The Putinization of America

What to expect if we don't rise up

Yesterday I looked at Gene Sharp’s From Dictatorship to Democracy, first published all the way back in 1993. Sharp provides some hope as well as a conceptual model for how authoritarian and despotic regimes can be turned back toward Democracies. He outlines approaches to strategy and tactics for building a movement. While the book remains useful and inspiring, a lot has changed since he wrote it. We see ongoing evolution, both in the techniques of authoritarian repression and in the methods used to overturn them by democratic opposition movements. Up until the late 1990s or early 2000s, these dynamics often favored the Democratic opposition, as we saw despotism overturned in many cases. But this is no longer the case.

If we are going to evaluate our current situation as objectively as possible to define a strategic plan that could succeed, we must admit there are a lot of troubling, concerning, and even somewhat terrifying aspects of this evolutionary process in socio-political formation. It bodes very poorly for the future of democracy, both in the U.S. and globally. To understand the threats, we must first understand the modern authoritarian's playbook, a refined and technologically sophisticated model of control that has been perfected over the last two decades.

Vladimir Putin’s Russia serves as the preeminent case study—a model aspiring authoritarians in the U.S. have studied carefully. Putin took over a society far more accustomed to authoritarian control than ours, with a much smaller middle class and intellectual class. However, his methods for consolidating power were methodical, patient, and ruthlessly effective, and it is not clear, at this point, how we effectively stop their application. These techniques provide a template for any leader wishing to dismantle a contemporary democratic state from within. His multi-front campaign included:

• Broadcast Media Consolidation (2000-2001): Putin’s first move was to seize the only nationwide channel that was not already state-run. In April 2001, executives from the state-controlled gas giant Gazprom—acting as a proxy for the Kremlin—took control of the board at NTV and sacked its news director. The Guardian noted that this coup meant “the Kremlin can now savor the prospect of a clean sweep of the key electronic media,” ensuring narrative control.

• Centralizing Political Power (2004): Putin pushed through a law that ended direct elections for Russia’s 89 regional leaders. This measure gave the president the right to appoint Russia’s governors, a move critics said returned the country to the Soviet-era power vertical, effectively gutting regional autonomy.

• Destroying Independent Oligarchs (2003): When oil magnate Mikhail Khodorkovsky challenged Kremlin corruption, he was publicly brought down. Masked agents stormed his private jet and arrested him at gunpoint. The subsequent show-trial and the seizure of his company, Yukos, sent an unmistakable message to the economic elite: Russian fortunes depend entirely on political obedience.

• Controlling Civil Society (2006 onward): The 2006 NGO law, later expanded into the 2012 “foreign-agent” statute, forced any group receiving "any form of support from outside Russia" to register as a foreign agent. The law buries civil society in what Human Rights Watch calls a “legislative minefield” and creates an environment of deep suspicion toward any independent voices.

• Manufacturing Popular Support (2005-2007): After Georgia’s Rose Revolution, the Kremlin funded a youth force, Nashi, whose objective was to oppose any hypothetical “color revolution” in Russia. This cadre of loyalists, combined with what scholars call “electoral authoritarianism”—marked by “outrageously unfair and fraudulent elections”—allowed the regime to claim public backing while it ruthlessly suppressed any legitimate opposition.

• Weaponizing Technology and Law: Moscow built a digital panopticon. Its “Safe City” network integrates over 200,000 cameras with facial-recognition software, allowing authorities to find, arrest, and detain demonstrators many days after a protest. Furthermore, the 2019 “Sovereign Internet Law” gave the state the power to reroute all traffic through government nodes, block opposition sites, throttle VPNs, and even “disconnect the country from the global internet,” creating a "cyber gulag."

• Criminalization of Speech and Memory: Since 2022, new war-censorship statutes punish “discrediting the Russian army” with up to five years in prison. Laws banning “false history,” LGBTQ “propaganda,” and unlicensed educational talks have turned everyday conversation into a potential felony. The result is a population that self-censors long before mass action can germinate.

• • The “Splinternet”
  After social-media-fuelled protests in 2011–12, Russia built what analysts call a “cyber gulag.” The 2019 Sovereign Internet Law gave Roskomnadzor the power to reroute all traffic through government nodes and to “disconnect the country from the global internet for a few hours,” a test that officials repeated after the 2023 Wagner mutiny. Packet-filtering gear run by the General Radio Frequency Center now blocks opposition sites and throttles VPNs.

This is the gnarly/nasty blueprint. There is no doubt at this point—at least in my mind, and, I hope, yours as well —about what Donald Trump, Russell Vought of Project 2025, Peter Thiel, JD Vance, Elon Musk, and their millions of acolytes and allies want to accomplish here in the U.S. They have analyzed a range of models, from Putin’s Russia to Erdoğan’s Turkey, and are working methodically to subvert the electoral process, construct an airtight surveillance system, and build up the military and security apparatus to ruthlessly suppress those who disagree with their program. Life under such regimes is deeply unhappy for the vast majority of the populace, who have no freedom of dissent or creative freedom. When a tiny oligarchic elite takes over the mass media, corporations, and the repressive state apparatus, the society entrenches massive wealth inequality and social injustice. We do not want this here.

Unfortunately, the liberal, progressive populace in the US is disorganized and still sleeping. We’ve lived in a very comfortable situation — internally, at least — for many decades. It is taking people a long time to shake out of their stupor and realize that those who seek despotism here in the US are approaching it like a military campaign which they seek to win at all costs. The establishment Democrats, meanwhile, have treated the situation as a political struggle where negotiation and compromise are expected. When one side is on a hyper-militarized mission of total war, seeking only submission with no concept of compromise, while the other side plays by outmoded, obsolete rules of polite engagement, the side seeking total domination has a massively unfair advantage. The Right has been utilizing this to the fullest.

I recognize that the American ideology of democracy, progress, and equality was largely smoke and mirrors. For the last seventy years, under the cover of this ideological construct, the US acted as an imperialist behemoth, snuffing out authentically democratic movements in many countries if they challenged our capacity to extract natural resources. In 1953, the U.S. and Britain overthrew the elected prime minister of Iran, Mohammad Mosaddegh, because he intended to nationalize the Iranian oil industry. We helped install the Shah, exacerbating the rise of Islamic extremism and leading to the Iranian revolution of 1979. That is just one of many examples.

Even admitting this, the adherence to the Constitution, the First Amendment, and a basic rule of law in the U.S. made our lives within this country relatively decent and bearable, even though the full egalitarian promise of the U.S. was often a deceptive illusion. What most of us want— what would benefit the vast majority of Americans, whether they know it or not—is a much deeper commitment to the idealistic promise of a pluralistic and participatory democratic society. Obviously, at the moment, we are heading in the extreme other direction.

What I find frustrating is that these problems are not based in any physical or material reality: they are caused by ideological constructs held within the human mind. The mass of Americans have been indoctrinated and ideologically programmed to an extreme degree. But because our problems are mental constructs rather than physical realities, there is at least a distant possibility they could change rapidly. However, engineering such a change on a massive scale seems an almost insurmountable obstacle.

The challenge is compounded by a sense of deep disengagement.