[ysilver]

Back to the USSR. East-West relations are reverting to the Cold War days. From saber-rattling, proxy wars to propaganda campaigns, few will dispute that there has been a back-slide in recent years.

But here is what I find amazing: we have already seen this movie and we know what forces are at play and what the likely outcome is. Namely, it is very difficult to maintain legitimacy as a government through a propaganda campaign. It is a highly unstable equilibrium. At any time, information can get out of the hands of the propagandists and the system will find a more stable equilibrium -- ie. leaders will be replaced. It's just a matter of time.

Right now the Kremlin is likely undergoing an intense debate on how to spin the downing of the recent Russian flight as something other than a reaction to the Russian air war in Syria. This is a heavy lift. Maybe they will succeed in this and maybe not. If so, they will have found a temporary reprieve but will no doubt find themselves encountering a similar issue in the future. The legitimacy of the Russian leadership will continually find itself teetering so long as it relies on propagandists to hold back a flood of disapproval.

Compare this system to the inherent stability of responsive governments with rule of law: healthy democracies (ie. Western democracy), responsive authoritarian systems (Singapore, China). Both these systems have release valves. In the case of democracies, elections reassert legitimacy with election cycles. In the case of responsive authoritarian systems, the government relies on surveys and technocratic leadership.

Russia has neither method of achieving stable equilibrium and so the propaganda will serve as a shaky dike holding back an ever growing force.

[pessimizer]

>But here is what I find amazing: we have already seen this movie and we know what forces are at play and what the likely outcome is. Namely, it is very difficult to maintain legitimacy as a government through a propaganda campaign. It is a highly unstable equilibrium. At any time, information can get out of the hands of the propagandists and the system will find a more stable equilibrium -- ie. leaders will be replaced. It's just a matter of time.

I hate to sound like a Pro-Russia troll, but the leaders weren't replaced in the West; the author of the Cuban Missile Crisis and the initial evangelist of the "Missile Gap" nonsense that sped us towards armageddon, Kennedy, is still Baby-Boomer Democrat Jesus. We're still having a debate as Americans on how perfect Reagan was - was he our great warrior-king that stopped the forces of collectivism from infecting our workforce, or was he just a lovable, charming, everyman's dad who was the optimistic, spiritual cure for the cynical unrest of the 60s and 70s?

America's government systematically destroyed the careers of every person in the media who had ever signed a petition, attended a meeting, or campaigned for an issue with any of the dozens of Soviet front groups OR communist groups, OR socialist groups, OR groups campaigning against state racism, or for the sake of any discriminated against group through the blacklist, and imprisoned people for peaceful speech. American propaganda was so pervasive that it renders some of the media from the period unwatchable without considering how heavily saturated every permissible theme was with the Cold War and Anti-Communism.

This just sounds like so much Russia is bad and inherently weak (in exactly the same way it was declared to be philosophically when it was Soviet, although it's governance is now comparatively unrecognisable) and America will defeat them for freedom's sake, but with a lot of words.

edit: Also, in the 25 odd years since the fall of the Soviet Union, the hegemon has had Father-Son Presidents, and is about to have a Husband-Wife pair. That will make 4 out of 5 post-Soviet Presidents a member of the nuclear family of another President. People are already discussing how to get Chelsea Clinton into Congress, as they have been since she started university.

[fsloth]

American political machine is fueled mostly by big money. Famous names sell and apparently people really like supporting dynasties of leaders.

However, I would claim the biggest reason for these dynasties is just their familiarity as a political convenience, not a nefarious plot to rule the land from here to eternity. Sure, papa Kennnedy had a lot of money and influence and he was a huge contributor to his sons successes. But it seems to me anyone with money can enter the political arena, and one can make that money without first being a crony (although I'm sure it helps).

At least to an outsider there seems to be a huge difference in the basic dynamic if the US is compared to a typical corrupt state with an embedded power clique.

In totalitarian crony states there is a tiny elite who grab it all - in US, as far as I can tell, anyone can become part of that elite if they just have the money. It's not people's democracy but it's dynamic at least.

In US, money owns the government, in Russia, government owns the money?

[ysilver]

> I hate to sound like a Pro-Russia troll, but the leaders weren't replaced in the West;

Right. That was my point. When we get bad leaders that make bad decisions that lose them support, they get cycled out and the legitimacy of the institutions is restored.

> America's government systematically destroyed the careers of every person...

This is a great example of how our western institutions often lead to big mistakes but then eject the responsible people. Institutions left more or less intact. It would be foolhardy to claim that the US has a track record of consistently smart domestic policies and foreign interventions (don't get me started...). I'm just making the point that it is much easier to achieve stability with a system where information flows freely.

> This just sounds like so much Russia is bad and inherently weak...

"Weak" is the wrong word. In many ways, the Russian government is demonstrating extraordinary strength in maintaining the "unstable equilibrium" that results from relying on controlling a society's interpretation of events.

[exelius]

> But here is what I find amazing: we have already seen this movie and we know what forces are at play and what the likely outcome is. Namely, it is very difficult to maintain legitimacy as a government through a propaganda campaign. It is a highly unstable equilibrium. At any time, information can get out of the hands of the propagandists and the system will find a more stable equilibrium -- ie. leaders will be replaced. It's just a matter of time.

I'm not sure I believe this. I used to, but Russia is the perfect example of revolutionary change resulting in more of the same. Leaders are replaced, but the power machine of the USSR is alive and well. The Communist party may have abandoned communism, but they kept the bureaucracy and corruption.

Russian leaders since Ivan the Terrible have known that projecting power outward is the only way to protect the western front. Geography is both Russia's best friend and biggest enemy. Moscow is situated in the middle of a wide, flat plain, which makes marching an army there logistically trivial. So Russia's national security has always relied on maintaining a large buffer zone around Moscow, and relying on the distance combined with Russia's harsh winters to destroy its enemies. If an enemy could stage an army and extend supply lines into Eastern Ukraine or the mountains in Georgia, a ground invasion of Moscow would be relatively easy. It's no accident that Russia is occupying both of these areas after their governments started to distance themselves from Moscow.

This is further exacerbated by the fact that Russia is quite literally frozen out of internationally commerce. Russia's major ports (with the exception of Kaliningrad, which is separated from the Russian mainland by Lithuania and some ports in Siberia that are too far from Moscow to matter) freeze over completely in the winter. This makes it very difficult for Russia to be a strong naval power outside of their submarine fleet (which can just go under the ice). The result is that Russia sees its outward expansion as a national security imperative -- so the saber-rattling isn't just for show. If Russia were to join the NATO / EU system, they lack the economy to be more than a #4 player (behind France, Germany and the UK) in the EU despite their large population. They look at Ukraine and think "If we were able to invade Ukraine and NATO did nothing, they would not come to our aid either if we were a member." Thus, Russia pursues a policy of self-determination.

And to address your point about the release valves of the "stable" systems, I'm not sure that applies to Russian psychology right now. The Russian people can rightly say "We've tried both of those systems, and they were both awful." There's a movement among the Russian masses that thinks while things weren't great under the USSR, they were better than they are today. I'm not stereotyping all Russians as thinking this; but it's a sizable movement similar to the Tea Party (or whatever they call themselves now).

And because Russia has the veneer of democracy, Putin doesn't have to even win over the entire populace or fix elections to stay in power. He can have his core bloc of corrupt politicians that support his economic policies (and who stay in power through good old American-style political machinery in the major cities), and shift his social policies to match whatever the most popular social movement of the day exists. Putin makes a powerful friend and an even more powerful enemy, so those groups are more than happy to ally with him when it suits his needs.

I think you're right about it being inherently unstable; but as long as Putin is alive it will stay together. If he's smart and not completely insane, we'll see him start publicly grooming a successor in the next few years. If his successor is as politically savvy as Putin, Russia could be a pain in everyone's ass well into the mid-century.

[geoka9]

Since the oil prices dropped, Russia has lost a third of its reserves. How do you think they are going to keep it together for as long as two more decades?

[jacobush]

It is uncomfortable to think of the alternative. Russia has warheads.

[alendit]

> Right now the Kremlin is likely undergoing an intense debate on how to spin the downing of the recent Russian flight as something other than a reaction to the Russian air war in Syria.

They can always claim that ISIS hates Russia's freedom https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-PKRHgmHzK0 .

[Kristine1975]

Sorry, but "they hate our freedom" has been patented by the US government for their propaganda. Also isn't Syria one of the bad guys right now, so waging war against them is a-ok? I'm getting a bit confused sometimes whether we're at war with Eurasia or Eastasia.

[exelius]

Syria (and specifically the Assad regime) is friendly with Moscow, and provides a friendly port on the Mediterranean. The US hasn't taken out Assad for human rights violations because they don't want a war with Russia. But ISIS is also clearly a threat to the US, so we can't support them either. So we basically tried to invent a third group of non-religious radicals, but without the fervor that a radical ideology provides, many of the individuals that make up this faction give up and flee to Europe after a few months of fighting.

Basically the US would like to see Assad deposed like Gadaffi or Saddam, but Russia is propping him up, and we dislike the other option more than we dislike Assad. The only other realistic option is the Kurds, but an independent Kurdistan would throw the region into chaos (and likely drive Turkey towards Russia, because the Turkish government views the Kurds as being terrorists worse than ISIS).

[unics]

I'm having trouble keeping up. I thought the current narrative was "they don't have jobs" and that's why they hate us. Silly me.

[reitanqild]

> Also isn't Syria one of the bad guys right now, so waging war against them is a-ok?

Not in Russia it seems.

[crdoconnor]

>But here is what I find amazing: we have already seen this movie and we know what forces are at play and what the likely outcome is. Namely, it is very difficult to maintain legitimacy as a government through a propaganda campaign. It is a highly unstable equilibrium.

America and North Korea have both been doing it successfully for years. You either need very sophisticated propaganda (America) or a very strict control over information (NK) or a mix (China).

The only reason it became 'unstable' in the Soviet Union was glasnost, which was deliberate government policy by Gorbachev. Without Glasnost the Soviet Union would probably still be around.

[ysilver]

> America and North Korea have both been doing it successfully for years.

Much is lost in this comparison. The American media landscape is pluralistic. Take for example our most popular news network: Fox News. Do they kowtow to the federal government? Russia + NK however, rely repressing dissent internally to retain legitimacy.

[exelius]

Russia's media is also nominally pluralistic. They have been careful to permit the existence of dissenting media -- if for no other reason than to have something to discredit. The propaganda outlets are much better funded and organized though, so they can largely drown out the voices pushing an agenda that differs from the party line. The Russian masses (just like the masses everywhere else, including the US) are largely uneducated, xenophobic and easily influenced by nationalism. It's just far more effective to allow them to exist and attack them in the media (as happened to the reporter in the article) than it is to violently suppress them.

The difference in the US is that the propaganda comes not from the government, but from the corporate/media machine -- which largely controls the government. American corporations now have such an outsized influence on American elections that it's hard to know who is the puppet and who is pulling the strings. Sure, you can go on TV and say whatever you want to say, but our system has become increasingly hostile to "real" investigative journalism (just look at our justice system's reaction to Snowden / Manning). They distract the public over trivial social issues (abortion, gay marriage, legal weed) while doing whatever they want. Or in other words, Obama gets to score points with liberal voters by blocking the Keystone XL pipeline -- never mind that he approved 6 other, similar pipelines in his last two terms. The difference is that the media simply chose not to cover them, so the blowback was limited.

[ysilver]

> ...our system has become increasingly hostile to "real" investigative journalism...

The burden of proof that there has been a degradation of information quality remains on your side of the court. This "lost paradise" argument may very well be right but it's far from evident to me.

I would broadly characterize media quality as always having been low on average throughout history. We had a brief period of oligopoly after mass media (the networks) monopolized a lot of what we call news but that period was more of an exception to the rule (and it certainly had its own problems).

[tremon]

> The burden of proof that there has been a degradation of information quality remains on your side of the court

The USA fell 13 places in Reporters Without Borders' 2014 annual ranking of press freedom:

"Countries that pride themselves on being democracies and respecting the rule of law have not set an example, far from it. Freedom of information is too often sacrificed to an overly broad and abusive interpretation of national security needs, marking a disturbing retreat from democratic practices. Investigative journalism often suffers as a result.

This has been the case in the United States (46th), which fell 13 places, one of the most significant declines, amid increased efforts to track down whistleblowers and the sources of leaks. The trial and conviction of Private Bradley Manning and the pursuit of NSA analyst Edward Snowden were warnings to all those thinking of assisting in the disclosure of sensitive information that would clearly be in the public interest.

US journalists were stunned by the Department of Justice’s seizure of Associated Press phone records without warning in order to identify the source of a CIA leak. It served as a reminder of the urgent need for a “shield law” to protect the confidentiality of journalists’ sources at the federal level. The revival of the legislative process is little consolation for James Risen of The New York Times, who is subject to a court order to testify against a former CIA employee accused of leaking classified information. And less still for Barrett Brown, a young freelance journalist facing 105 years in prison in connection with the posting of information that hackers obtained from Statfor, a private intelligence company with close ties to the federal government."

http://rsf.org/index2014/en-index2014.php

[ptaipale]

That's not really proof that "there has been a degradation of information quality". In a way, rather to the contrary - US ranking in this particular ranking fell because new information emerged; the administration then reacted against information leakers.

But if we look at that ranking, USA is still clearly in the top third of countries of world.

Russia is clearly in the bottom third of countries of world.

It is sort of funny that when we speak about the problems of the bottom third, and Russia in particular, it is somehow compulsory to see the comments "Look at USA, it also has problems!"

[ysilver]

History may show that we are digesting something akin to McCarthyism right now.

[exelius]

I'm not talking about media quality like it's something that has just recently gotten bad. I don't think it's gotten worse; but the mass media is also no less important now than in the past.

I realize it's always been an issue; I'm just saying we can't act high and mighty relative to Russia because it's a problem here too.

[ysilver]

I think you're smart to try to test the validity of the converse of my claims. However, it's also important to acknowledge that there is enormous variation in the freedom of the media to operate across countries. There are highly repressive media domains where a single actor represses others and achieves a near monopoly. Could the US improve freedom of expression domestically? Yes. Do we systematically repress dissenters as is common Russia, Bangladesh, etc? No

[Retra]

That doesn't really refute the point though: American propaganda does lead to social instability, even if it's not at the level of boiling-over into revolution.

[icebraining]

It's pluralistic inside a small window. They may be on opposites sides inside that window and tear at each other, but everyone tacitly knows where the limits are, and when you're off-limits. The underpinnings are absolute.

[crdoconnor]

>Much is lost in this comparison. The American media landscape is pluralistic.

No it isn't. It's all owned by about six companies.

>Fox News. Do they kowtow to the federal government?

Do they not put out propaganda?

[nine_k]

> Without Glasnost the Soviet Union would probably still be around.

Not at all. The cause of USSR's demise was its failing economy. There was literally not enough food, due to very poor agricultural practices and very inefficient industry. Per Yegor Gaidar (who later became Russia's Prime Minister) there was barely enough food to feed the population of Moscow during the winter of 1985-85. This is what made the Soviet leadership of the time suggest some changes, before hunger really struck the country.

Actually, there were a few more or less efficient industries in the USSR: it produced quite nice automatic weapons, military aircraft and pretty reliable spacecraft. These things required efficiency (at least, in a form of a well-working end result) due to high visibility and apparent military importance. The regime could not afford to be weak on the military side, or look like a failure in space. It could ration butter, milk, sausage, etc to the population because it was not such a big deal, apparently.

[crdoconnor]

>Not at all. The cause of USSR's demise was its failing economy. There was literally not enough food

That basically describes North Korea in 1993. Except North Korea didn't have glasnost.

[nine_k]

North Korea is indirectly fed by all its neighbors, because its demise will mean a huge influx of refugees, very poor and largely not adapted to life in a non-North-Korean society. It will also mean that South Korea would have to absorb and restore North Korean territories; even mighty West Germany had visible difficulties absorbing East Germany, which was pretty prosperous by the Soviet bloc measures.

I don't think the US or Europe would feed starving USSR to prevent it from collapsing.

Also, North Korea is pretty compact. Keeping a country the size of USSR in an iron fist would be somewhat harder (though this has been done in 1930-50s), and attempts to cut certain regions away from an ailing empire would probably be much more successful.

[jacobush]

Not feed it? With nukes, you never know.

[ptaipale]

China feeds North Korea. I think the primary purpose of DPRK's existence is internal politics of its large neighbour and supporter. DPRK is there because China keeps it up and running as an isolated laboratory of stalinist communism, to remind left-wing traditionalists inside Chinese Communist Party about what their version of communism produces for the people.

[snowwrestler]

Leaders are replaced all the time in the U.S. In fact, we have a system of government specifically designed to faciliate the regular replacement of leaders.

[VLM]

Our secret sauce over other nations is specifically how we select the new, very carefully hand picked leaders. Which Bush or Clinton family member will it be next time? with some help from the revolving door of actual leaders (.com) vs figurehead leaders (.gov)

[snowwrestler]

I once looked into the personal backgrounds of U.S. presidents. It's about 50% carefully groomed elites like FDR, Kennedy, and Bush (both), and about 50% "rose from nothing" people like Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, and Obama.

[csours]

Could highly advanced propaganda be mistaken for society? (see also technology -> magic)