Trump, Putin and Fashion in the Old East

It is clear the mould that Oliver Stone wanted for his interview with Vladimir Putin - the Frost Nixon interviews - more pugilist than journalist. This time transposed into the baroque interior of some Kremlin drawing room, Stone speaking to the translator, then on the more probing questions, to Putin directly. Putin speaks passable English and one assumes that the translator is there for authenticity and to buy the Russian president time to craft his responses. Not that he seems to need it. His well crafted responses are often convincing. Putin’s whole claim to power rests on his ability to construct an ice cold image, never flustered, his tone of voice never wavering, even parrying the Stone’s right cross of “Why did you hack the US elections?” So at ease, in fact, there is even space for humour. In the beginning it is he that brings Stone a cup of coffee, ironically parodying an obliging host. This is a man in total control.

Putin’s is the still surface below which swirls the most powerful currents able to reassemble history to convey Russia as the victim of a post-cold-war American-European conspiracy. In this narrative Gorbachev sold the Soviet Union and Russian might down the river for a deal that the US reneged on. The two superpowers engaged in a decades long Mexican standoff, putting down their guns at the same time, only for Uncle Sam to pick his up again straight away, seeding Russia with the disease and corruption of liberal democracy, opening her up for US companies to pillage, moving NATO into the Baltic states, right on Russia’s doorstep, a move that the US would never tolerate in reverse.

Even on a personal level, most former Soviet citizens feel they were sold a raw deal - the limitless material wealth, world peace and freedoms they were promised for relinquishing the Soviet dream, seemed never to have materialised. Branded on their consciousness is the nineties, the period of economic anarchy, the breakdown of social order, the international humiliation of defeat. Their leader Yeltsin bloated, drunk and confused, an international laughing stock like the country he represented. This was the time before Putin stepped into the breach, and took control. To the Russian people and to the world, for Putin to lose his calm would be to instantly lose his claim to power.

It is interesting to consider the East-West dichotomy through fashion even today. You can tell travelling from West to East when you have crossed the old Berlin wall but how young women dress. In the East they dress aspirationally. To Westerners looking on it appears tacky and old fashioned, their high-heels, fake gold and knock-off designer mini-skirts, their efforts at grace and poise, their infatuation with glamour seems camp and disingenuous. In the West we opt far more for a slovenly, shabby chic. Of course, this style of fashion is just as, or perhaps even more, richly socially encoded. In the West, the ideal is that our fashion points to individualism and authenticity (yet to anyone that has been in hip areas of Brooklyn or Soho will know just how fake this individualism is). This binary opposition points to a sociological polemic at work - in the West our dress conveys WHO WE ARE, while in the East, their dress conveys WHO THEY WANT TO BE.

The current choice of American President is the epitome of this rampant posturing individualism. Where in his interview with Stone, Putin clearly assembled a historical thesis about the downfall of the Soviet Union. Yes it had factual flaws, suffered from overstatements and was clearly politically motivated BUT it was measure, credible, cohesive and compelling. When President Trump discusses a particular topic such as North Korea or climate change, he seems idiotic, he lurches from one lie to another, his sentences are often incoherent, built from a toddler’s vocabulary and perception of right and wrong, “very very good” vs “very very bad”. The reason that Trump for all this still has traction with vast swathes of America, is that he resonates with them on an instinctive emotional level. The free world now has a leader so obscenely intellectually slovenly when we shifted individualism, when we accepted “That’s my opinion and you have to respect it” as a moral position, ie when it became more important how we felt, than what was.

At the fall of the Berlin Wall it was accepted as gospel that freedom lead to robustness and stability, within both economies and societies. Where Soviet control in the short-term allowed leader’s will to be achieved in the long-term, it had created lassitude, resentment, the fault-lines that eventually lead to the system’s collapse. In the West the free flow of ideas and debate had shored up the system from within, it was the chaos that had brought on innovation and the drive to achieve. Yet then there had been basic scaffolding of civic investment, belief in democracy and national progress, and a central canon of facts that the vast majority of society agreed were true. These have since fallen away so American society is an amorphous lump resisting any attempt to say anything conclusive about it.

This fragmentation in civil society has not just allowed a president like Trump to exist but has created him. Not that Putin would be much better. Putin is a ruthless and brutal operator, trained by the KGB, his capability to grasp and hold on to power is terrifying. Trump as a ridiculous display of incompetence might hit such a fever pitch so as everyone gives up on him. My point is the difference in form of what created these leaders - for Putin came from the Russian people’s fear of chaos, for the USA, Trump arrived from their embrace of it.