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Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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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 they some 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?

"Of course Trump was going to win, the writing was on the wall."

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.

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".

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.

Yes, inches from winning against someone universally derided as a laughingstock! That's hardly an argument against her being deeply flawed.

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.

He built a base of enthusiasm like nothing we've seen before or since.

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.

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.)