Vladimir Putin's Conservative Values

He says there's a war on between traditional religious nationalism and the liberal cosmopolitan west. He's right.

Photo by Tamara Malaniy on Unsplash

In a conference in Russia today, Vladimir Putin made a familiar argument: That Russia isn’t anti-Western, but is rather a beacon of conservative, traditional values, standing in opposition to “elites” and their West, which is “aggressive, cosmopolitan, neocolonial, acting as the weapon of the neoliberal elite.”

On Twitter, Anne Applebaum responded, “This man is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, for the kidnap of children, for torture, rape, cultural destruction and millions of refugees, and he talks about ‘conservative’ values? His only values are those of a criminal thug and serial liar.”

It’s true that Putin is a criminal thug and a serial liar. But he’s also a real conservative. The ethos Applebaum describes — profound disregard for human life and suffering as long as those dying and suffering are from undesirable groups, abuse of women, cultural destruction, creation of and then disdain for refugees — is in fact one we see in self-styled traditional conservative states and communities the world over. And the abuses themselves are justified by conservative traditionalism.

This isn’t Putin claiming conservatism to cover for his bad acts. It’s Putin and right-wing authoritarian leaders the world over accurately identifying conservatism as the cause of and justification for their bad acts.

Putin is correct that there are two Wests. One is the West of liberal democracy — of free and fair elections, moves toward greater social equality, expanding human rights and women’s rights, rule of law, and democratic norms. The other, which seems to be growing, is a West of Christian pre-democratic traditionalism and nationalism, what the historian Mike Duncan calls “orthodoxy, autocracy, nationality.” This is a different kind of national story, and a very different set of aspirations, than that of liberal democracies. The aspiration isn’t democracy at all, but an autocratic regime that enforces patriarchy, Christianity, and hyper-nationalism.

Russia is a prime example, as are Hungary and Poland. Voters in other countries, perhaps most notably in Italy and the US, are flirting with these same ideas. And the playbook looks more or less the same wherever it’s implemented: Gain popularity through dominant-group grievance by harkening back to some previous time of national greatness, and point to liberalism as the cause of that decline. Scale back the rights of minority and less-powerful groups, which universally includes LGBT people and women. Push a conservative version of Christianity not just to the cultural fore, but integrate it into law and policy. Embrace a kind of national hyper-masculinity, marked by hatred of feminists, the scaling back of women’s rights, and the reassertion of unchecked male power. Take over the courts. Manipulate elections. Then position your country and its dominant classes as the victims of forces invading from outside — immigrants, foreign powers — and of devious actors inside, often feminists and liberals, but maybe atheists and Jews for good measure.

Conservative nationalistic governments have done exactly this over and over and over again. Russia has a huge domestic violence problem, but under Putin’s leadership, the nation legalized wife-beating, so long as it’s not so bad it lands a woman in the hospital. And even then, a first-time offender’s punishment is a fine of roughly $88 US dollars.

This law was sold to the public as part of a return to traditional family values. And indeed, a man’s right to physically assault his wife is a traditional value, one not made criminal in much of the world until shockingly recently, and still allowed in many of the world’s most religious and conservative societies. Conservatives who are upset by wife-beating may say “this isn’t a conservative value,” but sorry, domestic violence is quite literally a long-standing tradition, justified by Christianity and several other religions, that conservatives have historically demanded remain outside of the realm of the law and even public scrutiny — to be treated instead as a private family matter.

Ratifying an international convention against domestic violence would violate “the principal approaches of the Russian Federation to the protection and promotion of traditional moral and family values,” Russia has said. Hungary, too, refused to sign the convention, asserting that doing so would undermine traditional family values.

We see the same encroachments on women’s rights and basic bodily autonomy in Poland, where an already-restrictive abortion law was tightened by the country’s constitutional court, an illegitimate political body masquerading as an impartial tribunal, and where women are already on trial for abortion.

Putin’s remarks on Russia’s vision of a Christian traditionalist West seemed to be, the New York Times says, “aimed at conservatives in the US and Europe.” Indeed they were. American conservatives are also increasingly leaning into this autocratic traditionalist playbook, outlawing abortion, pushing violent hyper-masculinity and male impunity, hacking away at democratic norms, embracing Christian nationalism, inflicting maximum suffering on scared refugees, banning books and other creative works that don’t adhere to their reactionary politics, and publicly fantasizing about murdering fellow citizens who disagree with them.

That Vladimir Putin “is responsible for the deaths of tens of thousands of people, for the kidnap of children, for torture, rape, cultural destruction and millions of refugees”? That isn’t despite his conservatism; it’s because of it. And that’s not a problem for today’s conservatives, because it is indeed the endgame.

xx Jill