The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

Putin, who is the only world leader Trump admires, has applied these lessons well in today’s Russia. The media is relatively free. Unlike in China, where the Great Firewall blocks a lot of Western media, most Russians have access to most global news sources. Sometimes a journalist is bumped off. Others are intimidated. More often, they are co-opted by the Russian state. Putin may have grasped something that has eluded the net evangelists, who had a strong influence in Mrs Clinton’s State Department. The utopians believe the Revolution will be Twittered.62 Putinists believe they are far too happy digesting Western entertainment to bother. Far from reading dissident blogs, Russians are just as enamoured of kittens and listicles. Such sites are where the bulk of our traffic goes. There is no reason to think Westerners are inherently savvier than their Russian counterparts. ‘[The] new Kremlin won’t make the same mistake the old Soviet Union did: it will never let TV become dull,’ writes Peter Pomerantsev. ‘Most [Russians] are happy with the trade-off: complete freedom for complete silence.’63