Opinion – Ross Douthat: Why Queen Elizabeth II’s Strength Is Vladimir Putin’s Weakness

Why is Vladimir Putin failing to win the Ukrainian War? The answers multiply: arrogance, corruption and incompetence on the Russian side; military bravery, shrewd leadership and American munitions on the Ukrainian side.

But the death of Queen Elizabeth II and the wave of old-fashioned splendor help to illuminate one of the Russian president’s main weaknesses. He has been handicapped in his struggle because his regime lacks the mystical quality we call legitimacy.

Legitimacy is not the same thing as power. It is what allows power to be exercised effectively in the midst of trials and transitions, setbacks and successions. It is what underlies political authority, even when that authority is not delivering prosperity and peace. It is what rulers seek when they ask their societies to sacrifice themselves.

In most of the world today there are only two solid foundations of legitimacy: the “demos” and the nation – democracy and national self-determination. The legitimacy that was once tied to imperial rule has faded, as has, except in the Middle East and a few other sparse places, the legitimacy of hereditary monarchy.

There are alternative claims to legitimacy — the ideological authority invoked by the Beijing Politburo, the religious authority invoked by the mullahs in Tehran — but these claimants rely more on repression for their power and survival.

Elizabethan pageantry emphasizes this global reality because the House of Windsor is an exception that proves the rule. Like almost no other institution in the West, apart from the Vatican, the British monarchy maintained a pre-modern and pre-democratic legitimacy; in the outpouring of secular grief there was still the sense that the queen was somehow commissioned by God to sit on the throne.

But the royal family maintained that legitimacy by giving up everything but a fraction of their personal power; It has legitimacy and little else.

In Moscow, we have the contrast: personal political power, much greater than the power of King Charles III, which lacks deep legitimation structures. Putin is a pseudo-tsar, but not a real one, with no divine anointing or ancient promise.

He claims a certain Russian nationalist legitimacy, but his system is really a polyglot empire. It claims a certain democratic legitimacy by holding regular elections, but its results are neither fair nor free.

So all he has to really justify power is success or what he has delivered for most of his career – a richer and more stable Russia than in the years leading up to his presidency and a series of policy moves. successful external

But now comes the test, the play gone wrong, the specter of defeat, and what does he have to fall back on? Not the authority of a tsar: he cannot mobilize the Russian people as feudal subjects, summoning them to treat the grand projects of imperial Russia as his own. Not the authority of a national leader in a struggle for self-determination: he is the invader, it is Ukraine that is fighting for a nation. And not the authority of a democratic leader: he cannot have his warlike policy justified in an election, as Abraham Lincoln did in 1864, because any election would be a farce.

In recent years, as authoritarian leaders have gained ground and democracy has waned, there has been fear that these figures have a stronger hand than the dictators of the past, because their authoritarianism is softer and more subtle and wrapped in the legitimizing structures of elections. .

But Putin’s predicament suggests that this more subtle authoritarianism is weaker than his predecessors in a crisis. The totalitarian regimes of the 20th century often seized on the rhetoric of democracy and nationalism, but deep down they made their own (and terrible) claims to legitimacy — the people’s republic, the rule of the master race.

Putin, without such foundations, cannot just be a proud imperialist or autocrat or revolutionary: he has to legitimize his ambitions in the structures of his western enemies, with absurd results (Ukraine is not a real nation, Russia is liberating Ukraine from Nazis, Russians are fighting for human rights).

There are parallels with US domestic politics, where movements prone to authoritarianism nonetheless legitimize themselves in the familiar language of democracy. So Donald Trump has to claim that the will of the people was frustrated in 2020 — not that he had the right to an autocratic government. Likewise, pressure from the left to cancel or undo platforms, to maneuver public opinion through censorship, tends to be justified in the name of “democracy protection”.

This pattern does not mean that there are no authoritarian dangers in our politics, any more than Putin’s legitimacy problems make his invasion any less destructive. But it helps to see our crises clearly if we recognize that they still play out along the lines of late modernity — which while Elizabeth II is buried, nothing like her radically anti-democratic legitimacy looks set to be reborn.