Putin creates Russian-style neoconservatism

Neo-conservatism is no longer a sin. It has been for many years since its concept was conceived at the SAIS, the puritanical School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, and much more since its leading representatives and ideologues cliqued around the White House, creating the strongest power lobby in living memory. At that time, neocon ideas were repugnant and fightable from any civilized and progressive point of view, but those fights for ideas are now in retreat. If all those who fought against the American ideological current were now to be met with the same indignation when they read the new precepts of the Russian Constitution, the reform of which has just been voted on by the citizens of that country, we would not have enough space to collect it. But it is the case that those who are promoting this clearly regressive reform, in accordance with the parameters established in the West, are a country that has never aroused worldwide criticism for the same or similar arguments for which the United States, and especially its current president, is being lynched. Let's see:

From now on we will be able to talk about a Russian referendum in the Bulgarian style, with almost eighty percent of the citizens called to the polls expressing their support for mega-leadership. The kind of republics that offer gifts and prizes for voting, and that put pressure on companies to facilitate the vote of their employees or allow home voting, these kinds of republics have a qualification that the reader will know how to place by extracting it between the lines. It was a plebiscite on the figure of the president in which the scale was the participation, and this already exceeded 65%, so the primary objective is fulfilled. Now Putin will be able to run for reelection twice more, to culminate a whole life perched on the presidential chair of one of the great world powers, which since his arrival in the Kremlin will have seen four presidents pass by in his great adversary and antagonist: Bill Clinton, Bush Jr., Barack Obama and Donald Trump. It is true that in 2008 he could not bend the laws limiting mandates and had to cede the presidency to his dolphin Dmitry Medvedev for four years, but his re-entry into the presidential palace was already in 2012 with all the consequences and with the will to be the man who has led Russia for the most years in the last century. An accumulation of power that should cause fear and mistrust, but the problem for the universal progressive sectors is the European parliamentary monarchies, lacking executive power, which establish succession for hereditary and lineage reasons. 

The constitution Putin is about to put forward proposes "to defend the concept of marriage as a union between a man and a woman". Any critical voices in the room? They have not been heard, focused as they are on the continuing criticism of Trump's mandate. "As long as I am president, there will be no parent one and parent two, there will be mom and dad," Putin said a few months ago to announce his constitutional amendment in favor of traditional marriage and family. Proud demonstrations and the marking of governments for equal rights continue instead in countries where progress in this area has been definitive. The majority of Russians support this amendment. It is not very difficult to imagine what the daily life of homosexual people will be like in today's Russia. The international silence in the face of this conservative regression is palpable, as it was when the law on gender-based violence was passed in Moscow, which allows beatings of women in the home if they occur only once a year, because it considers that twice would be repetitive. 

The embedding of the Orthodox faith and the figure of God in the constitutional framework deepens this neoconservative turn that Putin gives to his country, with no recognizable opposition due to the lack of freedom to exercise it. It also points to the concept of patriotic education that has been used in Russia for decades. The consideration of the Russian language as the only one of the founding people of the country corners the minority languages of a country that has dozens of ethnic groups spread over its vast expanse of land. 

If Donald Trump were to proclaim that US legislation is above international legality, which is supposed to be marked by the United Nations, the world scandal would be huge, as it was with the justification of the intervention in Iraq by his predecessor George Bush. For the new Russian Constitution, the Court of Human Rights in Strasbourg or the International Criminal Court in The Hague are not competent bodies over their nationals. The amendments also reserve for themselves the ability to control the courts by the political power, something that could never happen with the aforementioned international bodies. 

There are concepts in the new Constitution that will be to the liking of the most extremist sectors of the world's left, such as its treatment of the collective memory of the Soviet victory in the Second World War. The historical truth will be established by law in a mandatory way, the same as it is wanted to be implemented for example in Spain with the Civil War of 1936. With all this, the Russian president has found the opposite path to that of the European countries defeated by relativism and social and historical laziness: his path is patriotism at all costs and the defence of the traditional values of Russian society in recent centuries. He has proposed to combat the decadence around him with a new Constitution that underpins his strategy of harassment of Western democracies, harassment that he uses with recognised and recognisable methods such as this legislation and also with unavowable and hidden methods that he will never recognise but that any discerning citizen would know how to recognise.