Ross Douthat: “Legitimacy is not the same thing as power. It’s what enables power to be exercised effectively amid trials and transitions, setbacks and successions.'
By Ross Douthat | The New York TimesWhy is Vladimir Putin failing to win his war in Ukraine? The answers multiply: hubris, corruption and incompetence on the Russian side; military valor, canny leadership and American munitions on the Ukrainian side.
The Elizabethan pageantry emphasizes this global reality because the House of Windsor is an exception that proves the rule. Like almost no other institution in the West outside the Vatican, the British monarchy has retained a pre-modern, pre-democratic legitimacy; in the outpouring of secular grief there was still a sense that the queen was somehow God-ordained to sit on the throne.
But now comes the test, the gambit that hasn’t delivered, the specter of defeat, and what does he have to fall back upon? Not the authority of a czar: He cannot mobilize the Russian people as feudal subjects, calling on them to treat imperial Russia’s grand projects as their own. Not the authority of a national leader in a struggle for self-determination: He is the invader; it’s Ukraine that’s fighting for a nation.
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