We’re All Soviets Now

The Free Press ^ | Niall Ferguson

[Tench_Coxe]

The witty phrase “late Soviet America” was coined by the Princeton historian Harold James back in 2020. It has only become more apposite since then as the cold war we’re in—the second one—heats up.

I first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. In articles for The New York Times and National Review, I tried to show how the People’s Republic of China now occupies the space vacated by the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991.

(snip)

But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?”

(snip)

The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”

[Tench_Coxe]

Niall Ferguson is with the Hoover Institute.

[sauropod]

bkmk

[Who is John Galt?]

Have to admit that some of the old Soviet humor is getting more & more applicable in these United States:

Worker 1: "Hello, comrade! How are you today?"

Worker 2: "Average."

Worker 1: "What do you mean, 'average'?"

Worker 2: "Worse than yesterday, and better than tomorrow - you know, 'average'!"

[PGR88]

Ferguson is stealing my stuff.

Our woke, ideologue DC uniparty and Fed.gov have become the new Soviets - spreading an inhuman post-modern ideology, pulling all political power to the central government, mass surveillance, spreading chaos in small countries around the world, and bankrupting the country with central-planning and leftist schemes.

[Jan_Sobieski]

Yep

[Jan_Sobieski]

We’re All Soviets Now?

Yes…but no problem. Provoking WW3 will solve everything! LETS GO!!

[Who is John Galt?]

...Provoking WW3 will solve everything! LETS GO!!

Yeah, that's modern America:

[ansel12]

That is very apt for the general mood today in America.

Easy joy, surprise belly laughs, an underlying happiness and comfort, enthusiastic smiling eyes, a spring in everyone’s step, all things we don’t see much today.