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 The American political system is downright outdated, dysfunctional, corrupt, and run by a gerontocracy (President Biden was older when inaugurated than Leonid Brezhnev, Yury Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko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.