Post Truth Populists

Putin is the archetypal modern populist who mastered post-truth info warfare and weaponized historical trauma into a narrative of national resurrection.

But I digress.

Post 1991 Russia was a failed state in slow motion collapse. The Soviet myth had evaporated overnight, leading to a void of identity and purpose. The liberal promise of democracy and markets turned into a mafia run state of corruption and social decay.

In this chaos arises Vladimir Putin, a mid level KGB officer turned bureaucrat. He was a survivor and had killer instinct.

Boris Yeltsin (a drunk corrupt emperor) needed a loyal successor to protect his family from prosecution after his eventual exit. Putin was seen as quiet, competent and loyal. He was hand picked in 1999 to oversee the transition.

Two months later, as prime minister, he oversaw the second Chechen war, for which his approval ratings soared from single digits to 50% overnight. And this is where his myth started to form.

With approval ratings highs, he was able to reign in the oligarchs, whilst also gaining control of the nations media and security arms, thus becoming the most powerful person in Russia, offering protection from chaos in exchange for obedience.

By the mid 2000’s the Russian system was fully locked down, and this is where Vladislav Surkov steps in.

Surkov can be considered a sort of consigliere of Putin. He was a postmodern artists turned political strategist who understood that in a society of collapsing trust, narrative was the new battlefield.

Surkov’s genius was that he was able to mix theatre, irony and confusion to control the masses. He would often fund and manage pro government groups, while also funding opposing parties and rebel groups at the same time. He would feed contradictory narratives through state media, saturating the infosphere enough that most people (other then true conspiracy nuts) would give up on finding the truth.

The Surkovian feedback loop looked something like this:

1. Create multiple conflicting narratives (e.g. We didn’t invade Ukraine. Or maybe we did. But also NATO started it. Or maybe there was a coup.”)

2. Seed those narratives through different voices like State TV, fringe blogs, ironic Twitter accounts, “independent” analysts

3. Let the population spiral into confusion

4. Introduce the only constant figure untouched in chaos, Putin. In a world with contradictions and constantly shifting realities, Putin would continually be positioned as the only real thing that the nation could rely on.

This is what i would call post-truth authoritarianism. Where the society wasn’t repressed through censorship, but instead through information saturation, all coming from Surkov. after which he could mould the narrative as he pleased. It was literally weaponised autism, before it became popular in the west.

And throughout all this, you would continually see Putin on TV, talking about a restoration of the great Russian nation, peddling an attractive myth and binding it alongside his increasing power to unite a collapsing nation.

Just taking a pause here.

I think its important to flag how important it is to project this image of power ALONGSIDE the promise of a civilizational myth. Adding the two together is the new meta in politics and its basically crack for the normie. This is because it taps into something beyond politics (which no one believes in anymore anyway), it taps into the deep ache of a nations dream to recapture its fallen greatness.

And Putin/Surkov combo were the first to build this framework in the 21st century.

Putin’s entire civilizational myth is that Russia was once a great, spiritual and imperial power, it was humiliated due to its enemies and now it will rise again. He reaches deep into the Russian historical unconscious, utilising memes such as Tsarist iconography, orthodox mysticism and the idea of the Holy Rus (a semi-mythical Russian soul bound to the land). And all the while he was positioning himself as the latest Tsar in an unbroken lineage.

But, back to the story.

Eventually this framework was covertly exported globally. Below we will look through how this post truth framework has been utilised across multiple nations in a choose your character style format, i’ll start with Putin as the framework:

Putin -

Myth: Russia as a spiritual empire, Third Rome, bulwark of traditional values.

Fall: Bolsheviks, 1990s collapse, Western humiliation.

Villains: NATO, liberal NGOs, decadent western culture.

Promise: Imperial resurgence, moral clarity, spiritual destiny.

Method: Controlled chaos, post-truth media, war as purification.

Trump –

Myth: Post-WWII America as the peak of global power, cultural dominance.

Fall: Civil rights, globalization, immigration, cultural liberalism—seen by many as “loss of real America.”

Villains: Deep state, elites, immigrants, globalists.

Promise: Restore “real” (white, Christian, industrial, patriarchal) America.

Method: Cultural war > policy. He governs like a meme engine.

Modi –

Myth: Ancient Vedic civilization, Rich, spiritual, scientific, before Islamic and British colonization.

Fall: Islamic conquests, British imperialism, Secularism.

Villains: Muslims, liberals, colonial apologists.

Promise: A Hindu-first India, purified from “foreign” elements.

Method: Ritual politics, mass rallies, re-writing history books, riots.

Erdogan –

Myth: The Ottoman Empire as a global Islamic superpower and moral compass.

Fall: Westernization, secularism under Ataturk, EU subordination.

Villains: Kemalists, secular elites, Kurds, the West.

Promise: A proud, Islamic, assertive Turkey at the crossroads of East and West.

Method: Mosques over schools, control of judiciary, symbolic reconquests (e.g. Hagia Sophia).

Xi Jinping -

Myth: 5,000 years of continuous civilization.

Fall: “Century of humiliation” (Opium Wars, Japanese invasion).

Villains: West, foreign imperialists, internal “weak” liberalizers.

Promise: National rejuvenation by 2049. Return to centrality.

Style: CCP now uses Confucianism + AI + Marxist-Leninist control to create a techno-theocracy.

Viktor Orban -

Myth: Greater Hungary, pre-Trianon Treaty.

Fall: Treaty of Trianon (1920), Hungary loses two-thirds of its territory.

Villains: EU bureaucrats, George Soros, immigrants, liberals.

Promise: Ethnic purity, Christian values, illiberal democracy.

Style: Mixes realpolitik with mystical-nationalist myth (e.g. Turanism).

All of these characters are following the Putin formula:

1, seize and centralize state apparatus

2. saturate the information space with contradiction

3. become the sole anchor of power or stability

4. deploy a civilizational myth with a scapegoat

The reason this works so effectively is quite simple. In a trust less world with no meaning, myth building and scapegoating let’s the people believe again. And liberalism has no answer to this because in this same world, progress and diversity doesn’t stir the blood like lost empires and sacred lands.

If anything, this new framework is a direct response to the failures of liberalism over the past few decades. Post World War 2 liberal democracy promised rational governance, individual rights, free markets, and progress through consensus and institutions. However it failed to address the spiritual vacuum, the economic inequality and the identity loss, alongside the decay of its own institutions.

Anyway, there’s probably still a lot to dig into like what counter-narratives exist for those who reject the mythic trap, or whether this entire framework of modern politics is the correct path when viewed through the lens of today’s global PVP landscape (winner takes all). But i think this will take a while so I will leave it for a part 2 and 3.

What I was primarily interested in was identifying the current trajectory we are taking vs how to counter it, or what comes after.