My latest piece for The eXile is now online. Here is an excerpt of “The Myth of the Democratic Model“:
Stanford poli-sci prof and Commissar of Transitionology, Michael McFaul, is quiet no more. After a few years of relative reticence, McFaul, once known as the most gregarious cheerleader for the Yeltsin regime, was smoked out of his academic hole by Time’s recent crowning of Vladimir Putin as the “Person of the Year.” McFaul’s first response was a comment in Slate titled “Putin? Really?” The second was a lengthy quasi-academic condemnation in Foreign Affairs called “The Myth of the Authoritarian Model.” In the Slate piece, McFaul said that Putin’s accolade “most certainly doesn’t ‘feel right,’ and most certainly doesn’t feel like journalism.”
The fact that Time‘s decision doesn’t “feel right” to McFaul shouldn’t surprise avid eXile readers. What doesn’t “feel right” to him is the possibility that “as political freedom [in Russia] has decreased, economic growth has increased.” This is what McFaul has dubbed the “myth of the authoritarian model,” which he argues is based on “a spurious correlation between autocracy and economic growth.” After all, giving Putin any credit for anything except being a mini-Stalin, the second coming of Hitler, or simply a fire breathing hydra, is an affront to academic political correctness.
