Many years ago when I was in college (back in the 1980s), I went to a lecture by a visiting scholar whose name I’ve long since forgotten. He specialized in international relations and international political science.
I don’t remember the title of the talk. I don’t remember 99% of what he said. But I remember one thing very clearly.
“Almost every expert,” he said, “believes that, by the year 2000 the Soviet Union and/or the United States will no longer exist. It’s common knowledge.”
This was news to me. I had literally never heard anyone say anything remotely like that. And to think this was common knowledge among experts blew my not-yet-fully-formed mind.
It got me wondering what else almost every expert knew that the general public had no clue about? And also, what would happen to a world without the Soviet Union or the United States (or both)?
Five years later, cracks in the Soviet Union were visible to everyone. Another few years after that, well before the year 2000, the Soviet Union ceased to exist.
What had been common knowledge only among experts became our new geopolitical reality.
This was a time of great hope, with the reunification of Germany and the spread of capitalism (and the abundant fruits of capitalist societies) finally entering closed and closed-minded areas of the world.
At the time, all this seemed like it must have been inevitable. The Soviet Union, by most reports, was a cesspool of corruption where elites lived high off the hog while the vast majority of people were poor and downtrodden. Surely, the United States remained dominant because we had a superior system of government and a superior culture (and maybe superior leaders). And surely the fact that Eastern Europeans wanted TV and American clothing and American entertainment proved beyond doubt the superiority of the American Way of Life.
Sadly, corruption in the United States has increased steadily over the past decades. The elites have been living very high off the hog while gaslighting the vanishing U.S. middle-class. Right-wingers played a long game, systematically attacking the education system that was once the envy of the world, discouraging critical thinking on most levels, and framing nearly every argument through constant repetition of the same phrases (“pro-life,” “trickle-down economics,” “socialized medicine,” “reverse racism,” “the death tax,” and many others) over and over again.
So here we are: At a point where our democratic republic is on life support and the remedies that might save it are being taken away one by one.
In Russia in the late 1980s and 1990s, the oligarchs plundered the assets once supposedly owned by the workers and the Soviet Union, exploiting those assets in a drive to become richer and more powerful than most citizens of the USSR ever dared to dream.
You might think the United States would have learned from what happened to the USSR and post-Soviet Russia, but instead we’ve spent decades tiptoeing down that same path, privatizing what were once seen as public goods and rewarding the wealthy at the expense of the working class.
At the same time, the right-wing has spent the past 45 years attacking the idea of expertise and demonizing experts. They’ve crafted alternate-reality narratives that deliberately distort the world view of millions who never learned critical-thinking skills and are easily manipulated into being mad at those with slightly less than them (while overlooking real villains who have more than they could possibly want or need in 100 lifetimes).
That visiting scholar from long ago is most likely dead. Still, if I could find him, I’d love to ask him privately if most experts think the United States has any chance of surviving as a country.
But I think I already know the answer.
And as a reminder: We’re living through uneasy and dangerous times while hoping we have what it takes to bring forth a better world.
Stay safe and vigilant, friends.
Loved this.
I clicked the like button, but "like" is hardly how this makes me feel.....