The New Anti-Westernism

Fascinating anecdote from Anne Applebaum in Tbilisi, Georgia:

Halfway through an otherwise coherent conversation with a Georgian lawyer here I was startled by a comment he made about his country’s former government, led by then-president Mikheil Saakashvili. “They were LGBT,” he said, conspiratorially.

What did that mean, I asked, surprised. Were they for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights? For gay marriage? Were they actually gay? He couldn’t really define it, though the conversation meandered in that direction for a few more minutes, also touching on the subject of the former president’s alleged marital infidelity, his promotion of female politicians, his lack of respect for the church.

Afterward, I worked it out. The lawyer meant to say that Saakashvili — who drove his country hard in the direction of Europe, pulled Georgia as close to NATO as possible and used rough tactics to fight the ­post-Soviet mafia that dominated his country — was “too Western.” Not conservative enough. Not traditional enough. Too much of a modernizer, a reformer, a European. In the past, such a critic might have called Saakashvili a “rootless cosmopolitan.” But today the insulting code word for that sort of person in the former Soviet space — regardless of what he or she thinks about homosexuals — is LGBT.

As Applebaum says, Vladimir Putin and his friends do not have any sort of coherent ideology. They are guided by an attitude toward the west that mixes wounded pride, distrust, and contempt. They despise the shallow consumerism of western culture, the public sleaze, the petty vote-grubbing of politicians who seem more like salesmen than statesmen, etc., in short, all the stuff that anyone of conservative temperment despises about the west. Some of them also hate the secularism, others the pacifism. These attitudes push them toward nationalism and authoritarian politics. But without any more expansive ideology to guide them, it seems unlikely they will be much of a threat to the world.