Where Are We?

For John, BLUF:  Our Society is showing signs of misfunction, and we should do something about it.  Nothing to see here; just move along.

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Niall Ferguson: We’re All Soviets Now

Here is the sub-headline:

A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?

From The Free Press, by Professor Niall Ferguson, Thursday, 20 June 2024.

Here is the lede plus five:

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.

This view is less controversial now than it was then. China is clearly not only an ideological rival, firmly committed to Marxism-Leninism and one-party rule. It’s also a technological competitor—the only one the U.S. confronts in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It’s a military rival, with a navy that is already larger than ours and a nuclear arsenal that is catching up fast. And it’s a geopolitical rival, asserting itself not only in the Indo-Pacific but also through proxies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.

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?”

I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day—perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?

Yes, I know what you are going to say.

Then the Author goes on to look at comparisons between the late Soviet Union and current America.  Things like the dynamism of the ledership and population death rates, including suicides and drug overdoses.

After looking at the economy the Author looks at the American Sociwety and the way it is divided between the upper class and the working class and looks at DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion).♠

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.”

Anyway, it is an interesting critique of where we, in America, are today, and some areas we need to examine to do better in the future.

Regards  —  Cliff

♠  In my mind DEI is like PERT, which was all the rage in management terms in the 1960s, but then was found to have not been a real thing, at least in the project floouted as its success, the Polaris Missile Program, but rather a way of conveying information on a project.