> My peers and I wanted our country to have clean streets, polite police, and government officials who would resign at the exposure of petty corruption scandals. We wanted to be able to start businesses without passing money under the table, and to trust that courts of law would render justice. What we did not want were irremovable, lifetime dictators who packed the government with cronies on the take and sent goons to beat us up in the streets.
Putin and his fans think it's NATO expansion policies that brainwashes "the woke" to want to join the "western" (NATO/US/EU) sphere of influence, so attacking Ukraine to stop that is fair game, or "It's their fault they got attacked, they wanted to join 'the west'!". But what people want are clear laws and predictable officials, not ones that make up crap as they go along (as well as depending on the size of your "donation") to benefit themselves.
Not that the "west" can be seen as clean, it even managed to elect Trump, who's now stacked the justice system with his followers and is looking to steal the election by appointing corrupt officials state-by-state. And as much as the EU is better than the alternative, it's a huge joke, with people like Jean-Claude Juncker who was not pro-public but pro-corporations, and the inept Van der Leyen (barf) who's there because (I assume) cronyism. Or the way they're handling crimes against humanity depending on which aggressor country is commiting the murder of innocent civilians... No fucking wonder people are buying the lies of populists saying they'll make shit great again.
For more on corruption and how it makes the citizenry give up on its government, this is a nice article/review of a book on that topic: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/01/19/corruption-rev...