What has been the central issue for me is not the oligarchy that is Russia (or the Ukraine or the US). As I noted all of them are oligarchies. So are, though I will concede in varying degrees along a continuum, Iceland and Denmark. I have largely focused heretofore on the role culture, politics, and economics played and play in the current European war and the role culture plays in the framing of that war. My focus, in other words, was on the demagogic bullshite that always accompanies such conflicts. My discussion of oligarchy was related to the common myth among those who have drank the koolaid of American civil religion that the US is a "democracy".
There is no doubt, descriptively speaking, that the US and Russia are great powers and that they like to throw their ecoomic, political, and cultural weight around. There is no doubt that NATO expansion, as several commentors and intellectuals have noted over the years, has played an important role in the leadup to the current war. There is no doubt that an elected government sympathetic to Russian concerns was overthrown in 2013 and 2014. There is little doubt that the US played a role in that coup. That is what great powers knee jerkingly do. There is no doubt that Ukraine is a multicultural state in the mold of the old Austria Hungarian Empire. There is no doubt that the multicultural nature of the Ukraine has led to tensions and culture wars in that state and has made political culture in the Ukraine dysfunctional. There is no doubt that Russia has played a role in that dysfunction and there is equally no doubt that they didn't create it. There is no doubt that manichean cultural frames are a factor in how some, many of whom probably know little of the history of the leadup to this conflict, know llittle of the Ukraine including its history, and who probably couldn't tell you where Ukraine was on the map before the conflict, "read" this war and its broader contexts.
Let's be honest, most of those who have been turned into red faced vigilantes recently have been made into rageoholics by governmental historically deficient demagoguery and by the media, a media that, on one level, is a demagogic arm of Western governments and which is hardly known for operating outside the nationalist hermeneutic circle. See the Birmingham School studies on media framing and assumptions. The media, by and large, tend to be about as critical and historically inclined as a paper bag. None of what I say, of course, is Russian "disinformation". It is descriptive fact and that makes it different from the manichean and historically anemic disinformation being spread by many in the nationalistic and imperialistic American government and the nationalist, sensationalist, and melodramatic American media (all of which is paralled in much other Western media), which always becomes more penny in form and content in periods of imperial and nationalistic crisis.
Christian social ethicist and former pacifist Reinhold Niebuhr, of course, made the argument, in the context of the rise of fascism in Europe and, to a lesser extent, in the US, an argument which is fundamentally and inherently normative and ultimately, as a consequence, theological. Niebuhr argued that flawed democracies were, relatively speaking, "better" than aggressive authoritarian regimes and that one had to ultimately chose between them. Niebuhr was quite aware, when he made this argument, of the flaws of American "democracy" its, for instance, chasm between rich and poor and its racism. It is a valid ethical and theological argument, a, in other words, valid normative perspective. And it is even grounded, unlike some ethical and theological arguments, in descriptive fact making it more realist. Nieburh's approach, of course, was central to the rise of liberal realist foreign policy and the doctrine of containment. It is also less manichean than other normative perspectives in that it recognises that societies must by typologised on the basis of more "good" and less "good".
That said, it is also a valid to note the descriptive fact that in many ways these "democracies" are fake democracies given that they are bureaucratic in nature and hence oligarchic as Weber and Michels note. if one wants to critique the arguments of Weber and Michels, of course, it would be wise, at least in my opinion, to actually critique the arguments of Weber and Michels, two social scientific giants, rather than frame the issue within what is more or a normative than a descriptive frame. One might, for instance, argue that Weber and Michels are right but that there are multiple bureaucracies in the US and that these economic, political, and cultural bureaucracies are engaged in a struggle for power and hegemony, a struggle that opens up spaces for something like the New Deal and Great Society, both of which brought a greater degree of equality to the US. On the other hand, one might argue that the New Deal to Great Society was an anomaly in American history (as was the notion that America was characterised by a consensus from the Great Depression to Nixon) and that economic oligarchs have controlled and still dominate and control the economic, political, and cultural bureaucracies of the US. One might go on to argue, in descriptive mode, that such control makes these elites, thanks to the wealth, money, authority, and power that comes and accrues, in part, from one's position in hierarchical bureaucracies, the ones who really control and dominate the US economically, politically, and culturally. One might go on to argue that the social and cultural capital that accrues from one's bureaucratic position replicates oligarchic power in "democratic" oligarchies like the US. One might then go on to argue, as a consequence, that the US is an oligarchy that is not that different from oligarchic Russia. I think I will make that argument.
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