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Of Presidents And Sycophants

Oleg Gordievsky writes about how many Russians behave as toadies to Putin, but the examples he cited, while embarrassing and often ridiculous, seem positively tame compared to the praise regularly heaped on our Presidents by their partisans. To my knowledge, no one has speculated, jokingly or otherwise, about Putin’s potential to be a Messiah or […]

Oleg Gordievsky writes about how many Russians behave as toadies to Putin, but the examples he cited, while embarrassing and often ridiculous, seem positively tame compared to the praise regularly heaped on our Presidents by their partisans. To my knowledge, no one has speculated, jokingly or otherwise, about Putin’s potential to be a Messiah or a “Lightwalkerworker,” and I am skeptical that there has ever been any Putin sycophant so delirious as Hinderaker when praising Bush as a “man of extraordinary vision and brilliance approaching to genius.” Maybe Putin has similarly fawning admirers, but I have to assume they are somehow on the government payroll. Perhaps systems with strong roles for presidents inevitably lead to this sort of flattery of the quasi-monarch, as our cousins in the parliamentary democracies do not usually fall into such excesses of leader-worship. Parliamentary leaders are readily replaceable and the electorate is not involved in raising them up to their leadership position in the same way.

It seems to me that our bad habits might be worse in that they often seem to be more expressions of real enthusiasm in praising mediocrities rather than self-serving celebration of someone who can give you patronage. Nominating conventions here in the U.S. are elaborate pieces of staged propaganda for something very much like a personality cult. While many of the speakers no doubt craft their remarks to advance their political careers, that still cannot really explain the zeal of most of the delegates and other partisans around the country. This staged propaganda moment was not always the case, but as the conventions have increasingly become more of a formality and a televised performance than a necessary political gathering the sycophancy of the attendees seems to have grown apace.

Republicans rolled their eyes at the stagecraft of Obama’s acceptance speech in Mile High Stadium, obsessing about the “Greek temple” look that was actually a reference to the Lincoln Memorial (talk about a personality cult!), but this was, I think, mostly a function of jealousy after their own relatively technically inept convention centered around an uninspiring speaker. The response to Palin seems to confirm this. There is nothing particularly edifying or attractive about flattering people in power. However, unlike in Russia’s populist authoritarian system where there may be some clear incentive to do this as a way of gaining access or employment, there is not necessarily any reward for abasing oneself before party leaders here and yet thousands and millions of people here do it on a regular basis.

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