Clown World propaganda outlet The Atlantic absurdly tried to pin the observable loss of faith in “democracy” across the West on Vladimir Putin:
Putin’s objectives were always clear: He craved less hostile leaders in the West, people who would work to dismantle NATO and the European Union from within. Above all, he hoped to discredit democracy as a governing system, so that it no longer held allure for his own citizens. Scanning this list, I’m dismayed to see how many of these objectives have been realized over time, especially in the first weeks of the second Trump administration…
The Russian leader’s rise wasn’t uninterrupted, but the ledger is filled with his victories, beginning with Brexit, an event he deeply desired and worked to make happen. That was a mere omen. His populist allies in France and Germany now constitute the most powerful opposition blocs in those countries. Within the European Union, he can count on Viktor Orbán to stymie Brussels when it is poised to act against Russian interests. Meanwhile, the European Union’s foreign-policy chief claims that the “free world needs a new leader,” and former heads of NATO worry for the organization’s very survival.
Putin is winning, because he’s cunningly exploited the advantages of autocracy. His near-total control of his own polity allows him to absorb the economic pain of sanctions, until the West loses interest in them. His lack of moral compunction allowed him to sacrifice bodies on the battlefield, without any pang of remorse, an advantage of expendable corpses that Ukraine can never match. Confident in the permanence of his power, he has patiently waited out his democratic foes, correctly betting that their easily distracted public would lose interest in fighting proxy wars against him.
What’s most devastating about Putin’s reversal of fortune is that he read Western societies so accurately. When he railed against the decadence of the West and the flimsiness of its democracy, he wasn’t engaging in propaganda, he was accurately forecasting how his enemy would abandon its first principles. He seemed to intuit that the idealism of American democracy might actually vanish, not just as a foreign-policy doctrine, but as the consensus conviction of its domestic politics.
This is revisionist and characteristically-inversive nonsense. The idealism of “American democracy” has vanished, not due to Putin and Xi cunningly exploiting the advantages of autocracy, but because so-called “representative democracy” has repeatedly and reliably proven itself to be aggressively opposed to the will of the people.
In fact, “Western democracy” is explicitly anti-democratic; genuine democracy that accurately expresses the will of the people is castigated as “populism” or worse. Every time the will of the people is democratically expressed, it is overturned and overruled by the elite’s captive courts; one little-realized consequence of the failure of this faux democracy as a governing system is the way that it has underlined the intrinsic corruption of the court systems which have even less respect for genuine justice than the “representative” institutions have for genuinely expressing the collective will of the people they supposedly represent.
The Founding Fathers were always rightly dubious of democracy. But their intricate tripartite system designed to achieve some of its benefits while avoiding some of its costs has turned out to be even more corruptible, and even worse, than they could possibly have imagined.
The astonishing and observably reality is that both the Russian and the Chinese systems are now superior to the wicked corruption of Western democracies, in both the moral and material senses. And this is not the result of anything the Russian or Chinese leaders have done, it is the direct result of the complete abandonment of the historical principles of Christendom that made the West great.