According to The Atlantic, “The response is hard to understand without reckoning with the power of apathy, a much undervalued political tool. Democratic politicians spend a lot of time thinking about how to engage people and persuade them to vote. But a certain kind of autocrat, of whom [he] is the outstanding example, seeks to convince people of the opposite: not to participate, not to care, and not to follow politics at all. The propaganda used […] has been designed in part for this purpose. The constant provision of absurd, conflicting explanations and ridiculous lies—the famous ‘firehose of falsehoods’— encourages many people to believe that there is no truth at all. The result is widespread cynicism. If you don’t know what’s true, after all, then there isn’t anything you can do about it. Protest is pointless. Engagement is useless. But the side effect of apathy was on display yesterday as well. For if no one cares about anything, that means they don’t care about their supreme leader, his ideology, or his war.”
Holy sh*t! I thought Anne Applebaum was writing about America. But replace the contents of the brackets with “Putin” and “in Putin’s Russia,” respectively, and you restore the quote to its original. What a f***ing joke America has become. In short, with regard to the electorate, it is difficult to distinguish between the two countries. Eh, whatever! This is what dying countries look like. America is following the path of Russia, but faster. Welcome to stupid America!