The larger implications of the Putin "election"

The first thing to say is that it's no surprise. There was no serious opposition.

The main significance is that it further entrenches the pattern that's been established over the course of the Putin era.

Leon Aaron of the American Enterprise Institute elaborates on the two main implications we ought to consider:

First, there is the date. A Sunday in March is the only criterion for the Presidential election. Any Sunday. Suggesting a pattern, two previous elections were held on the first Sundays of the month: March 4th in 2012 and March 2nd in 2008. Putin chose the third because March 18 is the date of Putin’s triumphant address to the extraordinary joint session of the Federal Assembly where he “requested” the ratification of the treaty on “admitting” the occupied and annexed Crimea into the Russian Federation. For last’s week victory rally on the Manezhnaya Square next to the Kremlin, Putin chose a “concert” titled “Russia, Sevastopol, Crimea.” The message could not be clearer: no second thoughts, not to mention remorse in seizing part of the neighboring country. On the contrary, Putin must have felt that this theme would boost the turnout and the vote.

The second portentous feature of the pre-election context is the assassination attempt of former intelligence officer Sergei Skripal. It is possible, of course, that this could have been a “rogue” operation. Possible but very unlikely. By protocol deploying nerve gas in Britain, something that even the Soviet Union did not dare do, should have required the green light from the very top. Living openly and without protection, Skripal could have been killed at any time and in any other manner. Attempting to do so ten days before the election with an agent traceable to the hidden Soviet stockpile of chemical weapons sent another message of defiance.

Putin's personal style is not quite like that of the customary world-stage thug. He has remarked that Russian society ought to be more reliant on its traditional Christian underpinnings, and he's spoke about some social issues in a way that seems to stem from that. On the other hand, there are the two features of the just-concluded election that Aaron stresses, not to mention the track record of other mysterious poisonings, the harassment by Russian planes and ships of their US counterparts, the obvious support for the unspeakably evil Assad regime in Syria, the cyberattacks, and stunts like showing up at a meeting of Pacific-rim leaders with a formidable naval fleet in tow.

His ambition is what has propelled him. His path to his present level of power has not been a straight line. There was a time, during the Yeltsin era, when he was sleeping on a friend's couch in St. Petersburg, casting about for a gig.

In interviews, he is inclined to characterize his view of Russian geostrategy as an attempt to keep the West from diluting the essential identity of a huge nation with a long, culturally rich history of which it is immensely proud.

But, as the United States, Britain and various other countries have shown, a nation-state doesn't have to resort to thuggery to preserve its identity and viability.

He takes that nationalism to a level that precludes the kinds of moral considerations one should expect of a great power.

And, as Ben Shapiro points out today at NRO, he sets an example for other "leaders" in this age of rising nationalist fervor:

Romantic nationalism gives people a feeling of meaning. In doing so, it allows them to look beyond the failures of their leadership, and to ignore even material privation. And romantic nationalism is on the rise. Perhaps we have lived too long in the sunlight of capitalism and freedom, without bothering to educate our children on why these magnificent things exist; perhaps Nietzsche’s death of God left a hole in our hearts that cannot be filled by walking-around money. Whatever the reason, Putin’s continuing popularity should be a warning sign to freedom-lovers around the globe: Cults of leadership are on the rise. And if we don’t provide an alternative worldview for millions of young people from Russia to the United States, bad men will fill that gap with alacrity.

We should familiarize ourselves with the Putin approach to leading a nation-state, because it's an approach we'll be seeing more, not less, of.