I’ve been thinking a lot about Russia. I’m operating from the perspective that people are people everywhere – what happens anywhere else is in the realm of possibility here. All human beings have hearts, brains, and a sense of culture. American exceptionalism argues we are somehow special, that our nationalism is somehow the correct nationalism (that link is a wild read) because our supremacy is real and justified. I bet England felt that way too when they had most of the world under their crown. Maybe they still do.

Russia is an interesting foil. They have aspirations of being the best, just like we do. It’s huge. It’s mostly underpopulated, because the northern parts are frozen. It’s a diverse country, just as we are, but for different reasons. We had a lot of immigration. They conquered and then largely kept their indigenous populations, though shifted folks around. We have indigenous populations too – we also committed a lot of genocide. Russia’s government is a constitutional republic, at least on paper. In practice, it reflect the president’s successful efforts to consolidate power. If you oppose the president in a meaningful way that might organize support away from him, you die or you are functionally exiled.

When the Soviet Union’s government dissolved in 1991, the economic infrastructure ended up being parsed out to entrepreneurs connected to then President Boris Yeltsin. The bones of the USSR made a lot of people wildly rich.

We’re used to things working in the United States. An immigrant from Russia told me how her family’s region had inconsistent electricity. The area I visited at 22 didn’t have potable municipal water. By all reports, the government bureaucracy continues to be the standard bearer for Kafkaesque, and there’s far fewer creature comforts than you’d experience in the United States. Putin, the president, reportedly lives a lavish life. Russia scores low in the happiness index.

Russia has been restricting access to abortion (it was legal through most of the USSR’s time) because the birth rate is 1.5 children per women and dropping – too low to maintain the population. The legislative efforts include hard conservative perspectives like expecting women to start families as soon as they are adults and condemning women who go to higher education prior to starting families. Never mind how young men are being sent to the war in Ukraine. Instead of creating the circumstances where people would like to create families (a survey found financial issues and anxiety for the future were significant reasons why more people weren’t having kids), they are trying to use the law to punish women and to control the most intimate decisions people can make, because they don’t feel the choices people are making, ones that are in their individual best interest, serve the state. Putin deploys the idea of tradition, but the tradition he’s calling from pre-dates the memories of anyone alive in Russia. The most elderly people in Russia right now grew up with the Soviet state. It reminds me of the “trad wife” movement that seems to be based more on imagination than what women’s realities actually were.

The United States has its own demographic moral panic – ours is among white people, that whites will be outnumbered. We used to have very explicit laws about keeping races distinct – multi-racial people are so normal in my life that anti-miscegenation laws strike me as viscerally abhorrent. I think there’s fear of a loss of cultural hegemony and the power that comes with it. Americans perceive themselves as being on top, and white Americans in particular. That is a position of precarity – when the only place to go is down, everything feels dangerous.

People listen to stories and if they trust the source, they don’t approach with skepticism. Accuracy will fall by the way of what’s compelling. People are seeking meaning, a sense of belonging, and a sense of dignity.

There’s a lot of hand-wringing about why Harris lost. In the haze of discourse, I hear a lot about prejudice. I think the Democrats have proven themselves lousy at listening to people – left, centrist, or right. I think their consultants have proven good at raising money. I suspect many people may have been voting for a social order where they feel more anchored, because instead of equity it has an order. It seems to me that many people didn’t want to share their liberties with the folks they don’t like; a lot of the election was aimed at dialing up the unlikability of minority groups. The majority of voters seemed to imagine a society that they prefer, and it wasn’t the one us social justice advocates are trying to move towards. The social order that equity advocates feel anchored with is very different.

Freedom and liberty are hard things to have. They require everyone taking responsibility for it, and some folks don’t want that. Freedom and liberty also requires that someone voluntarily giving up some of the influence they could potentially have because they believe in the principles more than they believe they should be in charge. Clearly, not everyone feels this way. On one hand you have the people trying to usurp the rights from others (the abhorrent “your body, my choice” misogynists and the overt racists come to mind) and on the other you have those who give up their right to self-determination and argue others should do (tradwives are the ones who come to mind).

US history isn’t filled with stories of people being treated well. It’s filled with the consequences of power. This plays out in Russia. This plays out everywhere.

Concentrated power is generally bad news for the pursuit of individuality because whoever is in power will use their influence to impose their preferences on the rest of people (see: Russia). In the era of my life where I could have pursued a more international career, I chose to focus in the United States because being a woman elsewhere didn’t suit me, particularly Russia. Practicing gender and family in the way we have discerned has lead to an overall happy household for us. Claims about femininity tend to be more about rhetorical control than what naturally comes to many people. I don’t want that future.

There’s never been a good time to be alive. Trade disease for being haunted by the possibility of nuclear annihilation, it’s always been difficult. I do not think despair will help us. I think it is important to live like we have a future, a potentially good one, and make the decisions that would most likely create it.