By Wayne Allensworth
By the time you notice that something is terribly wrong it’s often too late to fix it. Much of my adult life has been a slow but steady realization that things were and are worse than I thought. But I’m getting ahead of myself.
Let’s back up a bit to a time when I was first beginning a new career and a new life, a convinced Cold Warrior who soon realized that the Cold War was quickly coming to an end. And the end of that struggle was approaching before many of us acknowledged it. Some did not want it to end. On my travels to the then Soviet Union during the Reagan administration, I encountered the usual crowd of Soviet officials and representatives of peace organizations. Of course, I was thinking that “peace” for them meant that the West would disarm itself. Soviet intentions were always peaceful, according to them. But the young people I encountered, fortunately enough, were different. They genuinely wanted to thaw relations with the U.S. They wanted a normal relationship, and a normal country. Mikhail Gorbachev, who was beginning his political career about the time of the post-Stalin, Nikita Khrushchev-era Thaw, soon tried to restructure (perestroika) and open (glasnost) Soviet society. Young people dreamed of what they called “convergence,” of the two opposing systems growing closer in a dialectic that would lead to a synthesis. Pragmatism would replace ideology. Peace would break out.
Gorbachev sincerely wanted to democratize the Soviet Union, something our hawks quite implausibly — as I eventually came to believe — saw as a ruse. But the USSR was not fixable. “Gorby” underestimated the yearning for independence of the national republics. Introducing political reforms and loosening restrictions on travel and censorship only opened the door to the inevitable. Incredibly, the USSR broke up without a general war, and the Warsaw Pact was a thing of the past by the time the breakup came about. Thankfully, President Reagan made the wise decision. He recognized that he could deal with Gorbachev.
Lessons learned: Ideology must not determine policy. Pragmatism opens doors that would have remained closed. A system that is beyond repair should not — and cannot — be held together by force. Nations decline and die and so do ideologies. Wise leadership manages the decline. The August 1991 coup directed against Gorbachev was futile. Even the most corrupt systems can produce reformers. In fact, it’s necessary for some systemic elites to join the reformist camp and help dismantle the old system. Be patient. The first attempts at tentative reforms in the USSR followed Stalin’s death and Nikita Khrushchev’s 1956 “secret speech” on the dictator’s “cult of personality.” There was a reversal of sorts in the 1960s, but the system was already changing. Two steps forward, one step back. Eventually, the reform mantle would be taken up again. The leader who launches reform is not always, or even usually, the right leader to finish the job.
People need a larger purpose in life. If they don’t find it in family, faith — faith as in trust, not unquestioning obedience and fanaticism— work, and friendship, they will adhere to rigid ideologies and the enemies that such ideologies demand. Careerism among the Swamp’s rootless pod people easily fits into the picture. Many did not want the Cold War to end. They did not want the USSR to reform — or to go away. But when it did, globalism found its needed enemy for a never-ending struggle. As the Soviets chided Reagan at one point, they were doing the worst thing they could — taking away his enemy. To Reagan’s great credit, he did not resist. As Gorbachev advisor Georgiy Arbatov put it in 1988, “To have a really good empire, you have to have a really evil empire.” Arbatov, whose comments applied to the USSR as much as to the U.S., commented that our foreign policy, our economy, even our feelings about our country were built in opposition to the enemy. But a self-governing republic should not need an enemy to fulfill its purpose: to further the wellbeing of its citizens.
As far as convergence is concerned, the two systems converged, but not in the way that young Soviets I met foresaw. The Luciferian spirit of resentment and rebellion of the most destructive and self-destructive kind had already moved its chief locus from Moscow to Washington by the time the Cold War ended. It was a long and complicated process. Suffice to say that managerial capitalism, as James Burnham intuited, shared Communism’s roots. The “woke” fanatics of today are direct descendants of Jacobins and Bolsheviks. Our managerial elite is a counterpart to the Soviet bureaucracy that sought total control and “planning” of all aspects of its subjects’ lives.
And in significant ways, Trumpism is treading the path of perestroika and glasnost. President Trump isn’t Gorby, but he wants something similar: to reform a system that is beyond repair. To hold together a multi-ethnic polyglot made of vastly differing groups under one capital, one flag, one idea. In this case, that of the United States as a good-guy superpower whose intentions are always peaceful. Anybody can be an “American.” And that means that following through on immigration reform by tackling legal immigration might not yet be possible. Trumpism tends to be pragmatic in execution, as perestroika was. But until we give up superpower status, we will remain prisoners of the idea and unable to see through pragmatic reforms to a conclusion. And that would entail dismantling the present system and allowing the disparate sections of the empire to separate. That’s assuming they have the smarts to do that and not attempt to use force to keep the empire together out of spite — we do need our enemies. In the Soviet case, the Russian core eventually rebelled against the Communist Party center. It yearned for self-realization, for a rebirth of Russian identity, and that spelled the end of the USSR as much as rebellion in the Baltics or the Caucasus.
Not to put too fine a point on it, but the parallels are obvious. Problem is, my friends, many of us have still not given up on the universalism at the core of the American superpower idea, a cousin to woke, radical egalitarianism. Changing that is difficult. But for the first time in my life, we might be moving in the right direction. I pray that process does not end in chaos or totalitarian controls that, because of high technology, are as threatening to our freedom as warped ideas are.
One more thing. During the 1990s and early 2000s, I saw the consequences of systemic failure first hand in post-Soviet Russia. The rampant crime, the endemic corruption, the chaos, the economic dislocations, the spiritual malaise, and the depravity and greed of the post-Soviet elite was terrifying and depressing. Depressing because I was watching the same processes with the same end emerging in slow motion in my own beloved country. “We” were becoming more like “them,” but sanctimony and hubris prevented so many of us from seeing that. It had been going on for a long time. The Swamp and Deep State were not about to give up on their enemy, which was us and anyone, anywhere, that opposed their hegemony. And we were still an easy mark for superpower arrogance. On the plus side, somehow Russia survived and came back. The deeply criminal system of the 90s somehow produced leadership that at least stopped the bleeding and improved life for most people.
If anything, the Epstein affair and the Russiagate Coup attempt underline my point. Our “elite” as presently constituted is wicked, perverse, and self-absorbed. It loves bombing people in distant countries, then feels self-satisfied about it. Killing lots of people is part of superpower “responsibility.” “Reasons of State” and “National Security” justify anything. We forget that actual human beings are killed and maimed. It’s like a video game. Elite decadence is at the “spirit cooking” and “abortion van” level. That’s not to mention Tony Podesta’s “art” collection. Then there’s the elite endorsement of mutilating confused children with “sexual reassignment surgery.” The degeneracy is rampant in both parties. Dismissing concerns about perversion is part and parcel of seeing yourself as above common moral norms — above the herd. Add in the total lack of accountability. It’s too late to fix this situation, even if some of the culprits are eventually brought to justice.
I can only hope and pray that MAGA opens the door to dismantling the system, buying us some time to get to the next stage, should it come. If we are fortunate, new leaders might finish what Trump inadvertently started. Trump and Trumpism are necessary, but not sufficient to complete the job. We must tackle so many difficult if not intractable problems — many of them essentially moral and spiritual. Politicians can’t fix everything, even if they wanted to. We must fix ourselves. Let us pray that we can traverse the social, economic, and political gauntlet, emerge on the other side and build a new country for our posterity.
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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