On the Decay of a Nation from Within

A nation can become harder to govern without becoming quieter about politics. Its citizens may follow every scandal, recognise every enemy and possess a ready explanation for each failure. What deteriorates is the possibility of finding out that an explanation was wrong. Public life continues, sometimes with extraordinary energy, while the means of correcting it become less dependable.

Yuri Bezmenov, a Soviet defector speaking during the Cold War, described ideological subversion through four stages: demoralisation, destabilisation, crisis and normalisation. In his account, the weakening of a country's confidence and institutions prepared it for a crisis whose resolution established a new order. His warning remains attractive because it gives the untidiness of political decline a sequence, an intention and an author.

That attraction is also a reason to examine it carefully. A sequence that can be fitted to many events after they occur may explain less than it appears to. Distrust, economic difficulty and political crisis do not establish that a concealed planner arranged them. Bezmenov's account records a particular man's claims about subversion; it does not supply a general law by which nations fall. Used carelessly, a warning against manipulation can become another way of making suspicion feel like knowledge.

There is nevertheless a useful question beneath the account. How much damage can a society sustain through its own habits of judgement, before an adversary needs to contribute very much? A public official does not require foreign direction to conceal a failure. A newspaper does not require a conspiracy to reward a story that pleases its readers. Citizens need no instructions to excuse conduct in their allies that they condemn in their opponents. Each participant may pursue an ordinary advantage while making the shared account of reality less reliable.

These habits can develop through small permissions. A misleading claim is defended because the other side is worse. An obvious contradiction is overlooked because admitting it would give an opponent something to use. A person who asks an inconvenient question is treated as disloyal before the question is answered. The immediate decision feels tactical. Repeated often enough, it changes what membership of the group requires. Someone may still value truth privately while learning that its public expression has conditions.

Language then becomes difficult to use for its most necessary work. A policy has succeeded if our side introduced it and failed if theirs did. Accountability means an investigation of someone else. An exceptional measure remains exceptional through several extensions. The words retain their reassuring familiarity while the conditions under which they would be withdrawn grow obscure. Citizens can argue indefinitely because the same sentence is doing different work for each of them.

The answer cannot simply be to restore confidence in authority. Institutions sometimes deserve to lose it. Exposing corruption, revising an inaccurate history or challenging an inherited practice may strengthen a society's capacity to judge itself. A demand for trust can protect misconduct as effectively as a campaign of indiscriminate suspicion can obscure honest work. The important distinction is whether criticism allows a claim to be examined and revised, or makes every possible finding confirm the accusation already in place.

Consider an institution accused of hiding a failure. If it releases evidence, the evidence may expose wrongdoing or answer the allegation. Either outcome leaves room for discovery. But if every denial proves the cover-up, every admission proves the entire institution corrupt, and every independent assessment proves that the assessors have been bought, the accusation has become impossible to test. It offers the satisfaction of seeing through everything at the cost of being able to distinguish anything.

That condition can serve power rather well. People who believe every account is dishonest may cease asking which account is supported. They choose the dishonesty that promises to defend them. A leader no longer needs to appear consistently truthful if inconsistency can be excused as the necessary conduct of someone fighting an enemy. Cynicism, which began as protection against being taken in, becomes permission to be taken in by one's own side.

A crisis puts additional pressure on these habits. Decisions must be made quickly, uncertainty becomes frightening, and measures that would ordinarily receive prolonged scrutiny can acquire an urgency of their own. Some may be necessary. Necessity still leaves questions: what problem is the measure meant to solve, what would show that it has worked, who can challenge it, and when does the justification expire? If those questions become evidence of disloyalty, the emergency has begun changing more than the available policy choices.

People can uncover an error, institutions can correct a decision, and a public can withdraw support without surrendering its capacity to cooperate. These possibilities depend on practices that are less exciting than the discovery of a hidden enemy: specifying a claim, retaining the evidence, applying the same standard to an ally, admitting what remains unknown. Their value is easiest to miss when everyone is certain that the stakes are too high to permit them.

A society does not need agreement on everything. It needs ways of remaining answerable to something beyond the advantage of winning today's dispute. Without them, political success can come to mean preserving the account that made failure possible. We may continue to call this loyalty long after it has begun costing us the country to which we claim to be loyal.

Further reading: Yuri Bezmenov's 1984 interview (reproduced transcript); OECD: drivers of trust in public institutions, 2024.