as a challenge to him personally and he eagerly took up the recommendation from Dugin and other extremists to wage war on liberalism globally. [Continue reading…]