The Crises that Could Bring Down Putin - not so much.

http://www.mauldineconomics.com/this-week-in-geopolitics

"The Crises That Could Bring Down Putin"

Interesting, but (to me) ultimately unpersuasive.

Writing about a Russian dictator’s potentially “losing his grip on power” is a mug’s game: in the first place substantially underestimates that grip. 

Yeltsin, the example provided, was *not* a cutthroat climber in the sense of Russian leaders historically; no, he was the (Bill) Clintonesque sacrificial lamb shoved to the front of the group of annoyed Politburians in the late 80s as a domestic-protest-move.  I believe they probably expected he was – in the long-established tradition of Soviet politics – going to  disappear.  That he didn’t either signaled that Gorbachev was either strikingly different (still not sure that’s true) or astonishingly weak by that time.  In other words, the Politburo handed Yeltsin the reins when it looked like the stagecoach was about to crash, and he was stupid enough to hold them.  After they got through the bumpy bits, those same elites took the reins back away from him.  So he’s of nearly no use as an example.

In the second place, it discounts (as usual) the characteristically unique level of paranoia in the Russian psyche.  I’m not saying that this makes them impossible to predict, that would be silly.  But it’s typical of western analysts to begin their examination from a position of empathy: “how would I feel if I were a Russian, and what would be the consequences?”  Russians are NOT Westerners.  The term ‘inscrutable’ used to be applied to Oriental states whose motives & goals themselves were hard to understand.  Whenever a faraway country would do something completely baffling for reasons we couldn’t even rationalize after the fact, it was shrugged away with “well they’re just inscrutable”.  It’s declined in usage because of the quasi-racist overtones it eventually assumed, but I would posit that given our radically different cultures, history, and outlook: to Americans, Russians remain inscrutable.

No, the average Russian believes as a given fact every day that:

1)            Russia is in danger from its enemies, and

2)            As Russians, saving Mother Russia will require their personal sacrifice – certainly in comfort/quality of life, but up to and including their lives. (This isn’t to say that they are blindly patriotic and will sacrifice themselves for Putin personally; not at all.  But for Russia as a nation distinct from its government?  Pretty much so.) 

The only thing Russian leaders can do is highlight the immediacy of that danger to spur the Russian people to ‘hunker down’ through tough times as needed, and to prove that they (the leader) is the particular strongman that can shepherd Russia through (today’s) crisis.  The art, for a Russian leader (Stalin was a master, enabled by the existential crisis of the war) is to get “out of the direct path” of the threat to Matya Rossiya.  “The roof just started leaking, I just happened to be the guy standing here with a hammer and shingles”.  “Well of course we had to secure our bases in Crimea, the west had overthrown the democratically-elected leader of Ukraine and was trying to strangle the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea”.  Notice, Putin’s action isn’t the narrative – he’s just fixing another “goddamned problem”.

The replacement of governors with people from his coterie of hangers-on isn’t going to be seen as much of a signal; they all serve more or less at his pleasure anyway, and if any make a stink (they won’t, it’s …unhealthy) I’d imagine there are already ample volumes of leakable evidence of their corruption or selfishness.  Again, he’s just trying to fix the roof and Russians will recognize he needs a crew up there that he can trust.

More substantially meaningful here to American interests is the historical (apparent) rapprochement between Russia and Turkey.  They’ve been enemies with directly-conflicting interests since, well, forever.  I’ll say that again: these two nations have been in direct competition for at least FOUR CENTURIES and the US (as the standard-bearer for Western diplomacy) has managed to let them discover interests that may bring them into alignment.  That is a diplomatic failure (for us) of colossal proportions. If he can pull it off, Putin could turn the Black Sea into a Russian lake and win essentially unfettered control of Istanbul and the Bosperus.  That would be triumphal in the history of Russia, probably comparable (in US manifest-destiny terms) to Canada just dissolving and joining the US.

Here’s my $0.02 guess: the editor's mystification over ‘what was traded here’ between Russia and Turkey will become apparent perhaps as soon as the next 3-6 months.  Russians are chess-players; They certainly don’t have the ridiculously short attention span of American observers.  They don’t have 2-year congressional election cycles to satisfy, or 4-year re-elections to run.  They can seriously plan for 10-year results or even longer. 

What I expect is that Putin is trading his participation in Syria for breaking Turkey out of the west’s orbit, obligingly along the fissure created by the Turkish putsch.  Hell, I wouldn’t be surprised if that ‘revolt’ was stage-managed by Russian agents (bonus points for them if they could convince Turkey/the world that they were Americans) directly for that purpose.

My guess is that could have been the point of the seemingly-pointless Russian military effort to prop up Assad from the start.  (That may be crediting Putin with too much prescience; more likely he was pushing a knight or rook out into the board as bait for what would opportunistically develop, but always in the knowledge that it really wasn’t there for function, but as a very-tradable sacrifice.)

I don’t even think which way the Russians and Turks jump matters all that much – whether Russia joins the fight against ISIS and abandons Assad, or whether Turkey pulls out of the fight against ISIS and (by negative act) ends up supporting Assad* - what matters to Putin and in the long game would be that Russia and Turkey would be working in parallel.

*I think the latter is less likely, given the personal enmity between Erdogan and Assad.  The former seems much more multi-valuable in terms of disarming criticism and undermining suspicion in the west.

The first hint will be the closure of US operations in Incirlik (the big US base in Turkey).  If that happens, I’d take that my prediction is likely happening.  (I just googled Incirlik to make sure I spelled it right and look what came up: http://sputniknews.com/military/20160816/1044330202/turkey-russia-incirlik.html “Turkey could provide its Incirlik airbase for the Russian Aerospace Forces jets in the anti-terrorist campaign in Syria, member of Russia’s upper house of parliament Igor Morozov said Tuesday”).  Well.

If you believe that police simply cruise the streets looking for black men to shoot, just stop reading. There's nothing for you here.

The PROBLEM isn't that we have too many cops shooting black men; that's the RESULT.

The problem is that there are too many angry, anxiety-laden confrontations between young black men and police. That many confrontations, with that much fear on both sides, a sizable percentage WILL end in violence. Such violence will generally logically end in the shooting/harming of the young black man because he's likely less well equipped, less trained, and likely outnumbered.

(Let me immediately dispense with the "skin color" thing; this isn't about skin color, it's about urban poverty which is altogether too easy to conflate with skin color. But that's not causal, obviously. We are basically talking about young black men, but it's not BECAUSE they're black.)

So there's two elements there: the confrontations, and the tension.

Let's be frank: the confrontations aren't because these young men are selling too many girl scout cookies, or mowing too many lawns.

The anxiety in these situations is twofold: the young men feel that the cops won't treat them fairly, and police are (justifiably) afraid that the confrontation will escalate into violence.

This comes from serious poverty. When young men (particularly) are really poor, there's a big thing about pride and "respect". It is a coping mechanism - if you have NOTHING else, and you recognize that you have little/no education, criminal record, maybe a kid or two, no stable home, you're aware your life is crap. They see the difference between their lives and what life "should be"*. It's human nature to rationalize by overcompensating your own self-image.

*I believe, tangentially, that our media culture hits them particularly hard in two ways. First, the gap for them between 'where they are' and 'where they should be according to the conventional wisdom' is nearly insurmountable. Worse (and this is probably the only place where skin-color does play a role), the lead figures they naturally identify with are celebrated (by white-owned media companies, let's not forget) as thugs, gangstas, and hoodlums. If you aren't the 0.01% with pro-caliber athletic talent, the ONLY other route to success (again, as presented is criminalism.

The problem is when this inflated sense of self-worth, bravado, machismo, whatever you want to call it, collides with the real-world situation of a police officer who HAS TO BE always conscious that his/her life is at risk. The tools that the urban youth uses to function in his environment with his peers - intimidation, fearlessness, aggression, posturing - are the only tools he's got (particularly when stressed). When deployed in a confrontation that's NOT the usually-fake-posturing that takes place between peers, these make everything worse.

So you can't tell the urban youth "don't act that way" - it's his ONLY TOOLBOX for his daily functioning. Likewise, we can't tell cops "don't care that much about your safety". How is a cop - particularly when we're talking about split seconds - supposed to distinguish 'empty brashness' from an actual threat? To Monday-morning quarterback those sorts of moments are, frankly, bull****.

An impasse of facts.

What we can say is this: poor, urban youth are living in an Hobbesian state of nature. The only way they're not going to do that is if we radically address that condition:

Either implement policies that truly encourage poor families to stay together & disincentivize fathers who abandon their children to an almost draconian degree, OR remove children from that environment. To the tangential point above about media companies, there needs to be a concerted, genuine effort by image-leaders to get out of the gutter. The gangsta-face makeup has done more durable, lasting, generational damage to young black men than blackface makup ever did.

NONE of these issues will be solved by throwing money at it. Frankly, I don't believe that activists for the left have the courage to face the catastrophic failure of foundational concepts behind their Great Society programs, and seriously work to fix them. Nor do I believe the right is willing to spend the money and time it's going to take (a generation or more) to tease out and address the root causes.

In that last context I think the militarization of the police is a part of the problem. As Democrats like to simply throw money at problems, in this case, it's more a GOP thing. If you have a rash of fires in your home, you're not going to try to solve it by giving the firemen more trucks and bigger hoses, would you? That would be absurd. Those things might help them put out the fires more capably but that's treating the result, not the cause.

Why is Donald Trump the GOP candidate for president?
I honestly don't think the GOP had any concept of how to deal with Donald Trump.

Since the latter days of the Reagan administration, in my opinion, the GOP has been hijacked (I'd call it an addiction) ever more to the right-wing evangelical vote.

THAT group, in particular, is particularly self-segregating (politically, if not socially and/or ethnically) and runs with blinders.  There's no reasoning with them.  They are lit by the fires of righteousness - not unlike many on the deep left-wing, that - so compromise is seen as weakness, not pragmatism.

I don't really get it.  Sure, there's a lock-in of a pile of votes if you're anti-abortion, but at what cost?  If the religious card could have been leveraged into breaking the lock the Dems have on the black vote through the Black southern Baptists, it might have been worth it.  If it could have further been leveraged into a big chunk of the hispanic vote through their strong Catholicism, again, probably worth it.

But if you're not going to fracture those two very natural demographics, then why the HELL would you tie yourself to southern religious conservatives?  Even if you ignore them completely, do you really think they'd vote for a Democrat?

The incompetent bunglers in the GOP party admin are too stupid to understand this.  They've managed to change the party of business and fiscal responsibility into the "narrow minded racist religious zealotry party" AND AT THE SAME TIME shown themselves to be just as fiscally [i]incompetent[/i] and self-interested as the Democrats.  So who are people going to vote for?

The Liberal agenda in the US is ascendant for lots of reasons from cultural to educational/indoctrinational.  I'd even say it's philosophical as per Plato's Republic or even Aesop - the grasshoppers are having a wonderful time, the ants look ridiculous for their concerns.  Them promoting a complete boob as their candidate for the highest political office displays either their complete lack of faith in the structures of our system (you might consider how monumental that is conceptually to a dogmatic conservative especially), or a troubling level of nihilism.  Probably both.

The US needs an opposition party; but that needs to be a CREDIBLE opposition party.  The GOP mandarins are far too busy in my opinion protecting their sinecure and personal wealth in Washington to perform that role any longer.

The point being that I think Trump's brand of populism isn't new; from the Gracchi in the Roman Republic to now, bomb-throwing crowd-pleasers have often riled the masses to their own benefit.

Where the GOP failed in this case is to understand the deep-seated and seething resentment in their core party over their failure to do anything in the last 16 years but kowtow to evangelicals, spending every cent of political capital on bullshit social issues that any *reasonable* conservative would consider NONE OF ANYONE'S BUSINESS.

Abortion?  Tragic, and sad, but very much an issue between a woman, her doctor, and her conscience.  As much as you may want to, one simply cannot legislate how women are going to value that unborn child.  Gay marriage?  Whether you "approve" of homosexuality is an intensely personal moral issue but in America, the foundation of this country is the premise that nobody has moral primacy over another.  Not a hereditary king, nor some suburban megachurch member.   In any case, the concept of marriage is one of stability and community - things conservatives used to consider important.

The resulting apathy of the core conservative mainstream means the nutters got to run the show...and thus you get a Donald Trump as a candidate.  Frankly, I'm doubtful he's even conservative; his anti-Establishment message simply 'sells' better within a party that is a) out of power, and b) nominally about reducing the power of government anyway.