The saddest thing about the article linked in the previous post is that it is obsessively fixated on Putin’s personality. The author seems to believe that understanding Putin’s personal characteristics will allow to see the current political situation clearer.
The realization that politics is not a Hollywood movie eludes today’s political analysts completely. It is extremely rare to find commentary that doesn’t adopt all of the conventions of a tabloid gossip column.
What is even weirder than the obsession with personalities is the assumption by the average person that they have a handle on ‘the truth’ so that they can detect when a politician “is lying”. Lying is supposed to be the thing that corrupts the character, which in turn creates disasterous political results out of what could have been perfect circumstances. It’s just this one tendency — to lie — which means we don’t have the perfect democratic circumstances we ought to have today.
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A conservative literary critic and college professor
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