Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals: If not a "new Age of Authoritarianism," at least a season

[DeepModem Mom]

NYT op-ed: Cold Friends, Wrapped in Mink and Medals
By BILL KELLER
Published: August 16, 2008


(David Plunkert)

Writing in The Financial Times last week, Chrystia Freeland recalled Francis Fukuyama’s 1989 essay “The End of History?,” which trumpeted the definitive triumph of liberal democracy. The great nightmare tyrannies of last century — the Evil Empire, Red China — had been left behind by those inseparable twins, freedom and prosperity. Civilization had chosen, and it chose us.

So much for that thesis. Surveying the Russian military rout of neighboring Georgia and the spectacle of China’s Olympics, Ms. Freeland, editor of The Financial Times’s American edition and a journalist who started her career covering Russia and Ukraine, proclaimed that a new Age of Authoritarianism was upon us. If it is not yet an age, it is at least a season: Springtime for autocrats, and not just the minor-league monsters of Zimbabwe and the like, but the giant regimes that seemed so surely bound for the ash heap in 1989.

The Chinese have made their Olympics an exultant display of athletic prowess and global prestige without having to temper their impulse to suppress and control. From the dazzling locksteps of that opening ceremony, to the kowtowing international V.I.P.’s, to the carefully policed absence of protest, this was an Olympics largely free of democratic mess....The striking thing about Russia’s subjugation of uppity Georgia was not the ease or audacity but the swagger of it. This was not just about a couple of obscure border enclaves, nor even, really, about Georgia. This was existential payback.

It turns out that if 1989 was an end — the end of the Wall, the beginning of the end of the Soviet empire, if not in fact the end of history — it was also a beginning. It gave birth to a bitter resentment in the humiliated soul of Russia, and no one nursed the grudge so fiercely as Vladimir V. Putin....In China, 1989 was the year that a spark of liberal aspiration flickered on Tiananmen Square, and was decisively extinguished. That was another beginning, or at least a renewal: of Chinese resolve....

Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way.

President Bush was mocked from both sides for his seeming impotence....

The United States, meanwhile, is mired in Iraq and Afghanistan, estranged from much of the world, and bled by serial economic crises. History, it seems, is back, and not so obviously on our side.

(Bill Keller, executive editor of The Times, covered the last years of the Soviet Union for the newspaper.)

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/08/17/weekinreview/17keller.html?hp

[Berry Cool]

1. Maybe the biggest nugget of truth is in this line:

"both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way."

Isn't that the way it's been since the world began?

And sadly, that's the way America has become, too. We've become an oligarchic kakistocracy--a government run by a small group of powerful individuals and corporations who are the least qualified and the most unprincipled--the only qualification that matters any more is "How much money have you got?"

[patrice]

2. And the struggle between the 3, US:Russia:China, will CRUSH the American Middle Class

not to mention, Murder Working and Lower Class Americans.

[many a good man]

3. "Springtime for autocrats", "new Age of Authoritarianism",

America, meet your future.

What will it be called? "Authoritarian capitalism"?

[bemildred]

5. Capitalism has never been anything but authoritarian.

When it stops being authoritarian, it becomes socialism or "a mixed economy" or something like that. Capitalism has owners and workers, and the owners own the workers.

[bemildred]

4. A lot of unintentional irony here:

"Both countries now tolerate a measure of entrepreneurship and social license, as long as neither threatens the dominion of the state. Both countries have calculated that you can buy a measure of domestic stability if you combine a little opportunity with an appeal to national pride. (The Chinese “street” felt no more sympathy for restive Tibetans than the Russian blogosphere felt for Georgia.) And both have discovered that if you are rich the world is less likely to get in your way."

The US is discovering, on the other hand, that if you are broke, people ignore you.

[DeepModem Mom]

6. Good catch, bemildred! nt