I suspect it might be how destructive conservatism became so muscular in the West too.
You have a massive economic disruption. With the USSR/Russia there were obvious inflection points like 1991, but even in the West it’s easy to say that for many people, forward motion has ceased. It’s hard for many people to say “I’m better off today than my father was in 1975”. Leadership has no effective tools to deal with this crisis. You can’t just give the point the economy in directions that would yield dividends for the proliterat anymore-- Russia simply doesn’t have the financial resources to do so, and in flailing Western powers, it’s all captured by the Capital-Protestant Work Ethic-Industrial Complex mindset where just because you’re more productive than ever doesn’t mean that means you deserve to be better off.
So what can you offer? Culture war wins. Pick some minority groups, blame them for the “mainstream” group’s malaise, and persecute them. If you can whip up enough of a stink with your population, they’ll take it as a substitute for actual material progress, but without any risk to actual entrenched wealth. Notice how all the modern “pogrom against queer communities” and “battle against woke” stuff costs virtually nothing to capital. Nobody has to pay an extra dime/kopeck in taxes, no business has to be reined in.
In some cases, you can even use it to further emaciate the state-- look how nobody is talking about “American public schools are underfunded and flailing” anymore because they’re too busy arguing about the Critical Race Theory that’s not actually being taught, making it even easier to plunder their budgets.
I suspect it might be how destructive conservatism became so muscular in the West too.
You have a massive economic disruption. With the USSR/Russia there were obvious inflection points like 1991, but even in the West it’s easy to say that for many people, forward motion has ceased. It’s hard for many people to say “I’m better off today than my father was in 1975”. Leadership has no effective tools to deal with this crisis. You can’t just give the point the economy in directions that would yield dividends for the proliterat anymore-- Russia simply doesn’t have the financial resources to do so, and in flailing Western powers, it’s all captured by the Capital-Protestant Work Ethic-Industrial Complex mindset where just because you’re more productive than ever doesn’t mean that means you deserve to be better off.
So what can you offer? Culture war wins. Pick some minority groups, blame them for the “mainstream” group’s malaise, and persecute them. If you can whip up enough of a stink with your population, they’ll take it as a substitute for actual material progress, but without any risk to actual entrenched wealth. Notice how all the modern “pogrom against queer communities” and “battle against woke” stuff costs virtually nothing to capital. Nobody has to pay an extra dime/kopeck in taxes, no business has to be reined in.
In some cases, you can even use it to further emaciate the state-- look how nobody is talking about “American public schools are underfunded and flailing” anymore because they’re too busy arguing about the Critical Race Theory that’s not actually being taught, making it even easier to plunder their budgets.