The USSRing of the USA

Oh, the irony. Two decades after President Ronald Reagan targeted the “evil empire” for destruction, the current administration is opting, instead, to use it as a model. Too extreme of an analogy? Perhaps, but there is so much that Americans used to mock that many (including a seemingly disproportionate number of the flag-waving kind) now embrace. It’s really rather sad.

Since the dark day of September 11, 2001, Americans stopped their enthusiastic search for silver linings, and instead started focusing on the clouds. I think the most insidious aspect of this has been this administration and Congress putting forth so much effort to spy on its own citizens. Whether it’s a military program to ferret out information from the Internet, to the search through library records, to monitoring phone calls (OK, I’ll grant that that’s a pre-existing one), to putting up surveillance cameras throughout a city, to forcing Internet companies to retain customer records for future data mining, to…well, the list is endless. Honestly, the KGB would be proud.

The similarities don’t end there…not even close. Think about the USSR. It was theoretically a system whereby all of the people would benefit by sharing the wealth. It broke when corruption filled each successive level of society until only those at the top had money and power. Under the current American economic paradigm, the thought is that if business leaders and the rich are freed of the legal burden of tithing their profits back to the society and the people (e.g. via higher wages, more employment, saner hours, etc.), then the surplus cash will “trickle down” over time. Have you looked at oil company profits lately? Or drug companies? Or war-time contractors?

An extension of this echoes back to the halcyon days of the cyrillically-known CCCP: the five-year plan. Every year, it seemed, there was a five-year plan. It was reported that all was well, and things were only going to get better. Never mind that infrastructure was crumbling and money was leaving the community chest faster than it was being produced. That didn’t matter…after all, they had a plan. When our most recent former president left office, there was a budget surplus, plus projections for increasing surpluses earmarked for the people (it was never going to be near what was being estimated, but it was still going to be on the plus side). Then things changed. Money left the treasury faster than you could count. But why bother counting at all? After all, not only are we a great nation, but we have a plan. Albeit, a plan that failed twenty years before, but it will work this time. Really. Things are good and they are only going to get better.

Fortunately, the one saving grace in this comparison is that we were never stupid enough to get involved in armed conflict against Afghan guerillas…no, wait. Actually, the Afghanistan incursion was righteous following the 9-11 attacks, but then we decide to create our own new Viet Nam…except this time we’d play on the other side.

And what about the aftermath of that dark day in 2001? Aren’t all of these things for our own good? Benjamin Franklin is oft quoted as saying: “They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” (Historical Review of Pennsylvania, 1759) It was always naive of us to think that we were never going to get a bloody nose or a shot to the gut given the passionate global guerrilla war. It’s also naive to think we aren’t going to get hit again. In this, we do remain essentially American. Even so, the USSR generated its iron curtain to form a buffer zone between it and its perceived enemies. As we now talk of constructing our own barrier between us and our neighbors, with the bonus of troops to guard it, how can we ever hope to again claim the moral high ground?

I never thought I’d live to see the day when hundreds of millions of Americans would not only shake in fear of a few thousand fanatics, but that our leaders would be trembling with us–flailing at every threat, whether actual, imagined, or inflated. Whatever happened to, “We have nothing to fear, but fear itself?” There’s none of that here. What we have is an entrenched plutocratic aristocracy fearful of outsiders taking away what is theirs. Sadly, the tighter they try to hold on to what they think they have or might lose, the more of what made us American slips through their fingers. Thank you, comrade president. We couldn’t have done it without you.