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September 24, 2023
When Soviet Bolshevism fell, liberal democracy and capitalism stood ready to replace it.
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But thirty years later, they are also not far from following those comrades into their workers’ paradise.
Liberalism and liberals do not come off well in my books. Liberalism, with its reforms, has always hastened any system’s fall, including its own.
The political side of this dynamic is easy to follow. When dissent is finally allowed in a once-illiberal country, discontent grows until it takes on its own momentum. Political and economic liberalization are destabilizing; they are merely interim measures leading to the next level of development that liberalism will not control. Moreover, most liberals are ineffectual, abusive, and insulting toward anyone who disagrees with them.
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Much-coveted private enrichment is easier and faster accomplished through corruption than honest capitalist exertion. Simply applying the liberal rules of the free market is never enough without the underlying classical liberal culture to make capitalism work. Then, ironically, the practices of liberal democracy will destroy that very capitalism in return. This shaky and unstable circle keeps wobbling until it becomes anarchy or develops into an illiberal democracy with managed capitalism. Russia has already experienced this path; the U.S. is still decaying into such disorder.
No one had predicted the fall of the crumbling Soviet empire until it happened, and no one who lived through that time can analyze the collapse of socialism without thinking about the decaying American empire of today. The American political system is downright outdated, dysfunctional, corrupt, and run by a gerontocracy (President Biden was older when inaugurated than Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko were when they died several decades ago).
The American Constitutional system is dead, and the legislature has become a theater for racial equity and political correctness. The judicial system is prejudiced; the mainstream media is shamelessly biased and propagandistic; big business slavishly follows state orders predicated on social justice; the educational system has turned into training institutions of leftist ideology; store shelves are intermittently empty, and there are show trials on television.
One other point of resemblance is the rebelliousness of a resentful majority. The Soviet Union, like the U.S., was racially and ethnically diverse, with Russians as the predominant nationality, albeit suffering a demographic decline—similar to the whites in the United States. Russian nationalists began to demand why Czechoslovakia, Poland, or Hungary enjoyed higher living standards than the Russians to whose empire they belonged.
Americans, primarily liberal intellectuals, have begun to ask why Europeans, mainly Scandinavians, live better than the citizens of the Western world’s leading country.
America’s assumed still-majority is not in a position to secede the way Russia was able to free itself of the USSR and thus bring down the empire. The features between the First, Second, and Third Worlds have been blurred in the contemporary United States as state competence stretches in various odd and tyrannical directions while leaving the essential functions of government untouched. The resulting misalignment of priorities could delegitimize the government in the eyes of the citizenry.
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The post-WWII political landscape was comparatively transparent. The “First World” nations of the West—the U.S., U.K., France, and so on, including Japan—portrayed relative political and economic independence, capitalist material prosperity, and legal probity. Then, there were communist dictatorships of the “Second World,” where the government exercised near-total control over its citizens, the state-dominated the media, and a single political party enforced its own ideologically driven laws. Filling out the picture was the “Third World,” notable for autocracy, corruption, poverty, disease, and crime.
Ideologically and intellectually impaired experts assumed an inevitable transition whereby Third World nations (even communist countries) would eventually become First World nations. There was some progress as capitalism became more widespread but this Third-World-to-First-World transition did not occur as those theorists had anticipated.
Now the America of today seems to be combining critical elements of communist-style dictatorships with Third World human misery and its intellectual morass to create a mind-boggling hybrid.
Most evident is the slide toward enhanced state power once associated with communist dictatorships, i.e., a totalitarian creep toward socialism. This encroachment includes politicizing the security and intelligence agencies and government permissiveness as social media companies censor and defund organizations disputing government claims. The transgression also involves the exaggerating of crises to expand bureaucratic control, political show trials, transforming education into indoctrination, rewriting history, state cooptation of the mass media, encouraging mobs to terrorize ordinary people, manipulating elections via questionable regulations, and an Orwellian obsession with criminalizing language.
America and the Western world have become not the Workers’ Paradise of yore, but the Wokers’ Paradise in which parts of the U.S. combine the worst of the Second and Third Worlds.
In supposedly First World cities, dozens of ill-kempt, homeless drug addicts might invade your front yard, mug you, and set up camps—trying to evict them is a risky business. Yes, the state-run stores in the old East Berlin had empty shelves, but the odds of your Trabant being carjacked with you in it were zero, and the Stasi happily ignored your choice of pronoun.
Whether I sit in a coffee shop forced to listen to a rap being played, or inadvertently overhear children play and talk, or listen in to municipal workers’ shouting in town, the F-word—the one that rhymes with muck and yuck—features prominently in the lyrics, used as an adjective, a noun, and a verb.
This crudity of language is merely one symptom of American descent into barbarism, while a disheveled fashion sense is another. The so-called Women’s Health Protection Act is one of the much darker signs of the drift toward barbarism, a bill passed by Democrats in the House of Representatives in September 2021. That act would override state laws on abortion, including mandatory waiting periods, requirements involving ultrasound tests, and informed consent—and allow abortions through nine months.
What kind of hell is being created in America? What kind of people will chop up an eight-month-old baby in the womb? The fact that this bill passed the House of Representatives condemns the United States of America, labeling it a country of barbaric pagans and putting it in the company of the ancient city-state of Carthage, pre-Columbian cultures practicing child sacrifice, and even Nazi Germany.
“Americans” are fond of condemning the past today, tearing down monuments, revising history books, and attacking the forefathers who founded the United States and made the country attractive to millions of immigrants. What will their children’s children, those fortunate enough to be born and see the light of day, think of a people who condoned and approved such atrocities?
Real Americans must embrace a moral way of living and not act as if they believe in modern Western civilization’s left-liberal values and mores.
Supposedly, The Times of London once sent the following brief inquiry to several intellectuals and acclaimed authors: “What is wrong with the world today?” G. K. Chesterton, writer and philosopher, responded with a two-word answer, “I am.”
Ideally, those in government, corporations, schools, universities, and the rest of American society exercised this same sense of humility. In that case, they might turn away from their dark path.
However, I am a realist, not an idealist.
Peter J. Sandys was born and brought up in Hungary, where he was briefly imprisoned for attempting to escape from the country in 1963. After rehabilitation, graduating from technical high school, and finishing military service, he earned a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from the Technical University of Budapest. Following his successful defection to the West, he settled in the United States and earned a master’s degree in business administration from Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and a doctoral degree in international business from the University of California. He held various engineering and project management positions, mostly in the aerospace industry, and published The Waning of the West: An Inconvenient Truism and Not All Quiet Before the Storm: A Political Study of the West. He has one daughter and a grandson. Retired, he lives in Germany.
Image: Pixabay / Pixabay License
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