Better for the culprit, that is.
Kevin Drum writes that he'll never understand authoritarians. He begins by quoting a report from yesterday's Washington Post:
Officials in Russian-occupied territories in eastern and southern Ukraine were forcing people to vote “under a gun barrel,” residents said on Saturday as staged referendums — intended to validate Moscow’s annexation of the territory it occupies — entered their second day.
Drum follows up:
What's the point of this? Everyone knows what's going on, and Moscow is hardly even making an attempt to pretend the referendums are real. Should we take it as good news that even a thug like Vladimir Putin feels like he has to at least symbolically carry out the norms of democracy?
What's the point of this?
I've often puzzled over this as well, though usually my puzzlement has been directed at American politicians and political operatives, not foreign powers. I've wondered: The pretext is so transparent, why bother? But pattern and practice confirm: bad actors almost always bother. There must be something to this strategy.
Sometimes an individual just doesn't have much of an excuse to offer or hasn't thought things through. It's as though they are just blurting something out that evades (no matter how unconvincingly) the truth. Sometimes a U.S. Senator, or a corporate malefactor, or any wrongdoer in the public eye can't come up with anything to say that's both exculpatory and plausible. Think of a child (no matter how imaginative) caught with a hand in the cookie jar.
In contrast, when this is not the course the offender takes -- when folks running a con blurt out the truth -- that's often regarded as especially dumb. With a politician, it's a gaffe. With anyone else, such truth-telling is an own goal, which covers the inadvertent truth-teller with ignominy.
With a political party, and a partisan media, when everyone is repeating the same bogus talking points, sheerest repetition may give even the flimsiest cover stories the sheen of believability. Sometimes this works -- with both partisan listeners, who don't think too hard about it, and with other folks who aren't paying all that much attention (which would be most of us, most of the time).
Plus the unconvincing bullet-points give partisans something to repeat to each other (and to their opponents). The folks dissembling aren't caught flat-footed with mouth agape. They have something to say, which -- if true -- would justify whatever con they're running.
Should we take it as good news that even a thug like Vladimir Putin feels like he has to at least symbolically carry out the norms of democracy?
I dunno. I don't find this reassuring. With brazen wrongdoing, whether invading a neighboring country or fabricating a big lie about a free and fair election, there are always folks who'll fall for the story-telling. So, when push comes to shove, a cover story it is.
September 26, 2022 postscript: It occurs to me that Drum's puzzlement may have stemmed from something that distinguishes Putin from most other bad actors: he is a strongman, who rules a country, commands its military, and poses an active threat to other nations across the globe.
My response? This doesn't matter. Putin, former KGB operative, is an accomplished con man who uses every trick of the trade, at every juncture. A Rand Corporation report states:
We characterize the contemporary Russian model for propaganda as “the firehose of falsehood” because of two of its distinctive features: high numbers of channels and messages and a shameless willingness to disseminate partial truths or outright fictions. In the words of one observer, “[N]ew Russian propaganda entertains, confuses and overwhelms the audience.”
Contemporary Russian propaganda has at least two other distinctive features. It is also rapid, continuous, and repetitive, and it lacks commitment to consistency.
Fiona Hill, who wrote a book about the man ("Putin: Operative in the Kremlin" in 2013), years before serving as deputy assistant to President Trump as well as senior director for European and Russian affairs on his administration's NSA . In October 2021, she observed that Putin had selected an attractive female translator for a meeting with President Trump just to distract the president. She said:
Putin is a very wily and very savvy former KGB operative. In fact one might say he never did leave the KGB. So he's extremely skilled at manipulating people and finding people's vulnerabilities.
Putin hasn't the least reason to abandon any tool that might offer an advantage, whether distracting an easily distracted chief executive or forcing people to vote under the barrel of a gun.