The American Gorbachev 1990/2010

                A powerful nation once stridently confident in its world mission had, it seemed, almost overnight woken up to the reality of bankruptcy and the possibility of unbridled civic anarchy. Not surprisingly public confidence in its social and economic institutions and the prominent political figures which led them were at an all-time low. Sometime before this ultimate ‘meltdown’ a young, inexperienced leader, soon to be feted the world over, had promised stirring domestic reform only to bring total collapse a short time later. On top of all this woe, an intractable war in Afghanistan causing friend and foe alike to pause and ask: wither O hegemon? 

                Of course the country or rather state that I am referring to above was the Soviet Union circa 1988-1991. Strikingly, though, I could almost have been talking about another gaspingly heaving hegemon: the US circa 2008-2011. 

                Yes there are differences. Big ones. Internally the US has been an evolving participatory democracy with a complicated free-market system for over two-hundred years while the Soviet Union was, as some commentators have somewhat facetiously remarked, a prime example of the last stage of “industrial feudalism” ruled by a “Kafkaesque-Gogolian” bureaucracy. 

                Yet these fundamental differences in state and civic character make the similarities of both their situations all the more intriguing.

                Both systems, albeit at different rates, had suffered from increasing centralization and government control over all aspects of life legitimized by elitist, technocratic, and, yes, atheist ideologies. Both systems increasingly watched perplexed as their citizens both relied more and more on government services while despising those who offered it to them in almost direct proportion to what was given. A steady decline in moral values such as cooperation, hard-work, sacrifice, self-control, and tolerance of differences in thought and in ways of living ensued. Greed, envy, licentiousness, and even cruelty became the true spirits of the age hidden by the hypocrisy of ‘intellectual speak’ as taught by the ‘higher institutions of learning’.

                And finally both systems did not understand or really know what was happening to them even when it did and after. Even so change did come revealing a shell-shocked, demoralized populace who sought to blame anyone else but themselves. What happened after that, in the case of the Soviet Union, is now history: dramatic population decline, a rapid loss of world power, devastating impoverishment and an overpowering sense of helplessness and cynicism which only worsened encouraging more of the same.

                Is this the ultimate fate of the US? I think not. However it is a warning. A large nation, like a large ship, often moves on inertia however there comes a time when it must turn around and sometimes sharply so: it has happened many times in US history…will it happen again?


http://www.americanthinker.com/2009/07/obama_is_russias_new_useful_id.html