What we've been up to

From the new issue's theme: In the late night hours before his invasion of Ukraine earlier this year, Vladimir Putin gave a long and angry speech justifying the violence he was about to unleash. A large segment of the speech recapitulated a longer essay he wrote in 2021 on the history of Ukraine attempting to claim the land between Lviv and Luhansk as part of the larger Russian world.

As Martha Bayles, Boston College professor and fellow at the Institute, writes in "Vladimir and Volodymyr: A Pivotal Moment in History," the myth of Holy Mother Russia has loomed large in Putin's consolidation of power—and particularly in the way that he, much like China's Xi Jinping, casts himself as a champion against so-called "Western decadence." Such grand myth-making has been increasingly weaponized for grim, nihilistic, and unrelenting propaganda.

"The bad news…is that a new species of totalitarian rule is looming on the horizon, with unprecedented powers developed, tested, and shared by the world's two largest autocracies. In the West, we can only speculate about what Russia has been learning from China, and vice versa. But that should not blind us to the fact that both regimes have been making a sustained effort to fashion a powerful 'narrative' that can unite their domestic populations against outsiders. And if jingoism and xenophobia prove effective in this effort, the leaders of Russia and China see no reason not to deploy them. The West will writhe in disapproval but not make any serious effort to defend itself."

From the new issue's Notes & Comments: Vladimir Putin's carefully crafted political persona of arch-traditionalist fighting the tide of progressive cultural mores has served him well—not just inside the nation of Russia but among some cultural conservatives in the US and elsewhere. The political left, meanwhile, finds in Putin the figure of a pugnacious rebel against American empire—not a hero to rally around but maybe just the enemy neoliberal elites deserve. In "Russia's War, and Ours," John M. Owen, politics professor at the University of Virginia and faculty fellow at the Institute, considers the temptation to make a culture war out of the Ukraine war. But it is a distortion of reality and it plays into Putin's hand. The political center, he argues, has been much more clear-eyed about the stakes of the war.

"The cognitive dissonance required here is bound to be exhausting. Russia, with the world's fifth-largest army, must be portrayed as the victim, the country whose legitimate security interests have been ignored relentlessly for decades. Ukraine's security interests—much more clearly at stake—are set aside. Russia, an autocracy, is said to be standing against hegemony and oppression. Ukraine, struggling toward democracy before the war and now fighting for its life, is at best an obstacle to the larger cause, perhaps, as Putin likes to say, not even a real country. All of this exquisite distortion is necessary if the fiction that Russia is somehow fighting for social conservatism or democratic socialism is to be maintained."

Web Features: There is an erroneous, yet apparently widespread, belief that what makes a paragraph a paragraph is an obvious and easy thing to understand. But as Richard Hughes Gibson, English professor at Wheaton and frequent THR contributor, explores in "Past Lives of the Paragraph," it is a convention of writing that resists easy definition. Gibson has the story, which goes back through the early modern period to the medievals and ancients, about what makes this such a vexing question and suggests a few defining characteristics of his own.

"What is a paragraph? Consult a writing guide, and you will receive an answer like this: 'A paragraph is a group of sentences that develops one central idea.' However solid such a definition appears on the page, it quickly melts in the heat of live instruction, as any writing teacher will tell you. Faced with the task of assembling their own paragraphs, students find nearly every word in the formula problematic. How many sentences belong in the 'group?' Somewhere along the way, many were taught that five or six will do. But then out there in the world, they have seen (or heard rumors of) bulkier and slimmer specimens, some spilling over pages, some consisting of a single sentence. And how does one go about 'developing' a central idea? Is there a magic number of subpoints or citations? Most problematic of all is the notion of the main 'idea' itself. What qualifies? Facts? Propositions? Your ideas? Someone else's?"

Read more from the Summer issue:

Philip S. Gorski reviews a new biography of sociologist Robert Bellah.

"A Usable Past for a Post-American Nation" by Johann N. Neem.

Eric B. Schnurer writes about the crisis of governance in an increasingly virtual and massively distributed world.

"Nietzsche's Quarrel with History" by Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen

Kyle Edward Williams introduces "The Use and Abuse of History."

From the archives: What has become of dirty words? They are not exactly ubiquitous, but they are quite a bit more easily encountered: in book titles, bespoke cross stitch, bumper stickers, and even wall art. We also use them a lot more often in public speech—or at least many of us do. What we are experiencing, Wilfred McClay, Hillsdale history professor and frequent THR contributor, argues in "Expletive Deleted" from the Summer 2020 issue, is a "curse currency inflation." And it is threatening to undo the zest and offense of using bad words.

"Despite the faux modesty suggested by the asterisks, there is nothing even remotely scandalous in book titles like The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. Try as the publishers might, the thrill is gone. The charisma has been routinized, and the intoxicating frisson reduced to the mild buzz of a spritzer. We've achieved herd immunity to the dirty word's viral power. There is nothing left for the dirty word but the occasionally struck pose of fearless candor and righteous anger, displaying one's superiority to bourgeois norms—not to mention one's pathetically impoverished vocabulary. But soon even that will be gone. When what once was salty loses its savor, it becomes worthy only to be trampled underfoot."

From further afield:

Our own Jay Tolson appeared on a new podcast called Aesculapius to discuss fake news, Russia, and the status of truth in the liberal international order.

On his own website, Tanner Greer discusses the question of why college students seem less and less interested in majoring in history and the humanities.

For The New Atlantis, Jon Askonas writes about how Tucker Carlson is following a trail blazed by comedian Jon Stewart.

In the pages of the New York Times, Alexandra Alter and Elizabeth A. Harris tell the surprising good news that independent bookstores are booming again.