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My latest post:
Why Are Negotiations Acceptable With Iran But Unthinkable With Russia?
And the core tension within the Woke political project
"One underappreciated reason why much of the European political establishment—and the previous US administration—sees Russia, and especially Putin, as a threat lies deeper than commonly supposed.
It is not merely that they believe Russia is preparing to conquer Europe, though some may conveniently semi-believe that as well.
Nor is it simply that exaggerating the Russian threat serves domestic political purposes by allowing incumbents to discredit dissenters as “Russian assets.”
Nor is it only that Russophobia functions as a convenient mechanism for achieving European cohesion, suppressing intra-European security competition, and strengthening supranational integration.
Nor is it solely because Putin has become the Western ruling class’s “Schelling point”—a singular villain onto whom elites can project blame for their own failures, incompetence, and declining legitimacy.
All of these factors matter, but taken together, they still do not fully explain the extraordinary emotional animus directed toward Putin and Russia. Or at least so I think.
No, for many, the hostility appears more visceral than that. More personal. For the type of people who comprise today’s transatlantic political class, the issue is perceived almost as a matter of personal survival.
Over the past several decades, the modern transatlantic liberal order has cultivated a vast network of institutional loyalists: activist bureaucrats, NGO professionals, media figures, academics, and ideological foot soldiers disproportionately drawn from identity-based constituencies - LGBTQ activists, feminist careerists, racial grievance entrepreneurs, and various minority advocacy groups. Like every ruling system throughout history, this regime has created its favorites: groups that trade loyalty for security, patronage, and status. They view the current order as the guarantor of their personal and social security, much as certain ethnic groups in past multinational states saw supranational institutions as the safeguard of their position and security.
I don’t necessarily blame them for it. Trading security for loyalty is a human, indeed, all too human thing.
When such people look at Putin, they do not merely see the leader of a rival state. They see the symbolic embodiment of everything their worldview stands against: the shirtless, horseback-riding, unapologetically masculine, nationalist, “privileged white male” archetype, much in the same way American progressives view Trump. In Russia they see not just a geopolitical competitor, but remnants of an older, traditional civilizational model that their ideology believes history has surpassed.
The progressive coalition itself depends on a sense of shared insecurity to maintain cohesion. A political alliance composed of heterogeneous groups—ethnic minorities, sexual minorities, ideological activists, professional feminists—requires a common antagonist to unify it. The image of the dominant straight white male serves as that antagonist. Perceived threat is not a bug in such a coalition; it is a feature. It intensifies solidarity, brotherhood-in-arms, emotionality, and group discipline. The coalition derives much of its internal cohesion from a shared belief that it stands in constant opposition to external oppressors.
Trump and Putin occupy that role of “external oppressor”: Trump for the U.S. Woke left, while Putin for Europe’s. Given these circumstances, it is not that surprising that they feel mutual affinity. Moreover, this also helps explain the affinity between the Trump administration and other leaders like Hungary’s Viktor Orbán. What unites Trump, Putin, and Orbán is not so much that they represent “autocracy” standing in opposition to “democracy” represented by the U.S. Democrats, and the current E.U. Commision, as is often claimed, but that they are all seen—rightly or wrongly—as embodiments of a political and cultural alternative to the progressive Woke order: one that emphasizes national sovereignty over supranational governance, more traditional social structures over fluid identity frameworks, and majoritarian legitimacy over coalition-based identity politics.
...
The Woke network is not some external body invading the innocent host population like a “Woke virus” (as some prominent people call it)—people of the dominant identity group, but especially its elites, were, in a sense, complicit in this process.
The formula describing Woke politics is: “Self-negation is the price you pay to buy the trust of the insecure.” Meaning: the historically dominant group (symbolized by “white straight males”) has to artificially lower its status to win the trust of those who (feel) were historically oppressed.
None of this is anything new: this was the politics in the Soviet Union back in the 1920s when Nikolay Bukharin asserted, “We, [ethnic Russians] as a former great-power nation, must put ourselves in an unequal position. Only with such a policy, when we artificially put ourselves in a position lower than others, only at this price can we buy the trust of formerly oppressed nations.”
As a small illustration of how Bukharin’s strategic logic works in everyday life, consider the 2019 paper by Dupre and Fiske showing that liberal individuals were less likely to use words that would make them appear highly competent when the person they were addressing was presumed to be black rather than white. This competence downshift by White liberals was interpreted by many, especially conservatives, as evidence that “liberals are the real racists!” However, a more plausible reading, I think, is Bukharin’s: artificially lowering your status for coalition/trust-building purposes.
But here, alas, we come to what appears as the fatal flaw of the transatlantic Woke imperium’s political program: the same elites who construct this ideological order are deeply dependent, in the final act, on the very demographic they most frequently denigrate: straight, native-born men—especially white men.
Because when states require defending or wars require fighting, it is not NGO consultants, diversity officers, or academic activists who fill the trenches. It is young men.
As I’m writing this, I have a DW article opened, titled “Young German men refusing military service”.
Can one blame them?
Historically, societies demanded military service and sacrifice from young men, but in exchange, those men were also conferred respect, honor, status, and a stake in the countries they defended. But modern Western societies increasingly ask young men to shoulder traditional duties while denying them traditional rewards. Young men are told to sacrifice, but are simultaneously portrayed as morally suspect and historically oppressive. They are expected to defend institutions that lecture them about their own toxicity, discriminate against them in education and employment, and celebrate their demographic replacement in the name of “diversity” and distorted notions of “equality”.
A regime that alienates those people upon whom it depends for its ultimate defense undermines the foundations of its survival."
➡️Full piece here: triangulation.substack.com/p/why-are-nego…
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