Putin's weakness

By televising his Russian Security Council meeting on Monday, we got an insight into the way Vladimir Putin welds power over Russia. Putin sat distanced from other members of the Council, enthroned behind a desk. He came across as high camp Bond villain with each Council member challenged to give an opinion. It was clear there was only one right view, and that was Putin’s, no matter what it was.

The most absurd moment came from Sergei Naryshkin, Director of the Foreign Intelligence Service, who fluffed his lines and became the designated scapegoat. I was surprised Putin didn’t casually flick a switch to drop poor Naryshin into a pool of hungry piranhas.

This type of power is so foreign to spectators in the West it appears almost cinematic in its ridiculousness. Putin becomes more than a man, he is a Tsar, a sort of demi-god. We see a mad, King Lear figure, from whom all power flows. We cannot compute this, as we have no such centre of Western power. Political leaders, liberal elites, military big wigs, Big Tech, the media, banking institutions, industrialists and woke academics are all said to be where ‘real power’ resides. Any centre of money, thinking, popularity or influence in the West is accompanied with a posse of conspiracy theories about power.

The debate about where authority in the West is located is as old as the hills and the traditional view was perhaps best summed up in an article from The Spectator from September 1955. Henry Fairlie, defined power as residing in a network of prominent, well-connected people he described as “the Establishment”. He wrote:

“By the Establishment, I do not only mean the centres of official power — though they are certainly part of it — but rather the whole matrix of official and social relations within which power is exercised. The exercise of power in the United Kingdom (more specifically, in England) cannot be understood unless it is recognized that it is exercised socially.”

In this world, the chairman of the MCC was a greater figure of power than most Ministers in Parliament. True power could reside in a lazy afternoon on the white benches at Lord’s rather than the green benches in the Commons. A well-timed “word in the ear” to the right person in the right situation could be far more important for a Prime Minister’s future than any backbench rebellion.

This understanding of the casual establishment of Power was put into a modern context by Owen Jones’s 2014 book, The Establishment: And How They Get Away with It. Jones takes us through the different elite groups which together create a fixed “Establishment” and which, in his view, have as their shared common interest the promotion of self-serving right-wing ideals, while claiming to serve the public. The problem is, since 2014, many of those right-wing ideals have been blown out the water, at least in the Anglosphere. This was done not by popular revolution but a schism on the political right in the form of populism.

The reality is, power in the West doesn’t reside, as some would have you believe, in the hands of long term established communities of “the powerful” shaping and distorting democracy for their own ends. Power evolves and regenerates in constantly changing coalitions of individuals, interest groups, institutions, and corporations making common cause. For example, to paint the Brexit debate as “The Establishment” vs a people’s revolt which aimed to “take back control” is naïve. Brexit won thanks to a powerful coalition consisting not only of people ideologically opposed to transnational technocrats, but also English Nationalists and the “left behinds” who found a common cause. As the Brexit cause recedes from view, so the political fortunes of those who nailed their colours to that mast will collapse, unless they keep the coalition together under another (potentially more poisonous) political cause.

Western political debate is now a series of confusing mass arguments dominated by point scoring, pile-ons and hatred, which can leave you scrolling through Twitter completely bewildered. But if enough people are motivated, in the right way, and make common cause the West can revive itself.

Look at the way the West handled Covid. Across the western world the public locked down and voluntarily sacrificed freedoms in a way nobody thought possible. We created armies of volunteers. Multiple vaccines were created in months, when most thought it would take years. Big business and the free market took that vaccine and mass-produced it with unimaginable speed and efficiency. Even the politicians got most of the big stuff correct with broad consensus, in the end, about furlough and state aid.

And that Covid experience should show the West that other existential crises we face, of which climate change is the most urgent, can be tackled. Unlike Russia, The West is far more than political leadership — our real strength is in our institutions, the ones that bolster our communities and freedoms.

So, you might feel the odds are stacked against us when you see Liz Truss going in to negotiate with her Russian opposite number. You might feel bewildered when you think about the power and respect Putin commands from his aides, when most around Boris Johnson seem genuinely amazed he manages to dress himself in the morning. But The West could never be constrained by a single figure or even entity. The West is the greatest collection of ant colonies nature ever created and when they have common cause they can move mountains.

And Putin can’t stand up to that, no matter how big his piranha tank is.

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