Outside the Beltway

Unreality in Russia?

And some cable "news" thoughts.

Steven L. Taylor · Monday, June 26, 2023 · 6 comments

The following passage from Anne Applebaum’s piece in The Atlantic (Putin Is Caught in His Own Trap), struck me as worth highlighting and commenting upon.

The response is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom Putin is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used in Putin’s Russia has been designed in part for this purpose. The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous “firehose of falsehoods”— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless.

But the side effect of apathy was on display yesterday as well. For if no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war. Russians haven’t flocked to sign up to fight in Ukraine. They haven’t rallied around the troops in Ukraine or held emotive ceremonies marking either their successes or their deaths. Of course they haven’t organized to oppose the war, but they haven’t organized to support it either.

So, it should be noted that it is very hard to know exactly what was happening on the ground in Russia over the weekend, so I take any assessment with a grain of salt. Yet, the above did strike me as plausible. If what is being fed to populations is a string of contradictory falsehoods (or just a storm of bullshit), it does make a discerning reality quite challenging. Further, it does seem like the fruit of Putin’s media strategy would be apathy, and as Applebaum rightly notes, an apathetic population may be less likely to mobilize against the regime, they also are less likely to mobilize in favor of it. And, I would note, a pro-regime mass mobilization is often a major tool in the authoritarian toolbox.

Tangentially, the above made me think of this clip.

First, Corn is correct: very little has been learned from the Dominion lawsuit (although if you parse her words carefully, she doesn’t exactly lie here).

Second, this is just stunning. I have been studying world politics for well over thirty years now, with a special interest earlier in my life in political violence, revolutionary change, and state capacity in the face of both. I have never witnessed or read about anything quite like what happened over the weekend in Russia. If there was ever a story more important than innuendo about Hunter Biden (and yes, that’s a low bar) this was certainly one. Indeed, I can think of very little that would have been less newsworthy over the weekend, even in a hypothetical sense.

And yet, here she is, pretending like the attention paid was because the Biden administration didn’t want people talking about Hunter. It is just insane. But, as we know from the discovery during the Dominion lawsuit, FNC is far more interested in telling its core viewers what they want to hear than they are in being a news organization.

They clearly are happy to help create their own little maelstrom of nonsense and unreality to try and keep a few more viewers from going to Newsmax.