Slouching Towards Collapse

This article was submitted to Amerikaner.org by Grant Norman.

Last Christmas Day marked the thirtieth anniversary of the Soviet Union’s demise. On December 25th, 1991, the red and yellow flag which had flown over the Kremlin for decades was lowered and replaced by the white, blue, and red Russian tricolor. An era was over, and with it, liberal triumphalists assumed, history itself.

Now, thirty years on, it is worth exploring the end of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics with reference to our current regime ruling from Washington, D.C. Historical parallelism is certainly a popular theme in the dissident sphere, encompassing connections to Weimar Germany’s degeneracy, the fall of Rome, and, for the mor exotic-minded, the bureaucratization of child abuse in the Ottoman Empire. It is also one prone to faults of wishful thinking and doom-saying.

Even in such a crowded graveyard of dead empires, I believe that the Soviet Union stands out as a particular shadow to the regime on the Potomac. The events of the last two years have seen the elevation of a geriatric to the highest post in the land, a tangible symbol of the ossification and conservatism that has seized a once proud and revolutionary nation. Like his Soviet counterparts, Joe Biden has built his latest public persona around the mission of reinvigorating the country and tackling the most egregious failures of the previous ruler, while steadfastly refusing to address any systemic issues or balance of power. The selection of Joe Biden as president is an interesting one, because he succeeded fellow living corpse Hillary Clinton as the Democratic Party’s nominee and triumphed over another senior citizen, albeit one apparently better preserved.

Donald Trump is himself a caricature not of the gerontocratic leadership of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko, but of Boris Yeltsin. In the dying days of the Soviet Union, Yeltsin utilized his power base as the president of the Russian Republic within the Union to challenge the central government, leading opposition to the hardliner’s coup against Mikhail Gorbachev, and nigh-unilaterally dissolving the U.S.S.R. with the leadership of Belarus and the Ukraine. Those are all much more impressive accomplishments than Donald Trump can boast of, but what followed will seem much more familiar. Yeltsin, this archetypical outsider, the champion of ordinary Russians and their rights against the Communist system, quickly was revealed to be a buffoon held in thrall to foreign powers and oligarchs with dual loyalties. Like Donald Trump, Yeltsin was widely mocked on the international stage and sold out his country and his supporters to people who hated them and him. Unlike the anemic “insurrection” of January 6th, however, Yeltsin at least had the chutzpah to use tanks against the Russian parliament when it sought to remove him from office.

So, we have a cast of characters similar to that of the Soviet Union, but other trends between our empire and theirs also rhyme. Within the Soviet Union, a massive program of wealth redistribution and political patronage was dedicated to taking from the productive republics, the Baltic states and Russia herself chief among them, to the backwards Central Asian republics. While the United States employs policies of expropriation of wealth and influence from the productive members of society to the regime’s golems and their handlers, which are in fact greater than that endured by Russians and Balts. Our rulers enjoy a far greater geographical distribution of wealth than that of the Soviet Union, however, with the distribution of wealthy metros across the United States helping to dull the prospects for regionalist and secessionist movements. Every urban area is a fifth column inside of states which might otherwise try to chart a less destructive course, and most worryingly these areas are also in command of many of the financial and political levers which control the fate of the salt of the earth Amerikaners whom they despise. As such, a clean break seems much more difficult in our situation, as does the general lack of rootedness and identity which the neoliberal ideology encourages.

“Aren’t we just as much Floridians as you?” the California transplant will cry, before the signature on their lease is even dry.

Also like the Soviet Union, it seems that the only people who still believe in the state’s ideology are those whose paychecks directly depend on it. The transformation in former Communist countries of many of their leading figures into every stripe of western-inspired politician showed just how shallow the ideology’s roots had become even among those who were in charge. Even now, you have graduates of prestigious Soviet universities who wrote their theses on party-approved Marxist lines testifying before the U.S. Congress that they never meant any of those things they wrote, that they did it just to get along. As for the ordinary people of the Soviet Union, Marxist-Leninism and the various attempts to shore it up was becoming more and more of a joke, one that grew more bitter and was uttered more publicly with every passing year.

We in America are bombarded every day with the hypocrisy of our leaders as they talk about the great gods of equality and justice while doing everything in their power to make sure that it is Amerikaners who suffer the effects of their policies. Nobody wants to be around the untalented ninety percent, not even their staunchest defenders. It is all about money and power, and how those can be wielded against the last few Heritage Americans who have not yet given up. Just as the Soviet Union was trying to prop up a Communist government in Afghanistan, our twenty-first century ideologues were hoisting pride flags and painting murals of George Floyd in the same country, the same city in fact, until the Taliban made both projects untenable.

Afghanistan is the elephant in the room when it comes to linking the fall of the Soviet Union with the fall of our own evil empire. For nine years, Moscow tried to hold up an increasingly unpopular government. The United States, richer, more powerful, and far more technologically advanced than the Soviet Union, attempted to do the same for two decades, and failed even more spectacularly. The Soviet Union faced an Afghan resistance which was backed by U.S. arms, funds, and propaganda. Decades later, the warlord pedophiles which Washington had empowered could not handle an insurgency whose biggest state sponsor was America’s nominal ally, Pakistan.

The United States is unable to export anything that people want. It projects a lifestyle that is increasingly out of reach for its own population and spreads dissolution and death everywhere that it goes. Botswanans are not legalizing sodomy out of any genuine change of heart regarding homosexuals, they are merely following in the footsteps of the African dictators of the Cold War who saw that by proclaiming themselves either Socialists or anti-Communists they could receive money and other support from the superpower of their choice with very few questions asked. The only thing left holding up American hegemony abroad is force and money, and both of those advantages, which once towered over any adversary, are rapidly being eroded. Russia is developing hypersonic missiles and the Chinese are perfecting an anti-access/area denial strategy which will turn its corner of the Pacific into a no-go zone for the U.S. navy. Meanwhile, that same vaunted branch of the forces of freedom and democracy cannot seem to stop crashing its boats.

Today Russia is a strong, resilient, and proud country capable of defying the edicts coming out of the Potomac swamp. But in order to get here, it was necessary for Russia to suffer through the 1990’s. With the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia was swarmed with parasites both foreign and domestic. Many of them embedded themselves in the administration of President Boris Yeltsin and pushed for the disastrous “shock therapy” policy meant to reorient the Russian economy away from a Communist system to a capitalist one as quickly as possible. As a result, the country’s wealth was snapped up by a collection of greedy oligarchs while the ordinary Russians saw their life expectancy fall dramatically as organized crime and drug abuse swept through a devastated and dejected nation. How bad did things get? The Communist Party’s candidate would have beaten Yeltsin and won the 1996 Russian presidential elections had it not been for election interference from the United States. This only five years after the end of the Soviet Union. While in the U.S. the decade calls to mind beanie babies and Friends, for Russians the 1990’s was the greatest disaster to befall their country since the Second World War.

Unfortunately, we in America appear to be suffering from the bad parts of the twilight of the Soviet era and the nadir of the 1990’s. From the former, we have the unresponsive leadership class which fears and loathes its subjects even as it keeps them cowed with security services and ideological claptrap. From the latter, there is the rising crime, mounting economic woes, and the consolidation of the country’s economy under a perverse breed of American oligarchs who put those of the Gilded Age to shame.

A large piece of the puzzle is still missing from this historical analogy, namely reform. Mikhail Gorbachev and even Andropov and Chernenko before him, recognized the challenges facing the Soviet Union and tried in vain to solve them. In this environment, Boris Yeltsin was able to win support by agreeing with and amplifying Gorbachev’s reforms. The moves towards democracy, liberalism, and capitalism did not go far enough, he argued, and thus Yeltsin rapidly eclipsed Gorbachev and the General Secretary’s agenda in popularity.

By contrast, no one in the leadership of either the Republican or Democratic Parties seems to believe that the United States is suffering from deep systemic problems. Debate is held on a narrow band over tax rates and minor procedural differences. Even when a figure like Donald Trump does touch upon some of the issues plaguing the country, it is mere rhetoric. Even in its hysterics designed to reinforce loyalty to the system, the current regime will not identify the problems of the present but only conjure up artificial specters of the past: Jim Crow, the Civil War, and war with Russia.

The most vulnerable time for a regime is when it begins to reform.

If I may hazard a prediction, it is that the governors who are currently in the running to be our American Yeltsin, complete with all of the baggage that entails, cannot merely set themselves against Joe Biden. Ron DeSantis, Kristi Noem, and Greg Abbott have to be willing to outflank the reformers, and therefore stress the regime even further. If any of these governors are willing to defy a central government run by members of their own political party, or, even better, a president from the same, then we’d be cooking with gas.

Don’t forget that the nineties were Hell for the Russians, but they have come out of it wiser and tougher for it.

We can only hope that on the other end of our empire’s crack-up we will be able to say the same of the Amerikaners.