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The time has come again, Russian elections are on the horizon in mid-September and already we are seeing the exact same reactions to them as we always do since Putin came to power. The West is absolutely convinced that any elections in Russia that they don’t like must be undemocratic or illegitimate. What qualifies as legitimate electoral methodology however is never discussed, for Russia is simply “bad”, and thus their elections must also be just as bad. For if they were good elections, they would bring about some sort of Yeltsin 2.0 figure who would stand down and give Europe/America everything they want from Russia at little to no cost.
Probably one of the most iconic political memes in Russia is the 1996 cover of Time Magazine that depicts a chubby but confident Boris Yeltsin with the words “Yanks to the Rescue: The secret story of how American advisers helped Yeltsin win”. This image is sort of the pinnacle of hypocrisy towards Democracy in Russia and absolutely nothing has changed since the Clinton era. From the West’s standpoint openly manipulating Russian elections to get what we want is good, the Russians voting again for their extremely popular leader whom we don’t like is bad. It is just that blunt, tribalistic and primitive.
Although these are not presidential elections, it is always disgusting how EU talking heads criticize Russia for having a populist president that gets elected over-and-over again. Does having a revolving door of politicians that no one actually likes really work better for “Democracy”? Well it certainly works better for the Frankfurt School agenda in Europe. Angela Merkel was in power for some 16 years, but that was somehow 0Democratic. But what if she was a bit younger and chose to remain chancellor, at what point would her tenure go from Democracy to Fascism? At the 18-year mark? At the 21-year mark? Critics of Putin for staying in office too long simply don’t like him and thus he has been there “too long”. Mark Rutte was the Prime Minister of the Netherlands for 13 years, way over the American ideal maximum of 8 years in office for an executive, and yet no one said on the BBC that he had been running things for too long. How utterly unsurprising!
But if we step back from anti-Russian bias and take an honest look at Democracy, we can see that the very idea itself has been and always will be a sham no matter what country conducts the elections. Probably the number one barrier for positive change in the United States is its ancient electoral system from a pre-telegraph universe that no longer exists. Many years ago I conducted interviews with all of the significant third parties in the United States and overwhelmingly the number one challenge for all of them was simply getting onto the ballots. Since elections are conducted by the states that means they all have to fight to get onto voting machines and pieces of paper for 50 different regions for every two-year election cycle. The Republicans and Democrats are free from this titanic endless bureaucracy. Ignoring phenomena like gerrymandering, dead people casting ballots, voter ID issues, voting machine fraud, etc. just the fact that there is virtually no way to even get a third party as a choice on a national level, shows just how undemocratic the Two-Party System is and always was, but it is in no way unique in this sense.
In Europe there are more parties, but they are all ultimately the same. If the Democrats and Republicans are ‘two sides if the same coin’ then EU countries like Germany have many parties that are all ‘faces of a single die”. Germany may have many sides to its political shape but the only party that actually presents systemic change, the AfD is under constant attack and is being forever pushed out from elections and delegitimized if not shadow banned to one day be completely banned. Besides the martyrdom of the AfD we have seen that after losing in Hungary, Orban’s party is being dismantled by bureaucracy, the Romanian elections were simply overturned when the results were unkind to Brussels and Zelensky remains a symbol of European Democracy after his mandate to rule expired long ago.
Democracy is a sham, it is a lie, it has never existed and yet every few years the Russian side has to always try to intellectually defend its local ‘Democracy’ against the charges thrown at it by the copyright holders of the term in the West. This is a very stupid dance of absurdity that needs to come to an end. At no point in human history has the little guy ever actually made the big decisions. Perhaps there is a spirit of Democracy, where in Russia the masses more or less get what they want from the state, but the decisions are ultimately made by a small group of people just like in Brussels, London, Washington DC, Beijing etc. But ultimately the decision of what happens in society in any state is not determined by the masses and this has never been the case. Perhaps a nation can be made up “of the People” but it has been, is now, and will absolutely never be run “by and for the People” no matter where you live.
If we look at the world, we see that ultimately stable governments in the 21st century use a one-party system with multiple fractions. In Russia, China, and North Korea this is very blatant, all of them have one big party with orbiting smaller parties mostly working in harmony with the big player. In America it is also fairly obvious that the Two-Party system is just two fractions of a single greater entity and as discussed above the EU’s bustling ocean of various parties ultimately still march to the beat of one drum even if their titles have words like ‘Christian, Green, or Communist’ in them. They all obey ‘the agenda’.
One party rule with multiple factions is where humanity has arrived in the 21st century and we should just get used to the fact that we are now ultimately systemically the same. The only major question is what the big party wants and does and if it lines up with what we the masses want. Voting by paper seems to change nothing because of this set up, but voting with your feet, sends a much more powerful message. As we enter into a Multipolar World perhaps we will see that those who despise their native mono-party will simply just leave for another civilization rather than trying to ‘beat’ the system at its own game.
This article is not an attempt to ‘black pill’ anyone but to show that ultimately the constant bickering between pro and anti-Russian forces online over whether Russian elections are ‘democratic’ is utterly pointless. Trying to prove that someone has this amazing Democracy where the little guy is in charge is a charade. The toiling masses have never been the decision makers, not now, not ever. These heated arguments over Russian elections are over a false pretense. The real thing that matters is that the Russian state does what it can to keep its and the President’s approval ratings high. This gives them the mandate of the people to act and ensures the stability of the state. This methodology works and it gives the people in Russia more-or-less what they want and in this regard, this is where Russia and the West are completely different, and where Russia comes out as absolutely superior. This is not Democracy per say, but a rose by any other name would indeed smell as sweet. With 21st century technology, it is very easy to gather the information needed to at least understand what the masses desire and what is needed to keep the state legitimized ideologically. Russia does this, the West does the exact opposite for its elite utterly despise us normies. That is the real difference between Russia and the West that is not subjective.
