An Audience of None

"When I agreed to serve as President Obama's running mate, he asked me a number of questions most important, he said to me, he asked me what I wanted most ... I told him I wanted to be the last person in the room before he made important decisions. That's what I asked Kamala. I asked Kamala to be the last voice in the room." 

-Democratic nominee for President Joe Biden, August 12, 2020

Here's the thing about a democracy. It's sloppy. It's glacial at times. It can often feel divisive, especially when the two major political parties are seemingly at an impasse. A democracy requires an educated populace, something we've seen can be hard to come by, especially in the last few years. But at democracy's core is what Joe Biden so beautifully articulated in the quote above. It is a collaboration among a team to do the right thing. Whether it's foreign or domestic policy, the expectation is that an American president has chosen the best men and women for the job. While most of the men and women who served in the federal government are career civil servants, a new administration typically can bring in roughly 4,000 members to Washington, DC to shape their vision for the country. Of those, 1,200 require Senate confirmation so as much as the party outside the majority likes to whine and whimper, the truth is that a new administration generally has qualified, diverse, and bipartisan individuals making life-or-death decisions for the country's health and stability on a daily basis. A president is the head of the Executive Branch, but he or she is not alone in making these decisions. 

This notion of collaboration for the greater good has not been easy. As Lin-Manuel Miranda has shown us, our forefathers were quite divided during the country's first three administrations. Later on, we saw Abraham Lincoln bring together a contentious leadership group that came simply to be known as a "team of rivals." Even Barack Obama, who swept into office as a transformational figure, had to work to earn the respect of the Joints Chiefs, who initially expressed quiet concern about the wet behind the ears kid from the South Side of Chicago. But despite these internal disagreements and initial skepticism, decisions got made. Ultimately, the buck stopped with the man in the Oval Office, but the American people came to understand that a president could and would do his due diligence before any decision was made. It was democracy in action, a system where the democratically-elected president and his hand-picked administration worked together and made decisions with the best possible information available at the time. We as Americans had no reason to think that this wouldn't always be the case. 

Then Donald Trump happened and all of that went out the window. His intentions were clear early on when he announced at the RNC Convention that, "I alone can fix it." Right there and then for all the world to see, we witnessed a rising autocrat announcing to the world his views on governmental collaboration. Over 4 years, we saw this play out in real-time. Trump hired and fired people on a whim. He brought in the CEO of Exxon to be his Secretary of State. He brought in a former neurosurgeon to run the Department of Housing and Urban Development. His senior advisor was a White nationalist millennial who came from Jeff Sessions' staff. He did not want the best people, he want his people. He famously wanted an Attorney General who would be "his Roy Cohn." By the end of four years, Trump had surrounded himself with what he thought were "the best people" but was in fact a group of unqualified sycophants, with no idea how to run a reelection campaign. By deferring to Trump's complete absence of political acumen, his stumbling supporters paved the way for countless errors that would prove fatal for his reelection efforts. In the end, Trump alone could not fix his broken campaign or his four years of failed political policies no matter how hard he tried. The American people knew where the buck stopped and it stopped with a man who led a disastrous administration that was unworthy of being given another four years to do even more damage to the country and to the world.

Like Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin also surrounds himself with an army of sycophants. 

But unlike Trump, Putin has zero accountability to the people of Russia. There are no Senate confirmations. As president, Putin can install who he wants, when he wants. He can amend his own country's constitution to allow him to serve a third term and even a fourth and a fifth. He can imprison journalists and keep them detained indefinitely. He even can go so far as to poison his political opponent, knowing full well that nobody in his personal sphere of influence would dare defy him. Putin is an autocrat, and one who sees it to be his mission and his mission alone to restore the greatest of Russia as to what it had been. It is his vision, not the collective vision of his administration, that rises front and center. Putin wants the history books to mention his name among the greatest Russian kings. He wants to reconstruct the Romanov Empire. And he wants to do it all because like Donald Trump, he believes that he and he alone can fix it.

However, here's the thing about autocrats. The people they bring in aren't always the best people. In fact, some of them are the worst types of people. They are corrupt. They are selfish. They are in it for themselves. They make decisions based upon how they can personally enrich their families rather than the people of their country. And those are just the more vocal ones. Others, like those who advise Vladimir Putin, are more than happy to sit idly back and let Putin make decisions. They know who butters their bread. Sure, Putin might be making ill-conceived decisions, but what does it matter? He's in power for life. They have a cozy Kremlin job for life. Sure, there are "democratic" elections in Russia but can there be any doubt that Putin won't win a four and fifth term? These people are ensconced in their Kremlin gig for the foreseeable future. Let Puty Putin have his fun; they'll simply sit by collecting rubles and seeking out the best locations for their third and fourth Italian villas. There are no Russian opinion polls on the job Putin is doing and even if there were they would be of no consequence to him or his administration. 

And here is where we see the ultimate weakness of the authoritarian. Yes, the buck stops with him. But without any dissenting voices, any decision is one made solely on one's naked ambitions. There is no consulting domestic policy team. No Joint Chiefs of Staff to give pushback. There are military advisors, sure, but their role is to simply rubber-stamp the authoritarian's desires. There is no Joe Biden or Kamla Harris serving in the number two position, being the last person in the room and being a voice of reason. The authoritarian listens to himself and himself only. His decisions are a go from the moment he announces them. With zero pushback, the authoritarian knows he has the green light to do what he sees fit. With no electoral consequences, it doesn't even matter if the decision hurts his country. He and he alone is making the decisions. It is simply up to his people to blindly obey his commands. 

We are now six days into the Ukrainian invasion, and we are witnessing firsthand the demise of Vladimir Putin. He did it. He went full Hitler. He launched the first European invasion of a sovereign nation since the end of World War II. His naked ambition made him want to have Ukraine as the first step in recapturing the Russian Empire of old. And yet, despite having superior land, air, and sea power, Putin's nearly 180,000 man army has met his match on the golden fields and blue skies of its western neighbor. The ruble has collapsed. Russia's big banks are facing historic sanctions. It is set to be kicked out of the SWIFT financial transaction system. Its oligarchs are being targeted for property seizure around the globe. It has become a pariah on the world stage. It has made Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy into the 21st century's first major international hero and has gained the Ukrainian people near-universal praise and support from across the globe. 

But even more damaging for an autocrat like Putin is learning, for the first time, that his country is not as strong as he envisioned. That his 180,000 man army can be stopped by a rag-tag team of "inferior" Ukrainian soldiers. For the past 14 years, Putin has put fear into the hearts of world leaders with the threat of his powerful military. Yet what we have seen over the past 6 days has been broken down tanks, untrained soldiers, downed fighter jets and bombers, and a complete and utter lack of proper military planning and execution on everything from supply lines to fuel to reinforcements to training and morale among the soldiers themselves. Putin's great military has been exposed, all because he, as the autocrat that he is, believed that it was superior because it just so happened to be his. In nearly 14 years as president, Putin honestly believed that his army would win because it was under his command. Not because of advanced training, or technology, or military genius, but because he couldn't in good conscious see any situation in which his army wouldn't win an armed conflict when fighting in his name.

History is cyclical. It's also instructive. We can learn a lot by studying the past. Vladimir Putin is no such historical scholar. He fell into the classic trap of believing himself to be the smartest man in the room. But as we've seen time and time again, being a former KGB agent does not give you all the necessary tools for world domination. Putin is deranged but in his derangement, he vastly overestimated his own military's capabilities while drastically underestimating the resolve of the Ukrainian people to fight for their country. Putin overestimated NATO and the financial and military support Ukraine is getting from Western Europe. And Putin overestimated himself. He saw himself to be a worthy champion of a cause that his country and his allies would rally behind. But as we're seeing, when things are going badly, Putin's people are ready to ditch him at the drop of a hat. Every man for himself. Vladimir Putin loved being the man, the one whose decisions would be rubber-stamped and who would be seen as a conquering hero. He owned each and every decision when things were going well. But when things go bad and you have nobody to turn to, that's when you see the true pitfalls of being an authoritarian. Vladimir Putin has nobody to blame but himself.

But like all failed authoritarians, he'll never be humble enough to admit it.