Andrei Cornea: The Gerontocrats. Putin, Xi, Trump

By 2025, through the indiscretion of a microphone left on, the world learned that Russia and China’s two autocrats, Putin and Xi Jinping, wish to live for at least 150 years. The elderly Donald Trump, President of the United States, is not at all far removed from the same obsession; even if he has not become an autocrat in fact (constitutional limits still exist in the United States), he is doing everything in his power to become one. The three great powers of these decades are therefore governed arbitrarily—or aspiring to this path—by gerontocrats who wish to be spared not only political democracy but also, personally, the democracy of death. Could there be a connection between the two?

The reality is that all three regimes (whose leaders seem to get along fairly well with one another)—however different they may be—give an impression of sclerosis and an inability to imagine paths of development outside conflict, the strengthening of repression, war, and the backward-looking fixation typical of old people. “Make America Great Again,” neo-tsarism, and neo-Confucianism are not, in substance, very different. Both China and Russia have rapidly aging populations, but above all, their governments are run by rigid and increasingly ossified bureaucracies. Both Russia and the United States are engaged in costly wars for themselves (not to mention the other side) that they do not know how to end and can scarcely bring to an end anymore. All three regimes are obsessed with “foreigners”: the United States—a country made up of and by immigrants, which for a long time drew its dynamism and “youth” largely precisely from the presence of immigrants—deports immigrants, depriving itself of their contribution of inventiveness and effort; Russia labels any connection with the West as involving “foreign agents,” while China has rediscovered its eternal suspicion of “foreigners” and “harmful influences” and monitors its population with the latest AI technologies. Nationalism, often in its ugliest, fascist forms, characterizes all three regimes.

Another common aspect is the “cult of personality”: Xi rules alone and periodically purges not only his rivals within the Chinese Communist Party but also some potential or suspected rivals, increasingly resembling Stalin during the years of the Great Terror. Suspicion, fear, and distrust seem to be spreading ever further through the party and state apparatus, as well as through China’s military. Putin has long ceased to take almost anyone else into account. As for Trump, he designs Arches of Triumph, arbitrarily changes international geographical names, and periodically protests that he is not awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. For all three, personal devotion to the supreme leader—not responsibility toward the state and the public good—creates careers in the administration and raises or lowers you on the steps of Power. The three elderly men at the heads of their states seek, from every direction—whether literally or symbolically—to convince the entire world (and especially their peoples) that they are geniuses, perfect, infallible, and above all indispensable. When some people smile ironically and alternate diplomatic politeness with refusals, as the Europeans do, the autocrats hate and despise them; two of them plot their political end, while the third plots their economic end. Could it be that, through the cult of personality and contempt for institutions and rules, they also seek to “secure” themselves and assure everyone else that their inevitable disappearance would be a catastrophe both for their countries and for humanity, if only because no national or international institution could be more long-lived than a Great Man?

And it is probably the inevitable approach of the end that stimulates delusions of grandeur in all three cases—although there must undoubtedly also be other, more specific causes in each case. You know that you will become nothingness before too long, and so, compensatorily, you want to assert your capacity to endure for posterity through exceptional merit. One wants to be the “reunifier of the Russian lands,” overturning history and the people’s wishes while embracing violence as the primary means; another relies on the “decadence of the West,” prepares the invasion of Taiwan, and dreams of a millennial hegemony of China; the third, finally, massively violating all the traditions of his country, wants to be “immortal” on banknotes (like the kings and queens of England—except that today they have only purely symbolic power) and demands to be adored by a court of flatterers and sycophants. And delusions of grandeur go hand in hand with profound contempt for the truth. Surely they, who possess unprecedented genius, will not stumble over the stumbling block of modest truth! And if anyone dares show them the inconvenient reality, they will disappear, like the Chinese doctor who first spoke about COVID-19, or be thrown out a window, like Putin’s more independent officials, or be dismissed from the administration and, possibly, subjected to legal harassment, as we have seen happen in Trump’s America.

And perhaps there is something else that unites the three old men, something less visible but which we sense in their policies: a kind of hatred or resentment toward youth, toward the new generations, toward what is fresh, alive, and authentic, manifested most clearly in their so-called “conservatism,” which presupposes a manic attachment to the values of an imagined “golden” past that they would like to make present; finally, their lifelong hatred can also be seen in their lack of compassion and contempt for the immeasurable suffering that their own policies produce, as well as in the satisfaction they derive from constantly producing more. It is as though they were saying to the younger ones: “If even we, who are so brilliant, will be gone before long, how could we not hate the fact that you remain alive so that you can enjoy yourselves and be happy?”

https://www.dilema.ro/situatiunea/gerontocratii