I know it's kinda trite to observe that today's Russians aren't the Soviets of the 50s and 60s. (Though the real Soviets probably never were.)

Russia today is an authoritarian oligarchy, and if oligarchy is capitalism run amok, the attraction to the corporate/wealthy strain of Republicans seems natural.

One of the hardest things to wrap my head around, as an American, is that not everybody is a big fan of democracy. Being "anti-democracy" seems somehow "dirty" to somebody born in the early '50s and raised on Cold War jingoism. But yet there's an abiding belief among many that democracy is the enemy of capitalism. I think many of those who think that way keep their heads down, knowing the prevailing emotional attachment to democracy. But they're there.

The theory that democracy and capitalism are mortal enemies may explain why people who aren't wealthy are still capitalists (or, rather, fervently defend capitalism): If democracy diminishes the wealth of the wealthy, then logically it must present obstacles to acquiring wealth in the first place. Democracy, to a have-not of this persuasion, is the enemy of upward-mobility.

How's that for alienconservative-whispering?