Briefly Noted: Ukraine, Putin, Liberalism, Sex

First, regarding Ukraine and Putin, I want to make some viewing/listening and reading recommendations.

I really can’t recommend highly enough the hour long video presentation by Scott Horton—it’s mostly his monologue. Horton is well prepared and speaks rapidly, without hems and/or haws. The result is an information dense presentation that covers the history of US Russia/Ukraine policy from the end of the Cold War to the present. As just one example, to whet your interest, Horton presents the story of GHWBush’s famous “Chicken Kiev” speech—probably his finest moment in public service, but which was used by the entire Establishment to ridicule him. In particular, Horton notes that HWBush’s background in the CIA would have made him aware of the CIA’s past disastrous use of Ukrainian Nazis to lead an insurgency against the USSR in Western Ukraine—that is presumably the background to Bush’s warning about "suicidal nationalism". It’s a very thought provoking presentation:

Regarding Putin, personally …

The other day—yesterday, in fact—commenter Robert Bush responded to a request for background information on Vladimir Putin by posting a link to a presentation that Christopher Caldwell gave at Hillsdale College in 2017:

How to Think About Vladimir Putin

Even in 2017 Caldwell was going out on a limb, in expressing his overall very positive assessment of Putin. That’s my assessment—Caldwell himself expressly states that he wants to suggest how to think about Putin, not necessarily what to think about him. That said, toward the beginning Caldwell makes clear what Putin is not—which will serve as a transition to Sex and Liberalism:

Vladimir Vladimirovich is not the president of a feminist NGO. He is not a transgender-rights activist. He is not an ombudsman appointed by the United Nations to make and deliver slide shows about green energy. He is the elected leader of Russia—a rugged, relatively poor, militarily powerful country that in recent years has been frequently humiliated, robbed, and misled. His job has been to protect his country’s prerogatives and its sovereignty in an international system that seeks to erode sovereignty in general and views Russia’s sovereignty in particular as a threat.

By American standards, Putin’s respect for the democratic process has been fitful at best. ...

Yet if we were to use traditional measures for understanding leaders, which involve the defense of borders and national flourishing, Putin would count as the pre-eminent statesman of our time. On the world stage, who can vie with him? Only perhaps Recep Tayyip Erdoğan of Turkey.

When Putin took power in the winter of 1999-2000, his country was defenseless. It was bankrupt. It was being carved up by its new kleptocratic elites, in collusion with its old imperial rivals, the Americans. Putin changed that. ... Out of a crumbling empire, he rescued a nation-state, and gave it coherence and purpose. He disciplined his country’s plutocrats. He restored its military strength. And he refused, with ever blunter rhetoric, to accept for Russia a subservient role in an American-run world system drawn up by foreign politicians and business leaders. His voters credit him with having saved his country.

Read it all—it goes very well with Horton’s presentation, because Putin was there for everything that Horton describes.

Now, Liberalism and Sex.

I try to never miss an opportunity to take a shot at Libertarianism—even, as now, when I have featured a presentation by the Director of the Libertarian Institute in the same post. So I want to recommend a thoughtful article by Nathanael Blake:

How Liberalism Ruined Sex And Degraded Women

Note that Blake uses the term “Liberalism” in its proper philosophical sense—as in, Classical Liberalism, a political ideology that attempts to adopt a type of “moral neutrality”, of non-intervention in people’s “private” lives. Public life and public policy are to be governed, basically, but a social contract for which no claims of binding morality are made. Libertarianism and Liberalism are on the same philosophical continuum. The effect of this ideology is to degrade all standards and to leave normal people philosophically defenseless and speeding down a slippery slope to … where America finds itself today. A nation sadly lacking in moral character, unable to formulate, much less agree upon, moral principles. A country that has eschewed—in principle—all moral standards. Morality is replaced by virtue signaling—a very different thing.

In this brief excerpt Blake relates that to how Liberalism has “ruined sex and degraded women.” His starting point was two articles by women, bemoaning the plight of women in contemporary America. He examines their complaints with sympathy, but finds their solutions sadly lacking in cogency—precisely because their reasoning is conditioned by their reflexive appeal to Liberalism as a philosophy.

He then observes that, in practice, Liberalism’s supposed moral neutrality is actually nothing of the sort—which is how we find our society on a slippery slope:

Morally, liberal ideology deprives a woman of anything stronger than setting her own “I want” against the “I want” of a man. This refusal to judge between desires leaves modern liberals such as Goldberg stuck, able to recognize the disaster of the current relational marketplace, but unwilling to accept any moral judgments that would give women’s desires more than subjective value. After all, without a normative understanding of what is good in a relationship (including sex), why should a woman’s desire for romance, or even simple kindness, matter more than a man’s porn-induced kinks?

Furthermore, liberalism’s theoretical neutrality between competing desires in practice favors desires that are simple and intense over those that are more complex and diffuse.  Thus, in a liberal culture, emotional needs and relational longings will naturally take second place to immediate sexual gratification. To be uncomfortable with unbounded indulgence is to mark oneself as an enemy of liberalism. This is why liberalism’s supposed neutrality about the nature of the good and the good life actually denigrates self-control and commitment while promoting selfish indulgence. Our culture is filled with celebrations of the liberation of desire, including the sexual desires and relational habits that are proving so harmful to women. 

Of course there’s much more. The point is that this public philosophy that controls most public discourse in America—certain things can be said, and certain things must be left unsaid—is inseparable from the decline of our societal and government institutions. Until people can reclaim moral control over their own lives, based on firm standards, American will not be able to pull itself out of the swamp that it’s in.