Moscow News: America’s Putin envy
(Moscow News – themoscownews.com – Anna Arutunyan, Editor andCcorrespondent at themoscownews.com – October 8, 2013)
“I don’t like Putin, but I respect that guy. He is tough. He delivers what he says he’ll deliver. He presents himself as a real He-Man.”
That wasn’t a congratulatory note to President Vladimir Putin on his birthday. That was Fox News. More specifically, it was right-wing military analyst Ralph Peters in a televised debate on the channel last month. And there’s a lot more where that came from.
Putin has long enjoyed a bit of a pop cult following in America, largely confined to online forums where he was mostly admired for the masculine image he projects. In 2011, for example, American humor website Cracked.com revealed the “7 reasons Vladimir Putin Is the World’s Craziest Badass” (just so you know, “bad” in this context means good).
The article and the comments in particular focused on the fact that Putin has the appeal of an action star. Among the 791 comments, this one was the most revealing: “This is why we should have made Chuck Norris King of the U.S. decades ago.”
This summer, however, it suddenly became about a lot more than Chuck Norris. The kind of Americans who usually come down the hardest on Russia were all of the sudden seeing Putin as an example to follow. The right-wing World Congress of Families announced plans to hold its next summit in Russia, evidently due to the so-called “gay propaganda” law Russia passed, a move that the organization fervently supported. The National Organization for Marriage had its head, Brian Brown, in Moscow in June lobbying in support of the legislation.
Then, a YouGov poll released late last month found that 49 percent of Americans believed Putin was the most effective world leader during the Syrian chemical weapons crisis, due to his role in brokering an agreement. Just 25 percent named U.S. President Barack Obama as most effective.
The virulently anti-Obama Fox news network went wild with those figures, and so did a number of conservatives. Putin was a better leader than Obama, they gushed.
“How have we come to a point in which a former KGB agent who now rules Russia sounds more sensible and realistic, from a culturally conservative point of view, than any leader in the post-Christian West?” The American Conservative’s Rod Dreher wrote. “Vladimir Putin, defending the permanent things!”
A number of American outlets picked up on Putin’s supposedly growing popularity in America, like Business Insider and The Atlantic.
I’ve studied the contradictory attitudes to Putin in Russia, and the ambivalent nature of his popularity here, and the notion that Putin’s popularity is increasing in the West struck me as strange.
Upon looking closer, I realized that “popularity” and “fan club” might not the right words to describe how some Americans are viewing Putin right now.
For one thing, American confidence in Putin (yes, there is such an indicator) was at its lowest in 2012, at 28 percent, down from 41 percent in 2003, according to the Pew Global Attitudes Project.
Furthermore, once you analyze the statements being made by American conservatives, it turns out they’re not talking about Putin. They’re really talking about Obama.
This heightened interest in Putin’s badassery – which went from a pop fad to a serious discussion topic – is a reflection of many Americans’ uncertainty in their own leadership. The key word here is interest. Some Americans are merely getting a kick out of saying that Obama looks so weak that many are beginning to envy Russians.
I don’t think that Obama is a weak leader. I do think that a growing number of Americans seem to want a king rather than a president. The reasons have less to do with the leader they currently have, and more with the type of society they might be moving towards. When badassery is in demand, it’s a reflection of deep schisms that people seek to fix – with a strong hand.