5 Feet of Fury

Steve Sailer on Russia: Nationalism is a Blast

Steve Sailer writes:

Russians are highly philosophical, so they need an ideology or they collapse into depression. Mikhail Gorbachev followed the Chinese communists in perestroika (restructuring) but added glasnost (openness), which quickly delegitimized the Communist Party’s authority. Even the hardline communists who started a coup against Gorbachev in 1991 almost instantly melted into despondent ineffectuality worthy of a Chekhov play.

Putin has recently attempted to furnish his subjects with a conservative nationalist ideology to counter aggressive American globalist liberalism. The ex-KGB man recognizes that liberalism—in the reigning sense of minoritarianism—is suffering from diminishing marginal returns, with ever-tinier minorities the subject of its obsessions, as we see with World War G moving on to World War T. (Of course, globalist liberalism doesn’t seem to actually make countries more equal; indeed, inequality of wealth has exploded during this period of minoritarian triumph.)

Much of the American press’s anger at Russia stems from the feeling that maybe Putin is on to something.