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How do you know a hero when you see one? Can we predict heroism or cowardice?
Typically I’m more in the “Great Forces of History” camp than the “Great Men of History” camp, more Hobsbawm than Carlysle. Current events might be changing my mind.
The conventional wisdom from Kofman to Ilforte to my Polish cousins seems to be that Putin made a tremendous blunder in invading Ukraine and attempting to implement regime change. That the balance of forces was always against Russia, and that invading only made that apparent. But I’m not sure that follows the available evidence available before the invasion. Putin’s strategy meetings might have amounted to “Lads, it’s Tottenham”; but they were wearing Tottenham jerseys after all.
It seems to me more likely that Putin took a gamble, a good gamble, which had positive expected value, and came up absolutely snake eyes on the heroism of a relative handful of Ukrainians. It’s wildly unfair to blame Putin for not expecting this guy would start acting like a Slavic Churchhill, when one could have expected a performance more akin to Ghani or at best like Tsikhanouskaya. If you really drew an org chart with leadership roles and dates of events, there were maybe 100 Ukrainians, from TDF and police commanders who chose to fight in Kyiv at key moments to key governmental figures without whom the whole Ukrainian resistance project would have collapsed, to a handful of nationalist psychopaths who chose what seemed like certain death over letting down the side.
But let’s focus on the guy at the top: Zelensky. His early life contains few signs of heroism, or even of particular nationalism or patriotism, very little of obvious self-sacrifice and duty. He’s been in the media industry for his entire adult life. Nor in media was he some Mishima-esque hyper-patriot, he voiced Paddington Bear in the dubs and some of his movies were banned in Ukraine under nationalist laws he opposed, not a bloodthirsty nationalist. Obviously I lack the language skills to really delve into his oeuvre or personality, but there’s little there that would predict that when the chips were down he would stay in Kyiv..
I’m having trouble tracking down citations, but I recall pre-war and in the early war the theory that NATO would immediately evacuate Zelensky and enough of his government to form a reasonable government-in-exile for Ukraine, while funding/arming terrorist groups inside Ukraine, gleefully described as “making Ukraine into Russia’s Afghanistan.” Had Zelensky chosen to go along with that plan, I think Kyiv falls by the end of March, even with a higher assessment of Ukrainian skill today than I had then. [It’s in the nature of asymmetric wars
that demonstrative symbolic victories
are critical to maintaining popular support. Fleeing was a choice he very much could have made, that many leaders have made, that some would call not the cowardly choice but the humanitarian choice to spare his people the suffering of war. But he didn’t.
And I’m left asking, can we predict that? How can we predict how leaders will react under pressure? How can we predict how wars and matters of state will conclude if they hinge on these personal decisions of individual, fallible, men?
Maybe we can blame that on systems. Maybe hyper nationalist Ukrainian networks were ready to kill him if he jumped, and the guy was stuck between picking how to die. But that strikes me as a little too pat an explanation, eliminating the individual by inventing a system that we can put our faith in.
Or maybe there’s some psychological profile? Surely the armies of the world have looked into this, studied this? What conclusions have been reached, and how can we apply them?
I've already written elsewhere that a lot of people are talking about the war the way
theysome people were talking about Trump's 2016 victory. "Of course Trump was going to win, the writing was on the wall." "Of course Ukraine was not going to fall, the writing was on the wall."None of this was obvious. Both Putin and Clinton squandered their advantage, but both almost won. A few more corrupt Ukrainian officials, or a luckier Gostomel airport opertion, or a narrower front, or Zelenskiy dying or fleeing - a lot of things could've turned the tide.
The bigger fault of Putin's plan is betting everything on a single outcome: the special military operation will trigger an overwhelming and quick regime change. Zero contingency plans. And I'm not talking about foreseeing the whole fiasco.
what if your army gets bogged down sieging the cities?
what if the Ukrainian army doesn't surrender?
what if Ukraine abandons the left bank and leaves actually competent insurgents behind your lines?
what if anything happens that turns your quick SMO into a slog? The response from the US to your posturing has been "bring it on" so far, are you sure you can weather their response?
Dunno. Maybe I was just biased and happend to get lucky against the odds, but I believed from the start that things were not going to go well for the Russians and put it in writing as early as March 2nd:
Evidently the Ukrainians' grit and resolve wasn't obvious to most until the fighting actually started. Were most westerners typical-minding things? After all, if the UK got invaded I can only imagine that most of us would be trying to flee or at least keep our heads down and not get killed. But that's not what I expected the Ukrainians to do, and they didn't.
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I expected Ukraine to fall, but I expected Putin to do it slow and methodical, not with a coup de main. For instance, roll tanks into the Donbas. Take that, fortify and regroup. Take the rest of Eastern Ukraine, fortify and regroup. THEN try for the rest.
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It is hard enough for people to update with new information. To actually update with new information and remember they used to have the incorrect information is rare.
I absolutely thought that Kiev would fall and fall quickly. (Should I have known this based on information I had available at the time? Good question.)
That's only imaginable if there is very little to no resistance. A city can be defended very easily, and unless you're dealing with an extremely casualty insensitive army, no one's gonna just drive in while vehicles are blowing up left and right around them.
Russians thought nobody would seriously fight, and the units weren't ready to steamroll even the modest opposition they encountered.
Mind you, most 'armored vehicles' Russia uses are paper armored due to flotation requirements, everything but the tanks can be killed with a .50 BMG.
So a couple of heavy machineguns inside buildings can be extremely dangerous to an 'armored column'. (NATO is slightly better in that regard, typically their infantry vehicles are armored to withstand the easily man-portable heavy machineguns. But they don't float at all, of course)
I also expected Ukraine to fall rather quickly, but I didn't expect anything like this.
I expected cities with major resistance to have their supply lines cut until the majority of the populace went elsewhere (or starved, but the former seems much more likely). Cities don't tend to have the huge food reserves they used to when sieges were more common.
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I was also surprised when Kiev didn't fall and the war dragged on. My perception was that Ukraine was a European version of the regime in Afghanistan, and would fold before determined attack because no one was truly loyal to it.
I think a lot westerners just kind of assumed that the Euromaidan and Reginonv parties were functionally equivalent in much the same way that Republicans and Democrats often are in the US or Torys vs Labour in Britain. Unless you were the sort of person who was already paying specific attention to the defense situation in and around the Black Sea prior to the invasion you wouldn't have known who Zelensky was, or that the Yanukovych and Azarov were even on the outs, nevermind why. (assuming you knew who Yanukovych and Azarov were in the first place)
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My model was not Afghanistan. It was Crimea. Russia would roll over it, the West would be Really Mad, but then shrug because what can you do?
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Who even claimed that?
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/nov/09/hillary-clinton-election-president-loss
https://www.brookings.edu/blog/fixgov/2017/09/20/why-hillary-clinton-lost/
https://www.chicagotribune.com/opinion/commentary/ct-hillary-clinton-lost-bad-campaign-perspec-20161114-story.html
https://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-ol-le-kamala-harris-hillary-clinton-20190126-story.html
All deride Hillary's supposedly obvious and massive flaws as a candidate, while ignoring that she was inches from winning. Massively flawed candidates don't end up there. Massively flawed soccer teams don't lose on penalties in the world cup final, they fail to qualify for the tournament at all. Hillary was a hugely talented presidential candidate who ran a very effective campaign (especially behind the scenes and within the establishment) who lost to another hugely talented political/media savant.
2nd place finishers are always underrated in today's culture.
Maybe it's a scapegoating thing. Losing always tends to make people suddenly notice all your flaws and laser-focus on them, trying to fit them into the explanation of why you didn't come in 1st.
It's more a combination of the adulation heaped on the winner and the just world fallacy. 2017 Trump is the most powerful man in the world, 2017 HRC paid $1 for a coffee like everyone else. If that came down to luck, it makes the world too frightening for most people.
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I disagree with your Hillary point, in that I disagree with your evaluation of how hard it is to do what she did. Given how sloped the media and social media environment is, my prior is that any Democrat that doesn't win in a landslide is a schmuck.
Sure, but the primary accomplishment is beating a bunch of other Democrats. Beating them so bad, so conclusively, they didn't even show up. Hillary was a football team so fucking good that the whole rest of the division said "2016 is more of a rebuilding season for us."
Did you see who was available? They said that because it was literally true. Basically everyone's been bemoaning what Obama did the the DNC's bench since 2014.
Elsewhere in the thread, other replies insulting Trump and refuting my claim that he was a good politician, argue that the 2016 Republican primary challengers were all chuckleheads too. At some point, we have to accept that somebody somewhere is good at winning elections, after all people keep doing it. If all the mainstream Rs and Ds were really this bad at politics, the weirdo 3rd parties we all support might actually win on occasion.
Jeb was pretty uniquely bad, and had gobbled the institutional support, which made the rest of the field weird. In the end the other problem was Ted Cruz was the Trump challenger the people wanted, but none of the institutions wanted to try that until way too late.
John, My Father was a Postman, Kasich basically ego'd Trump to a smooth victory instead of what could have been an interesting match.
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Note that each of those articles were written after the fact. None of those outlets, especially not the Grauniad and Chicago Tribune, would have countenanced the possibility for Trump winning prior to November 7th 2016.
For reference here is the Culture War thread from the week of the election.
Exactly, after events happened some people were claiming that was inevitable and obvious despite claiming exactly opposite before event.
I agree with you, I'm just pointing out an obvious problem with @FiveHourMarathon's alleged evidence, and offering counter-evidence of my own. The thing about going back to the thread from the day of is that even though a lot of the more ardent Clinton supporters have since deleted their posts, you can see the shift happening in real time as Trump goes from "joke candidate who will never win" to "president-elect".
I'm not really sure what the problem is, so either it's so obvious I'm missing it or we've lost the plot here.
The whole original context of that link dump was supporting @orthoxerox comparison:
The whole point is that the newspapers (and internet blowhards) went from pre-election/prewar certainty that Clinton/Russia would win in a brutal stomping, to finger-wagging smug certainty that "everyone knew Clinton/Russia's campaign was fatally flawed and that Trump/Ukraine were guaranteed a win." With the side dish of "Trump/Ukraine supporters weren't brave smart contrarians because they were just pointing out the obvious things we all knew."
This whole "Hillary and Trump were both trash politicians" thing quickly requires that "Rubio and Cruz and Bush III and every Democrat who stayed out of the race for fear of Hillary are all Trash Politicians" and then once you start working your way down we haven't had a decent politician since like Nixon or LBJ. Clearly someone is winning all these elections, and since nobody else can, we have to assume that the winners are pretty good at something.
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Here's where you lost me.
Hillary is a good servant but a bad master, by which I mean that having her in your administration is not a bad idea, but letting her be the boss giving orders to everyone else is a bad idea. I genuinely feared that if elected she would pick a fight with Putin to show off how strong she was, and I haven't changed my mind on that since.
Her campaign was trying to copy that of Obama, with the fixed notion that "Big Data won it for him". Adulatory articles in the media and online about how sophisticated it all was, that the old days of candidates on the doorstep were gone with the Ark, how Robbie Mook (and boy did nominative determinism strike again) was a genius. The campaign, in fact, got so cocksure they spent more time knifing each other in the back as to who would get the closest access to The Empress and thus the pick of the choice spoils once she was enthroned and the handing out of plum posts was in her gift.
Both comedians and current affairs shows made great hay of laughing at the very notion of Trump even having a snowball in Hell's chance in the election. There is still great Schadenfreude to be gotten from watching the smug prognosticators ending up with egg on their faces in videos like this. How's your "it'll be interesting tomorrow night when Hillary Clinton wins that Donald Trump will have lost this election from the very first day he announced" looking now, Hillary Rosen? Or your "big beautiful brown wall", Maria Cardona?
Afterwards, of course, everyone had hindsight as to what went wrong and what she should have done and how she should have listened to Bill when he was telling her when and where to campaign. The fact is, she was not very likeable with little to no charisma as a candidate, she seemed to change her mind with every wind that blew from focus groups, and the "basket of deplorables" remark - made to a fundraising dinner for rich LGBT folk where she and they laughed at the very notion of the plebians - didn't help her at all to overcome the "scolding schoolmarm" image.
I mean, she was the architect of the Libya intervention, which went spectacularly badly. Similarly, she was in favor of Iraq II, which also went spectacularly badly. Her domestic proposals - notably Hillarycare - bombed spectacularly. She didn't have a significant record of either drafting/sponsoring major legislation while she was in the Senate, or being a particularly-effective bureaucrat while at state.
No, I don't think that having her in an administration would be a good idea.
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I think Hillary was a massively flawed candidate because it was so close. 2016 was a cripple fight, not a clash of the titans. Trump was an appalling candidate and in 2016 he didn't have incumbency or anywhere near the fully developed cult of personality he did by 2020. Clinton had a trainload of baggage, including an active FBI investigation and decades of GOP attacks. I think it's quite probable that if Tim Kaine (or almost anyone basically competent who wasn't as politically radioactive as Clinton) had been at the top of the ticket then the Democratic candidate would've won handily and we'd be talking about how weird it was that the GOP nominated an insane reality tv star as their candidate. Conversely, someone like Rubio or Jeb might've been mediocre candidates in the grand scheme of things but they probably would've mopped up Hillary.
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I find it entirely normal that journalists try to come up with all sorts of explanations for an election outcome that was relatively surprising. So the arguments in these articles don't strike me as anything extraordinary. But they aren't the equivalent of the revisionist narrative, to the extent that it even exists, that "Trump was going to win anyway".
Yes, inches from winning against someone universally derided as a laughingstock! That's hardly an argument against her being deeply flawed.
But Trump isn't universally derided. He is, in fact, immensely popular.
As far as I can tell, Trump and his presidential bid was universally derided as a laughingstock by the great majority of polite society and the mainstream media. In retrospect, we know that he was popular, that much is true.
"Demeaned by polite society" isn't the same as "universally derided". Yes, Blue Tribe -- both its left wing members and right wing members -- revile Trump. But they are not everyone.
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I guess we disagree here. If political skill is a concept that exists, Trump has it. He KOed Republican primary challengers like he was prime Tyson, one after another. He built a base of enthusiasm like nothing we've seen before or since.
That says more about the rest of the challengers than his political skills, I think.
Assuming elections are basically real (and this conversation is kinda dumb if we assume they aren't) then it's sorta bass ackwards to say that nobody who wins elections nationally or in big states is good at politics. They went through a selection process where hundreds of smart talented guys would have wanted their spot, and they won, they clearly had something the other guys didn't.
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Obama. Just like Trump, Obama's cult of personality hollowed out the infrastructure of the party he hijacked, upending more "establishment"-connected figures left, right, and center. Also like Trump, Obama's coalition was not associated with any particular policy innovations, but generally was based on vibes ("he's young! Slim! Black! At home in celebrity culture!") that eventually settled into having most relevance in culture war issues that the candidate himself historically flip-flopped on (Trump on abortion, Obama on gay marriage). The parallel isn't exact, but it's a lot stronger than it seems like it should be on the face of the matter.
Maybe it's a perspective thing, but I don't recall Obama ever having Trumpian levels of support. The biggest thing with Trump was the grassroots nature of his support, which maybe Obama never had the chance to form because the media loved him so much. Trump supporters made their own billboards for him. Obama never had that kind of spontaneous outpouring of faith, outside of the Black community.
My experience is that Obama's support among the people was equivalent to Trump's, but that Obama also had the media fawning over him, which amplified the personal charisma to legendary proportions. I say this as someone who voted for Obama when I first turned eighteen, so I was in the enthusiastic youth cohort.
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This is so obvious I feel dumb for not noticing it. And Obama left the DNC amazingly unsupported by the end of his presidency, too. You kind of expect Trump to not give a shit about the GOP, but surely Obama cares about the institution of his party, right?
(I think Obama kept his email fundraising list out of the DNC's hands, but I am having trouble googling this to confirm.)
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Massively flawed candidates absolutely can get close to winning if they have found ways to use back-channels to force out opposition before elections start.
I believe that if the democrats had run Webb or Sanders they would have beaten Trump handily, but instead they ran a candidate who was literally the poster child for "Corrupt Washington insider" against a candidate who's whole brand was essentially "to hell with those guys" and were surprised when it turned out that "to hell with those guys" was a fairly widely held sentiment.
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I am not much of a Hillary Clinton fan, and I think you might be overstating her qualities: I do think that she seems to have a certain negative charisma, and unlike soccer teams competing for a spot in the World Cup final, she actually never went through the lengthy vetting at lower political levels that most Presidential candidates do Her only elective office was US Senator from NY, where she ran effectively unopposed in the Democratic primary in a state in which the Dem nominee is a virtual lock in the general election.
That being said, another data point in favor of your argument is that she did exactly as well as predicted by models based only on underlying fundamentals of the election (i.e., that ignore candidates, polls, etc).
Your description of her Senate run overstates her case a bit. New York is seen as a Democratic lock now but in 1999 it was widely believed that Rudy Giuliani was going to run for the open seat, and he was expected to beat every Democrat who had expressed interest at the time. After Clinton threw her hat into the ring the field, such as it existed, stepped aside as the party believed that only a candidate with Clinton's star power would be enough to challenge Giuliani. So right off the bat, she had the crowd cleared for her and didn't even have to run in a competitive primary. Then, Giuliani's marriage fell apart right around the time he was diagnosed with prostate cancer, and he decided not to run. Now she's running against Rick Lazio, who was less well-known and more conservative than Giuliani. And she underperformed here, too. Though she ended up winning by 12 points, polling was much tighter than anyone had anticipated; Lazio made it a real ballgame. More importantly, though, while 12 points is a healthy margin, Al Gore ended up winning the state on the same ballot by 25 points. In other words, a significant number of Democrats decided that they'd rather vote for a Republican nobody than vote for Mrs. Clinton. This should have been a prodrome for the future but the Democratic establishment never quite got it. It's no coincidence that when Democrats nationwide were given a choice they chose freshman Senator who had made a good speech a few years prior despite the "aura of inevitability" the party sought to create. It was no coincidence that after the part establishment sough to rectify this in 2016 by clearing the field to an unprecedented degree an old socialist who would have been a fringe candidate in any other election threatened to win the nomination, and was possibly only thwarted by the specter of superdelegates whose assumed positions made all media reports look like Clinton had the nomination locked up before the first primary.
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I agree on all your negative points, I really disliked her and most every policy she stood for. And, fwiw, when I say "Hillary" I think it's best to just include "the Clinton machine" or "Hillary's advisers" and "Bill working for Hillary" within the shorthand "Hillary." Because it's not really possible to separate them in any meaningful way. It's like using "Taylor Swift" as the shorthand for "Taylor Swift's musical production team" when talking about who tops the charts.
But I still think you're underrating the value of the behind the scenes wrangling she was able to engage in to achieve those stations of power without getting elected in an open competition. Tons of people would love to get parachuted into a safe Senate seat, she got it. She finished second in 2008 to a generational talent in Obama. She cleared the decks of primary challengers before running in 2016, her only opponents were joke candidates. Having the political skill and wherewithal to avoid having to fight a real primary is an underrated ability in America. It's like being such a dominant light-heavyweight that all your would-be challengers go up to heavy or down to middle because they already know they won't beat you. That's a singular achievement! Compare to Biden, who had to slog through a dozen idiots and a few good candidates; or Mitt Romney, who probably has a much better shot in 2012 if he doesn't get dragged for months by Santorum over his weak conservative Bona Fides.
In a similar vein, Mitch McConnell is the most talented politician of our generation, and he gets consistently underrated because it is almost all behind the scenes stuff, off camera stuff, that makes him great.
Yes, this is true; however: 1) As you note, I think this was more a function of the Clinton machine, rather than her per se; 2) I took the OP to be talking about her electability in a general election, rather than her acumen at negotiating intra-party politics and/or the [invisible primary])(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_primary)
So, ability behind the scenes, ala Mitch McConnell or someone who might well have him beat, Willie Brown is not the same as ability as a candidate.
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But is is really healthy to have such a lock on your national party that no meaningful opposition can run against you, you own them due to lending them money and having a firm grip on the pursestrings of campaign money so that you can funnel it where you want it (if the allegations are to be believed ), and your campaign is run basically on the idea that "it's my turn now, given that Obama stole my chance in 2008"?
I mean, it is great political machine manoeuvring to plan for years to run your campaign to get elected to the highest office in the land as your right, and to be able to get parachuted into a safe seat so you have the minimum necessary experience in office as yourself (rather than on the coat tails of your spouse) to run, and to have bribed/persuaded/terrorised other rivals off, but is it really good for the body politic no matter which party does it, in any country?
I doubt it's good for the long term health of the body politic, and you shouldn't throw hard sliders if you want to keep your original elbow ligaments, but we're not here for the long term we're here to win elections/baseball games. Saying someone who was a couple of lucky breaks from winning the presidency of the United States of America was a bad politician is a rabbit hole of constantly claiming that everyone is shit that leads nowhere useful. Somebody is good at winning elections because somebody keeps winning them.
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I don't know who Nate Silver had in mind.
I can definitely remember numerous cultural and political commentators expressing their complete confidence in Hillary's victory, and ridiculing anyone who dared to doubt it, and a different and much smaller group of commentators making the argument after the election that this cocksure approach had no basis in reality, as most polls predicted Trump having roughly 30% of a chance immediately before the election. I never heard the argument in the original comment anywhere, not even from dissidents.
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I mean, come on, Nate. Could you be less specific?
I think if you read the actual link you will see that he is quite specific about what he means, though he is talking about something rather different than the views posited by OP.
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