How It Started: “We Are All Socialists Now.”
—The Washington Post, through then-subsidiary publication Newsweek, February 16th, 2009, as Obama began his first term in office.
How it’s going, deep in his third term: “We’re All Soviets Now,” Niall Ferguson writes:
Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.
In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants, and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in “the great Patriotic War.” The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right.
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.”
In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”
The Biden administration and its operatives with Chyrons going full Soviet to help prop up the elderly husk of their nominal figurehead doesn’t help matters. But then, as Katya Sedgwick warned in December of 2020: Biden’s Brezhnev vibes — Is the presumptive President-elect the candidate of American stagnation?
At least nobody in the Soviet Union voted for Brezhnev — the elections were a sham with Communist party candidates running unopposed. Everything was a sham, actually. In his mumbling, robotic tones, the general secretary delivered long-winded, heavy on Marxist cliches and utterly incomprehensible televised speeches. The economy flattered, dissidents were subjected to psychiatric torture, corruption proliferated, and the rate of substance abuse skyrocketed. That period of Soviet history is known as zastoi, or stagnation. It only made sense that the man on top was some sort of sclerotic.
Like Brezhnev, Biden’s rhetoric is ridden with clichés, but of a different, folksy kind. At the time when political slogans are catchy and provocative — Make America Great Again, Black Lives Matter — Biden’s yard signs read ‘Our best days are still ahead’, and ‘Build back better’. His Twitter account is full of platitudes like ‘This is our moment — ours together — to write a newer, bolder, more compassionate chapter in the life of our nation.’ He’s just a boring ordinary guy — until he lashes out at a voter, or bites on his wife’s finger.
Is Biden the candidate of American stagnation? His cognitive and physical decline is increasingly difficult to hide and it’s highly disturbing to witness it become a subject of speculation. I’ve lived through it before and it gives me the creeps. Free citizens of a free republic shouldn’t need a Kremlinologist to decipher what’s wrong with their president.
And here we are.