Westerners (mainly Americans and the British) are so used to voting for the lesser of two evils that they can’t even comprehend that a country might actually like their leader. I don’t like Putin but that doesn’t mean Russians also don’t like him.
I remember a heated irl conversation I had about ten years ago with someone from Yugoslavia. That was a time I was peak lib and I couldn’t possibly fathom that what they were saying was true, namely that Russians really like Putin. Since then I have realized the error of my ways, but most people never get that far.
One of the hallmarks of liberalism is the inability to comprehend that other legitimate viewpoints than theirs exist in the world. They project their own (justified or not) likes and dislikes onto everyone else and think that secretly everyone in the world thinks like them and just needs to be liberated by the enlightened West. This manifests in a high level of condescension and dismissiveness toward other people’s cultures and outright refusal to even try and understand their politics on any deeper level beyond a superficial caricature. It is much easier to just label everything that is not western style liberal democracy as authoritarian, autocratic, dictatorial, etc.
Westerners (mainly Americans and the British) are so used to voting for the lesser of two evils that they can’t even comprehend that a country might actually like their leader. I don’t like Putin but that doesn’t mean Russians also don’t like him.
I remember a heated irl conversation I had about ten years ago with someone from Yugoslavia. That was a time I was peak lib and I couldn’t possibly fathom that what they were saying was true, namely that Russians really like Putin. Since then I have realized the error of my ways, but most people never get that far.
One of the hallmarks of liberalism is the inability to comprehend that other legitimate viewpoints than theirs exist in the world. They project their own (justified or not) likes and dislikes onto everyone else and think that secretly everyone in the world thinks like them and just needs to be liberated by the enlightened West. This manifests in a high level of condescension and dismissiveness toward other people’s cultures and outright refusal to even try and understand their politics on any deeper level beyond a superficial caricature. It is much easier to just label everything that is not western style liberal democracy as authoritarian, autocratic, dictatorial, etc.