Putin faces multiple crises and his grip on power may be fading. None of that will solve the West’s problems

The demagoguery of Trump and his Fox News heralds is more a symptom of this spreading virus than the main cause of our crisis. That cause is partly conspiratorial and malevolent, but often it’s just mindless: Americans (and other Westerners) have been increasingly stressed and dispossessed in recent decades by the frantic financialization and consumerization of civil society. It’s groping and goosing us 24/7, bypassing our minds and hearts on its way to our lower viscera and our wallets by titillating us, intimidating us, tracking us, indebting us and leaving us enmeshed in a spider’s web of commercials come-ons and pressures.

Unlike Putin, Donald Trump is both a product and an accelerant of that social malady. Putin has his oligarchs and his rubber-stamp parliament, but he hasn’t mastered the new autocrats’ learning curve, which may be transforming the West even as he clings to the weakest elements of Russia’s old authoritarianism: a society running on fear more than on love.

Source: Putin really could fall — but will that help the West as much as we think? | Salon.com