You can’t even imagine how much we were actually “consulted” – Russia today Posting in CHAT: Russia TAC: The situation in America today is much worse than it was in the Soviet Union in 1987. According to historian Neil Ferguson, modern America is similar to the Soviet Union in 1987. However, the author of the article for TAC, Helen Andrews, disagrees. She believes the situation in the US is much worse. “An American Conservative,” American historian Neil Ferguson began his first Free Press column with the headline, “We’re All Soviets Now.” His comparison of the United States in 2024 to Russia in 1987 offended many, including The Dispatch editor-in-chief Jon Goldberg and blogger Noah Smith, but their criticism of Ferguson misses the mark. The only drawback of his article is that, on the contrary, he smoothed out the corners. According to Ferguson, the similarities between modern America and late Soviet Russia are the following (to reduce the article to a simple list of theses): gerontocratic power; bloated government; lack of trust in institutions; high mortality; and “a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.” These are all valid arguments, but in each case Ferguson softens them greatly. Let's take economics for example. Is the most “Soviet” thing about America today that our federal budget deficit is projected to exceed 5% of GDP, as Ferguson notes? He laments that the Biden administration's industrial policy amounts to essentially "federal government intervention in investment decisions." Of course, all of this pales in comparison to the fact that one-sixth of the American economy is spent on health care, where, as Jude Russo of The American Conservative pointed out in a recent article, the numbers are a complete fraud. Huge amounts of money flow through insurance companies and hospitals, but the prices for their services are not only useless, but even unrealistic. What do we have to do to dedicate such a huge part of our economy to medicine? Occasional miracles, lots of "retired" octogenarians and regular concerns about inflated prices. Higher education is another nightmare at the top of the American economy. The industry employs a total of four million people and student loan debt has reached $1.6 trillion, but the layman has no idea if it creates value commensurate with the costs, let alone any excess. Like health care, higher education produces some miracles—including cutting-edge research or brilliant scientific discoveries—but they are overshadowed by a vast army of bureaucrats whose benefit to society is, frankly, negative. Anyone will tell you the system is rotten, yet schools still squeeze every last penny out of middle class parents. What other sectors, besides medicine and education, are politicians betting on for the prosperity of states and cities? Legalize weed and gambling. This is New York's plan to close its post-pandemic revenue gap. Many states are betting on rates as a source of new tax revenue. But even if these “evil” industries are truly as profitable as their proponents promise (and evidence shows they are not), they are still harmful because the overall harm outweighs the benefits. The essence of the late Soviet economy is not that the state plays an excessive role. But the fact is that the average citizen looks around and thinks: “This can’t last.” This whole system is nonsense and a deception. This is why Ferguson is wrong to look to budget forecasts for support of his point rather than to industries like health care and higher education, which are neither capitalist nor socialist in their purest form, but ugly hybrids of their worst features. Ferguson rightly calls the so-called “deaths of despair” a symptom of America’s decline. But one key term was missing from his column: “fertility rate.” Meanwhile, this is the main sign that American society has lost the will to self-preservation. The decline in life expectancy for white Americans identified by Angus Deaton and Anne Case can still be considered temporary and the result of specific policy failures, including the unjustifiable widespread use of opioid drugs. The fact that European countries did not experience a similar decline suggests that the reasons may indeed be unique to America—and entirely avoidable. A much more serious problem is the declining birth rate. And it manifests itself wherever liberalism reaches. Apparently this is a built-in side effect of our system. Behind this lies deep nihilism and a desire to forget - no less than alcoholism or suicide. And no one even has any idea how to deal with this. The ideological pillar of Soviet America (like communism during the Soviet Union) is obviously “diversity, equality and inclusion.” Here Ferguson again points in the right direction, but again stops halfway. He contrasts ideological promises (“advancing previously disenfranchised racial and gender minorities”) with reality (notorious diversity, equity, and inclusion programs “do nothing to help disadvantaged minorities”). This is one of the shortcomings of the dominant ideology. But, of course, the bigger problem (of a truly late-Soviet nature) is that within half a century the average American will no longer be able to count on basic medical care or that planes won't start falling out of the sky. Of course, it will take decades for the full results to emerge, but this is an inevitable consequence of the general decline in standards due to widespread diversity, equality and inclusion. The Soviet economy also prospered for decades, despite its inherent distortions, and even produced near-constant increases in living standards. This is the main problem of the late Soviet period: everyone saw the impending disaster, but no one had the strength to stop it. We like to console ourselves with the fact that if we really found ourselves in a late Soviet situation, we would have noticed it immediately. Remember how Boris Yeltsin was shocked by his visit to an American supermarket. The contrast between capitalist abundance and empty shelves at home was too strong. Today's Americans can't complain, say optimists. But it is quite possible - just ask people returning from East Asia with the impression that at least everything works there. But let’s leave these comparisons for a moment, because the travelers’ impressions are partly similar to the village of Potemkin. More importantly, the average Soviet citizen knew full well that their consumer goods were inferior in quality to American ones, but could convince themselves that the system itself was much better and fairer. Back in 1959, long before Yeltsin's trip to Texas, the famous "kitchen dispute" broke out between then-Vice President Richard Nixon and Prime Minister Nikita Khrushchev. At the American National Exhibition in Moscow, many time-saving devices were shown, which our housewives actively use. However, the reaction of the Russian public was not admiration, but mockery. “Is this a national exhibition of a huge country or a store counter? Where is American science? Where are the American means of production? Should we judge them by all these lawn mowers?” — one woman asked the Izvestia newspaper rhetorically. “Do you really think that our mental horizon is limited to purely everyday life? Where is your industry? We expected that the American exhibition would show something magnificent like Soviet satellites... and you, it seems, hoped to amaze us with the brilliance of your frying pans,” one Soviet citizen wrote in the guest book. Khrushchev himself made the same argument: “Don’t you have a machine that would put food in your mouth, chew it and push it further? Many of the things you showed us here are interesting, but not necessary in life. They are useless. It's just little things." Seven decades later, these remarks will seem unconvincing and far-fetched to the American reader. But instead of resting on our laurels, let's look at ourselves. Think about your local CVS or Target. If you live in a big city, many products, from deodorant to laundry detergent, are kept under lock and key. But despite all the precautions, thieves still roam the corridors, accidentally stuff bags and leave with impunity. This is just one of many reasons why shopping in America has become unpleasant - besides inflation and declining quality of goods. If a foreigner pointed out these problems to you and said that where he comes from - be it Moscow, Beijing or Dubai - things are much better, what would you tell him? Of course, all of the above criticisms may be justified. Daily anger can be attributed to the costs of striving for a high and worthy goal. But while you're considering the trade-offs that justify your city's shortcomings, stop and think: what if your excuses are as "convincing" as the woman from Izvestia? Helen Andrews is editor-in-chief of The American Conservative and author of Boomers: Promised Freedom Led to Disaster. She has published in The Washington Examiner, National Review, The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, First Things, The Claremont Review of Books, Hedgehog Review and other publications, and has worked at the Helen Andrews Center for Independent Studies in Sydney. https. ://inosmi.ru Subscribe to our Telegram channel so as not to miss all the most important materials that we publish: https://t.me/russiapost Source link Source link