Today, there are aspects of this phenomenon that the Left is carrying out in the USA. The mobbing that social media makes possible, the institutions calling out individuals for wrong think & not going with the proscribed leftist creed on gender theory, politics & racial diversity. At the moment, our saving grace is that we have 50 different governments (the states) and people can vote with their feet and to some extent they are. Enough people have left Commie New York & California to the extent that they have lost representatives in Congress. And yes, our forefathers were great for having established such a system.
I think that's because in our education system and culture the emphasis is on fascism fascism fascism, which was bad enough. But Stalin and Mao are covered with a much lighter emphasis, without the same level of concern or vitriol. I was thinking about this the other day, but if you took a poll of college students how many do you think would rank Trump as worse than Mao or Stalin? Hopefully not too many but I wouldn't bet against it being a majority. And that'd be a sad commentary.
Re: kids today thinking Trump worse than Mao/Stalin…I don’t disagree with you at all. That said, students graduating school today, perhaps excepting STEM students, are abysmally educated. Virtually none of them know anything about history for starters. They don’t even have a general understanding of when events happened chronologically: Many think the American Civil war happened in the 1950’s!! My daughter, a Harvard grad, often recalled the obtuseness of classmates. One summer, she stayed on campus to work and to take additional courses - she roomed with a recent graduate. This woman was a theology major and was fascinated by my daughter as she said, my daughter was the ‘first Jew’ she had ever met - at Harvard! She went on to query my daughter about Judaism - my daughter was stunned that this Theology major had virtually no understanding of the Jewish religion. So what was this she studying!? This woman was black - so I am guessing she stayed in her ‘black bubble’ on campus!?
Wow, that's incredibly embarrassing. And I agree with the historic ignorance, that's the basis for so much going on in society. If they had an understanding of history they'd have laughed the 1619 project out and unsubscribed from the NYT or at least made their displeasure known. Instead they seem to see their actions as justified based on slavery when America was founded and Jim Crow, as if slavery wasn't a universal thing at the time, and as if most other countries were perfect. They'd claim that's whataboutism which is convenient, because it allows them to ignore much of the world. But you can't understand anything without a context, which they deny. Simultaneously they are happy to do a deal with Iran, while ignoring their multitude of flaws.
It all just makes me want to throw up my hands. The education establishment seems bent on raising activists rather than teaching and informing, not to even get into the gender stuff now. And then there's a lot of people with power who will say 'yeah, that stuff is pretty bad, but Trump!' And it's like don't you see the asymmetry here, and how the actions on the left create someone like Trump? It's unfortunate but you have to make a choice and deal with whichever you think is worse. If you claim they are equal then you aren't dealing with either. Anyway enough rambling.
And don’t forget 2A, also prescient of the founders. The lesson of history is the governments oppress people. People need tools to push back and understanding this, the founders gave us the right to protect ourselves.
In reading the sections of this essay that focus specifically on the trajectory of the Soviet Union, I can't help but wonder if the existence of the United States had the opposite effect on the USSR that we tend to ascribe:
Typically, we learn in the West that the perpetual economic and military competition with the United States through the decades-long Cold War exhausted its resources, highlighted its inefficiencies and fatal flaws, placed its productivity under constant stress, which accelerated dissent and ultimately collapse. That the US "won" the Cold War, by nothing more than keeping the USSR in a constant state of existential crisis demanding overwork of a broken system.
Reading this essay, one wonders if it would have crumbled much sooner if it did not have the US as an ideological rival against which to stabilize its ideological currents- because what else was the USSR if not the Communist bulwark against the capitalist edifice of the United States, its mirror image in all things, against which all good Soviets can at least agree upon?
This is a common tool of weak leadership. Motivate solidarity against an enemy instead of motivating solidarity toward a vision of shared responsibility to solve problems and improve.
Now, there are cases when motivations against the enemy are justified.
Morality isn't really a thing unless it has a shared basis.
I was debating someone about liberal vs conservative justices. Liberals view the law as a means to an end. Conservatives view the law as a means to constrain those that would moralize almost any means to an end.
And the conservatives are in a word: correct. They are correct because it is a proper appreciation of how the human animal works. Law binds us and protects us against ourselves. Means to an end is the street car fallacy and the starting point of violence and killing.
Agree. God given rights enshrined by our constitution. Those God-given rights support the basic human condition. Conservatives know this and only demand that those God-given rights are protected. However, there is a fundamental base of morality to help regulate the behavior of those that would harm others for their own gain. That is the missing piece. I think it started to crash biggly when Bill Clinton lied to the world saying his bald-faced lie "I did not have sexual relations with that woman". In that moment the leader of the free world told the world that if you can get away with the act, then it is moral.
This is all moot, though, if we accept the premise that the US and USSR were legitimately existential threats to one another- that the post-WW2 world order wouldn't have room for both ideological poles to exist indefinitely.
I think the inherent self-destruction of Communism would have brought the USSR down faster without a spirit rival, but the USSR would never have existed in a vacuum.
But this is all a completely different topic than your analysis of leftist sociology.
Corporatism, Communism, and Wokeness are the same three headed beast. Only Americans have forgotten the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because we are stupefied with technology and our vanity. It is great folly to dismiss the horrors Central Europeans suffered under Soviet Communism. Now that we have our own platforms, communism is somehow cool. Communism only deals with our earthly desires and has no answer for the bigger questions like why are we here. Napoleon was the hero of the French Revolution. ‘General Rule’ was that: “No social revolution without terror. Every revolution is, by its nature, a revolt which success and the passage of time legitimize but in which terror is one of the inevitable phases. “Vanity” said Napoleon, “made the Revolution; liberty was only a pretext.” The terror of COVID is now settling in as apart of our society and pivots are being made. The study of communism and the corporate mindset are noble pursuits in coming to your own conclusions about the current regimes. The human nature of our Uncle Joes. If interested, I highly recommend the author Victor Sebestyen, his books on Soviet Communism dissects the communist mindset and nature. "Twelve Days the Hungarian Revolution 1956" is a great starting point. Rob is my first paid Substack subscription. Really dig the newsletter, nice work!
Question, how is this communist artificial dialectic different than our current situation: “the political Gnosticism of the liberal imperium” as per Professor Deneen.
Answer, it is not different. It’s the same thing, using the same mechanisms for controlling people. An oligarchy is controlling through intimidation while they rape and pillage our society. The same minus the executions.
I am curious to know from which Berlin work the quotes are drawn. Are they from his "Six Enemies" lecture series? I would suspect that he might have attributed too much sincerity to the Soviet revolutionaries in their Marxist-Leninist ideological beliefs. Being a brilliant intellectual, his faith in the power of ideas is understandable. However, most people feign ideological zeal in the pursuit of narrow self-interest. Social concerns take a backseat to their acquisition of wealth and status.
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago suggests that, to the contrary, many Soviets were well aware of the cynicism and cruelty of their totalitarian system. NKVD agents did not always purge individuals because of their ideological impurity; but, because they had heard a rumor and they had quotas to fill. One might have been sent to gulag simply because an agent took a fancy to your wife.
It seems that the majority of citizens in the Soviet Union lived in terror most of the time. The going philosophy being "You today, me tomorrow" or "Better your hide than mine, so screw you."
Probably the best explanation of the social dynamics of the Soviet Union incorporates both Berlin and Solzhenitsyn's perspectives.
Today, there are aspects of this phenomenon that the Left is carrying out in the USA. The mobbing that social media makes possible, the institutions calling out individuals for wrong think & not going with the proscribed leftist creed on gender theory, politics & racial diversity. At the moment, our saving grace is that we have 50 different governments (the states) and people can vote with their feet and to some extent they are. Enough people have left Commie New York & California to the extent that they have lost representatives in Congress. And yes, our forefathers were great for having established such a system.
I think that's because in our education system and culture the emphasis is on fascism fascism fascism, which was bad enough. But Stalin and Mao are covered with a much lighter emphasis, without the same level of concern or vitriol. I was thinking about this the other day, but if you took a poll of college students how many do you think would rank Trump as worse than Mao or Stalin? Hopefully not too many but I wouldn't bet against it being a majority. And that'd be a sad commentary.
Re: kids today thinking Trump worse than Mao/Stalin…I don’t disagree with you at all. That said, students graduating school today, perhaps excepting STEM students, are abysmally educated. Virtually none of them know anything about history for starters. They don’t even have a general understanding of when events happened chronologically: Many think the American Civil war happened in the 1950’s!! My daughter, a Harvard grad, often recalled the obtuseness of classmates. One summer, she stayed on campus to work and to take additional courses - she roomed with a recent graduate. This woman was a theology major and was fascinated by my daughter as she said, my daughter was the ‘first Jew’ she had ever met - at Harvard! She went on to query my daughter about Judaism - my daughter was stunned that this Theology major had virtually no understanding of the Jewish religion. So what was this she studying!? This woman was black - so I am guessing she stayed in her ‘black bubble’ on campus!?
Wow, that's incredibly embarrassing. And I agree with the historic ignorance, that's the basis for so much going on in society. If they had an understanding of history they'd have laughed the 1619 project out and unsubscribed from the NYT or at least made their displeasure known. Instead they seem to see their actions as justified based on slavery when America was founded and Jim Crow, as if slavery wasn't a universal thing at the time, and as if most other countries were perfect. They'd claim that's whataboutism which is convenient, because it allows them to ignore much of the world. But you can't understand anything without a context, which they deny. Simultaneously they are happy to do a deal with Iran, while ignoring their multitude of flaws.
It all just makes me want to throw up my hands. The education establishment seems bent on raising activists rather than teaching and informing, not to even get into the gender stuff now. And then there's a lot of people with power who will say 'yeah, that stuff is pretty bad, but Trump!' And it's like don't you see the asymmetry here, and how the actions on the left create someone like Trump? It's unfortunate but you have to make a choice and deal with whichever you think is worse. If you claim they are equal then you aren't dealing with either. Anyway enough rambling.
Exactly
And don’t forget 2A, also prescient of the founders. The lesson of history is the governments oppress people. People need tools to push back and understanding this, the founders gave us the right to protect ourselves.
In reading the sections of this essay that focus specifically on the trajectory of the Soviet Union, I can't help but wonder if the existence of the United States had the opposite effect on the USSR that we tend to ascribe:
Typically, we learn in the West that the perpetual economic and military competition with the United States through the decades-long Cold War exhausted its resources, highlighted its inefficiencies and fatal flaws, placed its productivity under constant stress, which accelerated dissent and ultimately collapse. That the US "won" the Cold War, by nothing more than keeping the USSR in a constant state of existential crisis demanding overwork of a broken system.
Reading this essay, one wonders if it would have crumbled much sooner if it did not have the US as an ideological rival against which to stabilize its ideological currents- because what else was the USSR if not the Communist bulwark against the capitalist edifice of the United States, its mirror image in all things, against which all good Soviets can at least agree upon?
There is some research indicating a common enemy outgroup is often a stronger unifying force than an agreed upon ideology within an ingroup.
This is a common tool of weak leadership. Motivate solidarity against an enemy instead of motivating solidarity toward a vision of shared responsibility to solve problems and improve.
Now, there are cases when motivations against the enemy are justified.
>> Now, there are cases when motivations against the enemy are justified.
Absolutely. But it is completely agnostic to whether the organized opposition represents a healthy organization or not.
Morality isn't really a thing unless it has a shared basis.
I was debating someone about liberal vs conservative justices. Liberals view the law as a means to an end. Conservatives view the law as a means to constrain those that would moralize almost any means to an end.
And the conservatives are in a word: correct. They are correct because it is a proper appreciation of how the human animal works. Law binds us and protects us against ourselves. Means to an end is the street car fallacy and the starting point of violence and killing.
Agree. God given rights enshrined by our constitution. Those God-given rights support the basic human condition. Conservatives know this and only demand that those God-given rights are protected. However, there is a fundamental base of morality to help regulate the behavior of those that would harm others for their own gain. That is the missing piece. I think it started to crash biggly when Bill Clinton lied to the world saying his bald-faced lie "I did not have sexual relations with that woman". In that moment the leader of the free world told the world that if you can get away with the act, then it is moral.
Yep. That's my point.
This is all moot, though, if we accept the premise that the US and USSR were legitimately existential threats to one another- that the post-WW2 world order wouldn't have room for both ideological poles to exist indefinitely.
I think the inherent self-destruction of Communism would have brought the USSR down faster without a spirit rival, but the USSR would never have existed in a vacuum.
But this is all a completely different topic than your analysis of leftist sociology.
Corporatism, Communism, and Wokeness are the same three headed beast. Only Americans have forgotten the fall of the Berlin Wall. Because we are stupefied with technology and our vanity. It is great folly to dismiss the horrors Central Europeans suffered under Soviet Communism. Now that we have our own platforms, communism is somehow cool. Communism only deals with our earthly desires and has no answer for the bigger questions like why are we here. Napoleon was the hero of the French Revolution. ‘General Rule’ was that: “No social revolution without terror. Every revolution is, by its nature, a revolt which success and the passage of time legitimize but in which terror is one of the inevitable phases. “Vanity” said Napoleon, “made the Revolution; liberty was only a pretext.” The terror of COVID is now settling in as apart of our society and pivots are being made. The study of communism and the corporate mindset are noble pursuits in coming to your own conclusions about the current regimes. The human nature of our Uncle Joes. If interested, I highly recommend the author Victor Sebestyen, his books on Soviet Communism dissects the communist mindset and nature. "Twelve Days the Hungarian Revolution 1956" is a great starting point. Rob is my first paid Substack subscription. Really dig the newsletter, nice work!
Kyle, great post. I commend you to NS Lyon’s “China Convergence “ Substack piece, a tour de force.
Are we talking about communism or wokeness here?
Question, how is this communist artificial dialectic different than our current situation: “the political Gnosticism of the liberal imperium” as per Professor Deneen.
Answer, it is not different. It’s the same thing, using the same mechanisms for controlling people. An oligarchy is controlling through intimidation while they rape and pillage our society. The same minus the executions.
I am curious to know from which Berlin work the quotes are drawn. Are they from his "Six Enemies" lecture series? I would suspect that he might have attributed too much sincerity to the Soviet revolutionaries in their Marxist-Leninist ideological beliefs. Being a brilliant intellectual, his faith in the power of ideas is understandable. However, most people feign ideological zeal in the pursuit of narrow self-interest. Social concerns take a backseat to their acquisition of wealth and status.
Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago suggests that, to the contrary, many Soviets were well aware of the cynicism and cruelty of their totalitarian system. NKVD agents did not always purge individuals because of their ideological impurity; but, because they had heard a rumor and they had quotas to fill. One might have been sent to gulag simply because an agent took a fancy to your wife.
It seems that the majority of citizens in the Soviet Union lived in terror most of the time. The going philosophy being "You today, me tomorrow" or "Better your hide than mine, so screw you."
Probably the best explanation of the social dynamics of the Soviet Union incorporates both Berlin and Solzhenitsyn's perspectives.
This is fantastic and hair-raising the USSR and Maoist China histories seem to be repeating themselves in the US today.