By Paul R. Grenier, Landmarks Magazine, 2/3/25
In an open letter to J.D. Vance, the prominent Catholic publicist George Weigel argued recently that the defeat of Russia in Ukraine is essential to the causes of democracy, Christian virtue, and world peace. Paul Grenier, in the following Landmarks essay, argues that Weigel is only able to make such a case by engaging in a series of distortions — firstly, about the history of the Ukraine war; secondly, regarding the nature of political order under Russian president Vladimir Putin; and thirdly, regarding the relationship between democracy and Christianity. – The Editors
George Weigel, the prominent Catholic intellectual and neoconservative, wrote an open letter to Vice President-elect J.D. Vance a while back, urging him to fix his attitude toward the war in Ukraine. Vance’s lack of enthusiasm for the cause of Ukrainian victory, according to Weigel, displays “crass indifference to injustice and suffering” and is “ignoble.” Ukraine, the national security of the United States, and world peace all depend on Vance joining Weigel in fighting for a decisive victory for Ukraine and a decisive defeat for Putin’s Russia.
Despite its brevity, Weigel’s letter to Vance (which letter, incidentally, is only the latest in a long series of essays penned by Weigel about Russian perfidy) has enormous symbolic value in as much as it conveniently encapsulates in one place a great many of the American foreign policy assumptions that have been all but institutionalized in recent decades, and not only among neoconservatives. For example, the assertion that America’s war with Russia in Ukraine is a war between the forces of good and the forces of evil. America’s goodness stems from its being a democracy. Russia’s evil stems from its being an autocracy. America is a Godly country because it has from the beginning been “an experiment in ordered liberty ‘under God.’” Meanwhile, Vladimir Putin, writes Weigel:
… is a pathological autocrat whose warped worldview and homicidal treatment of political opponents were formed in the moral cesspool of the Soviet Union’s security services. [Vladimir Putin] has openly declared his intention to reverse history’s verdict on the Soviet system. He is conducting a genocidal war in Ukraine to further that ambition. Like the aggressors of the 1930s, he will not stop until he is stopped.
If one reviews these various assertions, it is by no means impossible to find individual elements that are true. Will a loss in Ukraine harm U.S. national security? The current foreign policy trajectory of the United States, a trajectory that insists on the continuation of its unipolar hegemony, will indeed suffer a setback. But what has already been far more damaging to US national security was the original policy of simply dismissing as of no importance Russia’s security interests these past 20 years, thereby driving Russia into China’s arms and destroying any basis for mutual trust.
And indeed, there have been cases of known enemies of Putin suffering a violent end; some of those cases may be traceable to the Kremlin or to forces aligned with it. Some of the most famous cases, however – that of the Skripals, for example – are so filled with illogic and completely unbelievable causal chains as to throw into doubt whether Western adjudicators of criminal behavior are really up to the task. If the same rules of evidence used to ‘prove’ such cases as that of the Skripals were applied to Washington, one could easily come up with an at least equally impressive list of likely state-ordered murders. Trump’s “Are we so pure?” statement in this context is positively endearing. What is more, the U.S. is not squeamish – for good diplomatic reasons, to be sure – about maintaining normal, peaceful relations with Saudi Arabia despite unimpeachable evidence of what happened to Jamal Khashoggi.
The notion that continuing the Ukraine war is a means of showing compassion for Ukraine, whereas seeking to end it immediately demonstrates “crass indifference” – well, it is hard to imagine a more astonishing reversal of logic! This completely unnecessary war, a war that the US and England eagerly sought and made all but inevitable, and then prevented its early termination, has decimated Ukraine’s population. Plausible estimates suggest that the war may have already cost Ukraine some 700,000 men killed in action. Even if the figure proves much lower than that, it is a matter of simple math that Ukraine, with its far lower population, cannot beat Russia in an attrition war.
If there has been “crass indifference to suffering,” that indifference was manifested by the American strategists and their neoconservative cheerleaders who, since at least 2013, have been laying the groundwork for using Ukraine as a tar baby in which to trap, weaken and destroy the Russian foe — among other means by insisting on ignoring Russia’s shouting from the rooftops, since 2008, that Ukraine in NATO means war. There is no need here to review this extremely well-known history which has already been so ably recounted by, among others, Richard Sakwa, John Mearsheimer, Anatol Lieven, and, most recently, Scott Horton (see also the perhaps unwittingly frank interview provided to Russia’s equivalent of the Wall Street Journal by Stratfor’s George Friedman in December 2014).
There is neither time nor space, here, to review the long list of cruelties and outrages committed by the regime in Kiev, both before and after its US-supported coup, not to mention its well-known pervasive culture of corruption. But even the short list of items for which I have just provided some links — the false flag sniper killings that made possible the original coup, the shocking Odessa massacre at the trade union building, the cold blooded assassinations of civilians in both Russia and Ukraine (some of which are openly admitted to by Kiev, while many others are still under wraps) – makes it impossible to take seriously Weigel’s claims about the virtue of Ukraine’s post-coup regime. To say nothing of Weigel’s curious indifference, as a Catholic, to the Kiev regime’s persecution of the Orthodox Christian church.
Weigel is, of course, correct when he notes what everyone already knows (it is endlessly repeated) — that Vladimir Putin began his career in the Soviet Union’s security services, the KGB. After the USSR collapsed, Putin served as first deputy to Anatoly Sobchak, the liberal mayor of St. Petersburg and one of Putin’s former law school professors. When efforts were made to restore the USSR in 1991, and then to overthrow Yeltsin in 1993, in both cases Putin stood with those who wanted to continue the process of moving away from the Soviet experience. While serving under Sobchak, Putin became known, as even the harsh Putin critic Masha Gessen has acknowledged, as one of those rare well-placed public servants who never accepted bribes. Philip Short’s rather harsh 800-page biography of Putin likewise does not at all support Weigel’s portrait of a morally corrupt Russian leader allegedly obsessed with restoring the Soviet system.
The canard that Putin “openly declared” his “intention to reverse history’s verdict on the Soviet system” traces to the endlessly repeated phrase from Putin’s April 25, 2005 speech to the Federal Assembly. It was here that he famously referred to the collapse of the USSR as a great (or the greatest) catastrophe of the 20th century. The Russian language has no definite or indefinite articles, and so the wording is ambiguous and does not make clear whether Putin meant ‘a very great’ or ‘the greatest’ catastrophe. In any case, for many Russians, it was precisely very great. As Putin immediately stated, explaining his characterization, it was after this collapse that tens of millions of Russians suddenly found themselves living as aliens in foreign countries. After the collapse of Russian state authority, and of Russia’s economic system as a whole, and of nearly all its institutional structures, the majority of Russians suddenly found themselves destitute and without bearings. This was indeed a most catastrophic experience for his Russian listeners.
And yet, the upshot of Putin’s April 2005 speech was that Russia had successfully come through this terrible trial. There existed now a new Russia committed to democracy and individual freedom. Crucially, this new Russia, guided by Putin, rejected the Bolshevik idea of engaging in social experiments. “We are not implementing any innovations here,” Putin stated, flagging in this way his rejection of a return to Bolshevik experiments. “We are striving to use everything that has been accumulated by European civilization …” Earlier in that same speech Putin stated that Russia’s goals in the international arena were easily summarized: border security and favorable external conditions for solving Russia’s internal problems. Putin later, in an interview with German reporters, summarized his position on the USSR matter as follows: “ … any Russian who does not regret the shattering of the Soviet Union has no heart, but anyone who thinks it can be restored has no brain.”
Skeptics of the objectivity of this summary are welcome to read the whole speech for themselves, in English, on the Kremlin website. In any case, what emerges from a survey of Putin’s many speeches over the years is a pragmatic man who believes in hierarchy, legal order, faith, especially the Christian faith, and especially a strong, prosperous, unified Russia. Observation of his actions suggests that, to these qualities, must also be added a degree of realpolitik, including a willingness to use deception and coercive measures if needed in the interests of state.
Much has been made by some scholars, often quite sloppy ones, of Putin’s occasional penchant for quoting the conservative Hegelian and legal scholar Ivan Ilyin (1883 – 1954). Such scholars dig around in Ilyin’s large body of works to find compromising statements, from which they draw far-going conclusions. It is likely, all the same, that Putin does indeed find in Ilyin some guiding ideas, among which are fear of the consequences for Russia if it lets itself be weakened by too fast an embrace of political liberalism – as happened once before in February, 1917, six months prior to the Bolshevik take-over. In March 2014, in the immediate aftermath of the unraveling in Kiev, Putin famously urged his governors to read, along with books by more mainstream Russian philosophers, a work called Our Tasks by Ivan Ilyin.
Now, Ilyin had been exiled by Lenin to the West in 1922 due to his vehement rejection of Bolshevism (archival records have shown that he bravely stood up to interrogations by the Cheka). The book assigned by Putin had been published by Ilyin’ in 1948, from his place of exile in Switzerland. In it, Ilyin cautions Russia’s future leaders about the dangers that will arise for Russia after the USSR ceased to exist – something he was certain would eventually happen. The rest of the world, in its ignorance of the consequences, would seek the breakup of Russia and, to this end, would provide lots of development assistance and ideological encouragement to those willing to carry out this assignment. These same outside forces would encourage civil wars and bring about all sorts of crises, including for world peace. To avoid that fate, Russian leaders, Ilyin counseled, would need to embrace authoritarian rule for a time, thereby preserving the unity of the state and providing a breathing space for Russia to recover. The passage that Putin quotes from Ilyin in his 2005 speech, the same speech that Weigel apparently believes proved the Russian leader seeks a return to the USSR, reads as follows:
‘State power,’ wrote the great Russian philosopher Ivan Ilyin, ‘has its own limits defined by the fact that it is authority that reaches people from outside… State power cannot oversee and dictate the creative states of the soul and mind, the inner states of love, freedom and goodwill. The state cannot demand from its citizens faith, prayer, love, goodness and conviction. It cannot regulate scientific, religious and artistic creation… It should not intervene in moral, family and daily private life, and only when extremely necessary should it impinge on people’s economic initiative and creativity.’
Democracy, America’s God
How is it that, especially in the realm of foreign policy, so many public figures who are themselves quite intelligent, and not personally corrupt, are as if compelled by a force beyond their control to repeat things that, as we have seen above, are completely disconnected from reality?
Everyone knows that money, ambition, career pressures, are important ‘factors’ here. But these factors cannot be sufficient and final. To begin with, it is clear to me at least that many of those who believe in the American democracy promotion project genuinely mean well. I do not accept the notion that, for example, such a genuinely sincere theologian as George Weigel has corrupt motives. If this seems naïve to some, so be it. But there is also another consideration. For action on the scale of a nation state to have coherence and consistency — and American foreign policy is nothing if not consistent — it must be guided over time by certain ruling ideas or concepts. It is only thanks to the internalization of such concepts that the dynamics of understanding and action are able to have coherence, because they proceed from an essentially shared picture of reality
As I emphasized at the outset, Weigel’s letter is just one example among many of the American way of seeing the world. What we find in Weigel’s letter, rather glaringly, is the characteristic ruling concept we are seeking – that of democracy, and not just democracy, but democracy’s fateful opposition (from this same American conceptual framework) to authority, to authoritarian orders. It is precisely along these lines that the sharp distinction is drawn (not only by Weigel!) between friend and enemy (hostis).
What has happened in America, I think, is this. As Weigel correctly points out, at its origins, the United States was founded both as a democracy and as a nation ‘under God’ – in point of fact, as a nation under a (protestant) Christian God. The problem is that the characteristics of an absolute, appropriate for the supreme being of Christianity, have been gradually transferred to democracy, and this same democracy, over time, has itself gradually stagnated in its meaning, at times to the point of meaninglessness. For America’s neoconservative theologians, there is no conflict here: both democracy and Christianity thrive at one and the same time in America – and, in their defense, isn’t this, after all, what such astute observers as Tocqueville and even Chesterton have stated they observed?
America, is indeed, as Weigel correctly declared, a democratic experiment in ordered liberty, under God. What Weigel misses, unfortunately, is that the experiment has failed. Now, one could argue that we no longer have democracy or God, but we certainly no longer have the Christian God, because America itself — America’s ‘freedom’ and ‘democracy’ as abstractions– have become our god. Writing nearly twenty years ago, the Lutheran theologian Stanley Hauerwas noted that:
The God most Americans say they believe in is just not interesting enough to deny … the only kind of atheism that counts in America is that which calls into question the proposition that everyone has a right to life, liberty and happiness …
.. More Americans may go to church than their counterparts in Europe, but the churches to which they go do little to challenge the secular presumptions that form their lives or the lives of the churches to which they go. For the church is assumed to exist to reinforce the presumption that those who come to church have done so freely. The church’s primary function, therefore, is to legitimate and sustain the presumption that America represents what all people would want to be if they had the benefit of American education and money.
Hauerwas is not saying here that Americans, as individuals, are necessarily devoid of genuine piety. His point is that the only public function of a church in America is to emphasize the liberal ideology with its privileging of abstract choice as a possibility, its freedom from any commitment to a cosmic order or concrete good (in other words, what Hegel would call a negative infinity).
Unfortunately, what Americans think of as a necessary harmony may be precisely the opposite. Democracy and Christianity operate, after all, according to different principles. Democracy proceeds on the basis of equality. Christianity at its fundamental core proceeds on the basis of hierarchy. The attempt to merge these two, in the American case, has led to the transformation of religion, its flattening and emptying, even as it has led to the unjustified treatment of democracy itself, along with America, as itself an absolute — as the equivalent of a god. This is why not just Weigel, but much of the American establishment so consistently justifies America’s actions, regardless of how apparently cynical or violent, so long as they are successful. Why limit the success of what is, after all, the only absolute we possess? If Russia acts in defiance of the will of this ‘absolute,’ who can gainsay the logic of putting down Russia as forcefully as necessary?
Corruptions of a Relative Good
Democracy, though not an absolute good, can nonetheless importantly contribute to societal well-being. When grounded in a genuine popular awareness of the world in its reality, and if guided by a public that is sufficiently ‘virtuous,’ democracy can be an effective means of bringing about desirable change, even as it provides a means of public participation in the life of the community. It would be foolish to deny that these virtues of democracy can still be observed in the U.S., even today. But one can just as easily observe that America’s democratic process suffers from extremely serious flaws.
First, as I have argued elsewhere, democracy has tended to become an abstraction – a ‘catchword’ — capable of being filled with almost any content, as best serves the interests of this or that powerful group. As a case in point, consider the recent, absurd case of Romania. When an anti-war, ‘pro-Russia’ candidate won the election fair and square, the result was nonetheless thrown out, and the election deemed invalid, despite general acknowledgement that the voting was fair, simply because the result was judged to be in Russia’s interest! And much the same can be said for the nation of Georgia, and its recent elections. Democracy is what happens when elites in DC and Brussels are pleased. Actually existing democracy, in other words, often overlaps with that same ‘authoritarianism’ that it constantly condemns.
Second, the public information realm has been so polluted – intentionally polluted – with lies about the world that meaningful public participation in decision making about foreign affairs has become difficult if not impossible. It suffices here to mention the manufactured Russiagate narrative on which basis the first Trump administration was prevented from negotiating with Russia and instead browbeaten into pumping Ukraine with arms. And even though this entire narrative was fictional – and traceable to campaign tricks waged (and funded) by Hillary Clinton, with help from the intelligence agencies – the narrative of Russian perfidy was set firmly in the public imagination and remains there to this day. Similar lies have polluted public discourse about the war in Ukraine, indeed, to such an extent that it has been impossible, here, to recount them in detail.
Now, it may be true that the public eventually saw through at least some of this chicanery and voiced its preference for peace with Russia despite the propaganda calling for endless war, and this stance in favor of peace with Russia in no small part explains the electoral victory of Donald Trump and JD Vance. Ironically, precisely in the name of defending democracy, Mr. Weigel, along of course with a great many others in the Washington mainstream, now insist that the voters’ preference for peace be overturned.
Democracy or Hierarchy?
It is a common cliché in America to declare that democracy is the worst form of government – except for all the others. By this means, Americans flatter themselves that their system, despite its flaws, is nonetheless the ‘supreme’ political good and should therefore be universally promoted.
As an American, I am genuinely attached to democratic forms. I would like to see democracy continue here, albeit in a more honest and noble manner. It would be a terrible uprooting of our way of life to proceed otherwise. At the same time, as a lifelong student of Russia, I am aware that not every country is rooted in the same tradition. From the Russian perspective, the concept of democracy has a different connotation than it does in the United States. Democracy has long been contemplated there as a spiritual and not only as a political phenomenon.
It was self-evident to the major Russian philosophers and thinkers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries — Nicholas Berdyaev, Fr. Sergei Bulgakov, Vladimir Solovyov, Fyodor Dostoevsky – that there is a hierarchical, a vertical ordering to the cosmos. Democracy, for them, was not merely a political technique, it was, in its modern form, the harbinger of a new quasi-religious order, one no longer oriented to what is higher, but instead to a newly autonomous man.
Nicholas Berdyaev (1874 – 1948) is one of the most influential philosophers in Russia today. Until recently at least, he was also widely admired throughout the West. Berdyaev understood, of course, that democracy is an ancient political idea. In its modern form, however, he believed it had become something different. The democratic ideal of equality is now permeated with the spirit of positivism. It is not the soul, for democracy, that is considered ‘equal before God.’ God is no longer in the limelight for the democratic consciousness. Now what is assumed to be equal is the abstract individual (“the given, natural man,” as Berdyaev puts it) endowed with various rights and powers.
What is more, now the criterion of truth and right becomes merely quantitative, and the loss of all the qualitative criteria of truth and right bears witness to “the erosion of the soul, the loss of God in the soul.” Is it true, though, that the democratic spirit of equality and quantity must erode the life of the soul? As if in response to that question, Berdyaev asks whether it would be possible for a democracy to be oriented to “the Divine content of life,” in other words, to the sacred. No, this would contradict the very idea of democracy, as it would make democracy subservient to something higher than itself. Therefore, concludes Berdyaev, the democratic principle, as something self-sufficient, can only stand in opposition to Christianity:
Christianity has nothing in common with democracy and cannot provide a foundation for democracy. The attempt to align Christianity and democracy is the great lie of our times, a hideous substitution. Christianity is hierarchical. The Christian revelation about the infinite value of the human soul, about the equal value before God of all human souls is not a democratic revelation, is not a democratic equality. Christian brotherhood is not democratic equality. Everything qualitative in Christianity, everything unrepeatedly individual, everything unique, is all connected with the person and therefore hierarchical. … The very existence of the person presupposes a hierarchical structure to the cosmos …
The above, and all the preceding, quotes from Berdyaev come from the Russian philosopher’s volume The Philosophy of Inequality. It is obviously of some importance, in the given context, to point out that Berdyaev’s Philosophy of Inequality was among the three philosophical works famously recommended by Putin to his governors for reading, back in March 2014. The others were Vladimir Solovyov’s The Justification of the Good and, as already noted, Ilyin’s Our Tasks.
Russia, Hierarchy, Church
Berdyaev’s apodictic, and of course from our America perspective controversial statements about Christianity being hierarchical and therefore not in the first instance democratic, are nonetheless supported by the Church Fathers – indeed, by those same Church Fathers whose thought is so foundational for Eastern Orthodox Christianity. A particularly clear statement on the ‘hierarchical structure to the cosmos’ can be found in the works of St. Dionysius the Areopagite. As David Bradshaw reminds us, for Dionysius, hierarchy “is an image of the divine beauty.” Hierarchy within the human and angelic world, and within the created world more generally, reenacts in time what proceeds simultaneously within the Divinity, such that, to quote Dionysius directly: “ … the order of the hierarchy is for some to purify and others to be purified, for some to illumine and others to be illuminated, for some to perfect and others to be perfected, each [imitating] God in the way that is appropriate to his own function.”
If hierarchy is the deep structure of Christianity, and if the Russian czars saw their authority as ultimately legitimated by its relation to the Orthodox Christian church, then it is hardly surprising that the czarist order was itself deeply hierarchical and structurally resistant to democracy. My colleague Matthew Dal Santo’s writing on this theme are completely convincing on this score, and I can find no flaw in his logic whatsoever. And this extends, as well, to the analogy he draws between the czarist order and the political system that has evolved under Vladimir Putin.
Though there is no czarism today in Russia, and though there may never again be such an order (it is hard to imagine it returning in the literal sense), Dal Santo is, I think, correct when he finds in Russian governance under Putin a kind of analogously czarist hierarchical order, and this is nothing more than the return of the deep structure of Russian political order as such. Indeed, I would go further and state my agreement as well with Augusto Del Noce about the Soviet Union. Long after Berdyaev wrote his emotional condemnation of the Bolshevik revolution, the Soviet Union itself gradually returned to a spiritual-intellectual hierarchy of sorts, even as the specifically economic order remained, perhaps understandably, quite democratic. In the worlds of science and the arts, Soviet society was deeply hierarchical. Only the very best reached the level of the Kirov ballet or the Academy of Science; in these realms, hierarchy, not democratic equality, was the ruling principle. And these latter were symbolic, I would argue, of a wider Russian return to its own traditions, and harbingers of the rebirth of the Orthodox Church — something already noticed by Del Noce as early as 1970 (cf. his essay, The Death of the Sacred).
We arrive now at the crucial decision point, or rather, the crucial question. In the first half of this essay, we dispensed with the fictional narrative about the war in Ukraine and its origins. Tragic as this conflict is, it is deeply dishonest to make Russia more responsible for it than is the West itself, given that the latter acted precisely in such a way as to make the war inevitable.
Which leads us to the following question, on the answer to which depends whether or not an enduring peaceful settlement between Russia and the West can now be found: Is today’s Russian political order in any way more dangerous for the United States, or for Western Europe, than was, say, Russia under Nicholas II, or Russia under Alexander II? If Russia’s current political order, contra Western propaganda, is not Stalinist Hitlerism, and if it is also not a liberal democracy after the American pattern, but is instead a flawed, inconsistent, peculiarly Russian quasi-democratic, quasi-hierarchical ‘czarist’ order — why is that in any sense a problem for us? Why, in particular, should such a Russia present a problem for devout Catholics?
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