The Voice Over

A year or two ago, I tried to figure out what was behind the processes taking place in Russia over the last few years—the changing societal sensibilities, which made all of that possible: the silent Putin majority, the war in Ukraine, the political trials that happen against the background of general festivity. I tried to single out the most important characteristics, imagining the Russian experience to be an extreme example that could not be repeated under other circumstances—and thus instructive. The set of traits seemed eclectic but also strangely consistent: those were the generic features of a society shaped by a traumatic course

—a history of unceasing violence, which lasted for more than a hundred years. This special feature of the Russian situation—the fact that trauma is not limited to one extreme (or unthinkable) experience but persists and deepens what came before, becoming a kind of enfilade of ongoing pain—still seems to me one of a kind.

This makes it even stranger and more distressing to see similar patterns reproduced in the rhetoric and practice of countries that used to seem like, if not an example to be emulated, then at least one of many faces of the general norm: an existence held together by the invisible web of an ethical contract. What seemed like a rare disease turned out to be a kind of swine flu, with all cases exhibiting the same set of symptoms. One is the special kind of hybridity, the possibility to hold contradictory positions at once, to be inconsistent, to change one’s decisions and strategy, to twist facts in the name of common affect. And the dummy effect: the attempt to rely on precedents and traditions that never existed, that were just invented ad hoc, making phantoms an object of active nostalgia. And the appropriation of this and that, borrowed without any awareness of context or meaning, which turns cultural legacies into a master key for political doors and tasks. When you follow this logic, truth and lies, good and evil, black and white become nonexistent. They endlessly merge and spill over into one another for the sake of some kind of artistic effect. What’s important is that all of these truths and untruths use the language of yesterday.

And there, it seems, lies the difference between this turn and nationalist movements from a century or more ago. The key word in Trump’s slogan “Make America Great Again” is not great

but again

; the ideologues of the new political turn are not building a utopia but a shelter—places where one can hide from the summons of the present, shut the door, and not let anyone else in. The old kind of nationalism, that of Karl Lueger or Hitler, thought of itself as a first step toward realizing a utopian vision. This notion is entirely gone; today’s agenda contains not a fantasy of the future but a dream of the past.

We cannot locate this past in time and space, nor can we describe it—in part because it’s not history but a fantasy, whose main features are prosperity and permanence. Stasis is understood as an ideal state of government, and so it was the unspoken goal of Putin’s political project, which was oriented toward a vision of the great past and awkwardly tried to reproduce it. Until recently, it was difficult to imagine that this fascination with reenactment would have global potential. But the hope to restore a version of reality from, let’s say, 1913, is not as relevant in and of itself as the urge to insure oneself against any kind of change. There have never been so many anti-utopias and disaster movies as we have seen over the last twenty years. Their lessons have been soundly grasped: the future is always worse than the present, which means that it cannot be allowed to happen. We must resist it at all cost; or at least we must try to make it look just like the day before yesterday.

What’s interesting is that for this new sensibility, which lurks behind the right turn, greatness, prosperity, or safety cannot be a product of the future: you cannot inherit them or work toward them. They can only be imitated, simulated, a picture-perfect likeness of the real thing stripped of its most recent layers: the features of globalism and multiculturalism, anything that points toward a shared human experience, or the ability to collectively work to build a better life. The world hasn’t been as afraid and bewildered by the idea of change in a long time. The present should stop and linger not because it is all that fair, but because we do not trust what will follow; the past seems like the only solid ground, a territory of exact (or so it appears to us) knowledge and reliable models.