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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   30108 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 12, 2024

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Is it just me, or is there a rather obvious historical parallel between Gorbachev and the impending Kamala Presidency?

  • -17

In the sense of "we had some old leaders and now we might have a younger one" sure, but that seems like a fairly shallow comparison and I don't see the case for Kamala proposing or being capable of implementing any great reforms of our political or economic systems. If anything, policy-wise they are diametrically opposed, with Kamala's campaign basically arguing that things are good now under Biden and if we just keep doing what we're doing they can be even better.

It's no surprise that this is what her campaign is arguing now, when Trump is her opponent and the election is coming up. But this is rather likely to change after (and if, although I doubt it's a big if) she assumes office. The narrative will then change.

I don't see any. Gorbachev inherited a slowly-Westernizing USSR that would gradually become more fractured as member states started to splinter off until the "union" was no more. Harris, if elected, would inherit a post-pandemic, recession-defying US that is in the midst of, what I would argue to be, the most significant social crisis since the Civil Rights Movement.

I'd be grateful if you could spell out which social crisis you are thinking about.

I'd presume it's "the Culture War".

Not at all. Gorbachev was a failed reformer. He had ideas how to improve USSR, was realist that the situation is not good, was willing to break with the ideologic doctrine for the state to survive, but he ran out of runway.

Kamala is probably the other type - if we assume that the west's dominance is doomed due to reasons, she will be the one that with steady hand will ignore any and all warning and ram the titanic in the iceberg.

She is shitty material for US president, but damn she is just fine for a member of the European Commission.

I am not sure she can even comprehend the challenges US will be faced with - the biggest allies are sliding into irrelevance - Japan hasn't grown in 3 decades, Europe in 15 years, the other big players in the world are smiling to the US and chasing their own interests, you have the incoming national debt shitstorm, wildcards with AI, changing nature of warfare, cultural split, cost disease, total lack of people that have lived experience in a multipolar world to run the US foreign policy, probably even lack of people with any idea what US interests are.

Kissinger said that USSR in the 80s was faced with many problems - not a single one of which was unsolvable, but all together overwhelmed the state. The US is in much better shape economically, the challenges faced are somewhat vaguer and there is no consensus among the elite that the US is in trouble. Polls show that the population is worried, but the elite is not. In the USSR I think it was the opposite - the elite were worried because they could travel west and compare, the population was not, it was waiting for the collapse (not that it brought much good, but many a phd-s could be written why things went so wrong everywhere in the former soviet bloc in the 90s and early 00s, we got the italian organized crime, korean birth rates, indian brain drain and japanese gdp growth all at once )

I mean Kamala does represent a faction with(to be clear, generally quite bad) ideas to reform US government- court packing is quite literally the most major change in decades. Green new deal etc.

Plus soviet-style controlled economy stuff

italian organized crime, korean birth rates, indian brain drain and japanese gdp growth

What does any of those have to do with the Soviet collapse?

He’s saying that the former Soviet Union experienced Italy-like levels of organized crime, Korea-like birth rates, etc.

That after 1991 Eastern Europe suddenly had organized crime stronger than the Mafia, birth rates collapsed way below replacement, most of the competent people moved to western europe, the economy shrink almost twice and we never had the catch up growth that the post WWII countries had - we grew sluggishly like japan in the 90s and 00s

I see, then it makes sense, thanks.

Great post and it sparks in me a question.

How inevitable was the collapse of the Soviet Union? Let's say instead of Gorbachev you get a hardliner. What happens then?

I think we often look back at history with an idea that things had to happen just the way they did. But if Gorbachev wasn't chosen, I think it's possible the USSR exists today. The Venezuelan government still stands after all.

The USSR would probably still exist without Gorbachev's efforts to reform it.

No, it wouldn't have, because the other SSRs wanted independence, and to keep them all in would have required a incredible amount of bloodshed that no Russian leader was capable or willing to do at the time. The Soviets were poor and backwards and would have fell ever further behind if they remained Communist. Think how poor Russians are now, and imagine them - even poorer - stuck with technologies from the 1970s: an international pariah from all the ethnics they'd have to messily put down with the army.

Could they have staggered along, like a North Korea or a Cuba? Maybe. But it would have destroyed the Russian people completely and utterly.

But none of this means that the USSR couldn't still exist.

Regarding the part on independence, let's be more precise. Out of all SSRs, it was the three small Baltic ones which had significant independence movements, and this happened years after Gorbachev created an atmosphere where political dissent was normalized. He wasn't willing to do any bloodshed to keep the USSR together indeed, at least not to an impactful degree, precisely because his entire political line hinged on the assumption that he needed to capture the West's goodwill in order to have his reforms implemented and secure foreign loans, and he believed this all could only work without bloodshed. Outside the Baltics, the fact was that independence movements were rather weak or nonexistent, even in Ukraine, for that matter.

The independence movements of non-USSR Warsaw pact countries was written on the walls, no hardliner could have managed those. With those revolutions kicking off its impossible for me to imagine there SSR’s not following suit.

But they in fact weren't, except for the Baltic states.

Why do you think Poland, Czechoslovakia and Romania weren’t bound to happen?

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No, it wouldn't. Even if you had the proverbial 50 Stalins in charge, the Soviet Union was running into the debts it had incurred to reality - no amount of will can overcome the demographic cliff, uncompetitive industries, and the ruling elite's lack of faith in its own ideology. You might as well say that Hitler could have held along for longer if he just 'cracked down harder.

It was over. Gorbachev was merely more deluded than most, in thinking it could be reformed. The hardliners that wanted to keep the Union together had no solution for the country's problems other than continuing the stagnation.

You might as well say that Hitler could have held along for longer if he just 'cracked down harder.

Hitler was beaten by the Allies, not by domestic opposition. He absolutely could have held on longer if he hadn't declared war on the Soviet Union and United State. There was no western plan to invade the Soviet Union if it weakened to the point where an invasion might succeed.

had no solution for the country's problems other than continuing the stagnation

I'd say that has been a usual characteristics of many regimes throughout history, and yet most of them didn't crumble in spectacular fashion as the USSR did as a result of Gorby's decisions. Also, North Korea, Cuba, Vietnam, Laos should have all collapsed a long time ago according to your logic, and yet they didn't. Burma and the countries of post-Soviet Central Asia aren't that different either.

demographic cliff, uncompetitive industries, and the ruling elite's lack of faith in its own ideology

Again, none of these are that uncommon anywhere.

Just reform the industries? It really isn't that hard, China did it and they were coming off a poorer base. The Soviets could've cut the astonishing amount of military spending to free up resources for the civilian sector and waited for oil prices to rise again. That alone would've been enough to get out of the danger zone.

Gorbachev was a world-historical blunderer, he had no idea how the Soviet system actually worked and lacked the power to effectively implement his insane reforms. People don't actually know how shambolic he was, they have this vague notion of glasnoist and perestroika but no concrete facts of what specifically he did:

https://x.com/haravayin_hogh/status/1790224622694387726

With what capital, exactly? With what technologies, from the West?

China bootstrapped their industry with technology transfers and capital investment - from Americans. 'Just reform the industries', like it's easy. Reduce the military budget, as if the military was not its own fiefdom hostile to its own diminishment.

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I’m not absolutely sure about this, and I could be proven wrong, but I think people misunderstand China. I think China is a genuinely Marxist state that looked at the Soviet Union, and decided that they hadn’t properly done the first Bourgeois revolution. So they decided to go back, do the first Bourgeois revolution, and then have the second revolution later. I think that second revolution is about to happen soon.

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Even if you had the proverbial 50 Stalins in charge

Did you know that in your grandfather's time a single Stalin was enough to genocide 5 million Ukrainians? Today 50 Stalins is barely enough to make a cutesy point in an Internet argument, this is known as Stalinflation.

Vote comrade Roman Pavlik for First Secretary to bring us back on the Steel Standard, and restore the value of our nation's Stalins. Make the capitalist pigs pay the Iron Price!

This is my take too. Every time that the ruling class is sufficiently cruel, they win. If the tanks rolled into Tallinn like they did in Prague and Budapest, then any resistance movements would have been crushed.

Venezuela today is a mess compared to the USSR in 1990, but Maduro is still in power. So are the Kims in North Korea for that matter.

Contrary to the idea of "the harder you squeeze, the more of us will slip through your fingers", ruling with an iron fist is a sure way to a long reign, provided that you can't be toppled by an outside power.

But if you get soft, and can be shamed, then a million revolts will grow.

ruling with an iron fist is a sure way to a long reign,

You can still be crushed by your own iron fist if it mutinies. This normally looks like a military coup (see Roman Emperors passim ad nauseam) but the Russian Revolution (February and October) is also an example.

Maintaining political control of the military is a hard problem. The reason why democracy overperformed in the 19th century and dramatically won the 20th century is that maintaining political control of the type of military needed for industrial age warfare without neutering it turns out to be easier under democracy that other forms of government. This is also the tl;dr of Why Arabs Lose Wars - Arab armies are designed to be incapable of staging military coups, not to be capable of defeating Israel.

Bangladesh just now is a good example, the military didn’t want to fight a civil war and so told the Prime Minister they’d be switching sides, then she fled. They were of the opinion (likely accurate) that the new regime could be made amenable enough to them. You need the military to be scared to really put up a fight, and often civilian leaders can’t manage that.

For the Soviet example, it’s questionable whether the red army was willing to roll back through to Berlin in 1989 to put down the whole thing, country by country. Honecker wanted them to, but that doesn’t mean it would have been easy, even if a hardliner had been in charge. In addition, at least some of the KGB elite did well out of the collapse, so the incentives were muddled there too.

You can be assured that there was not one higher-level officer anywhere in the Soviet armed forces willing to start shooting in order to keep the Warsaw Pact / COMECON together in 1989.

I have almost nothing but negative things to say about Kamala Harris and the 2024 Democrat Party and this parallel isn't obvious to me, so no, it is probably not obvious to most people. Perhaps you could elaborate?

See my reply to @stuckinbathroom below.

Speak plainly, please. Particularly for a top level comment, this is too low-effort. (What you should have done is spelled out the parallel you have in mind, and explained why you think it is so obvious.)

I was thinking about posting it in the small-scale questions thread for this very reason, but then realized that it's a culture war issue as a whole. I also thought that spelling it all out in detail would narrow the discussion down too much and derail it at the start. But I'll take more care next time.

Small-scale questions allows CW.

I agree that there needs to be a substance for a top-level comment with a more thorough explanation of the users thesis, but I don't see how this isn't speaking plainly.

There is none.

In 1980's, Soviet system was completely discredited among all classes and strata of population, the more educated the more so. There were not "true believers" anymore, there was no equivalent of people voluntarily defending the Party line (and professional agitators were despised by everyone, including themselves), no equivalent of people sincerely putting "in this house, we believe in the Party" signs.

It was age of universal distrust in any authority (mixed with credulous trust in astrologers, shamans, self proclaimed prophets, faith healers, UFO contactees etc...)

And your conclusion from all that is that there's no parallel at al???

The one part we could really nitpick about is the one concerning the educated classes, but I'm confident to say that whatever level of trust they have in the current American system is a function of their trust in the Democratic Party's ability to assert itself as the long-term political hegemon on a national level. Most of this trust would evaporate in an instant should Trump win another election.

The Party is means to the end, means to promote the Idea.

If you believe in the Idea and the Party fails, does it mean that the Idea were false and worthless? No, it means that it was weak, that it needs to be cleansed and purged from weaklings and traitors, or abolished and replaced with something better. If the masses reject the Idea, it means that they are dumb ignorant rednecks who need to be put in their place.

And the Elite Human Capital believers in Idea are as strong as ever before (it helps that modern Idea is rather incoherent grab bag of various contradictory things instead of perfectly logically consistent science of Marxism-Leninism).

It depends on how we define the word.

In the case of the USA, if we define 'system' as 'the political structure founded after the War of Independence and the constitution's ratification', then I'd say it's indeed not discredited by any class other than left-wing activists and their sympathizers who see it as implicitly white supremacist and classist. But if we define it as 'the Global American Empire's globohomo Deep State as it exists in 2024', the situation is pretty much the opposite. On a related note, I'd refer to this comment of @RenOS as a good description of the overall loss of societal trust in the US.

The USSR, on the other hand, did not have such political longevity, so the system meant 'socialism in one country, as founded by Stalin', and I can largely agree with your assessment, although I think the idea that the system discredited itself was the main driving force behind Gorbachev's popularity, for the short time it lasted, that is.

'the political structure founded after the War of Independence and the constitution's ratification'

Is long dead. US of 2020's has less in common with US of 1790's than USSR of 1980's had with Russian Empire of 1750's.

But if we define it as 'the Global American Empire's globohomo Deep State as it exists in 2024', the situation is pretty much the opposite.

Yes. The Elite Human Capital overwhelmingly supports GAE, both ideology(as far as we can talk about one) and practice.

Why shouldn't they? The system works for them, life of EHC is as good as it could be. Exact opposite of Soviet elite, who knew they were miserable beggars compared to their Western counterparts.

Open defections are so far rare. The peasants are getting more restive, but what can you expect from dumb rednecks.

This is more like USSR in 1930's, not in 1980's (of course, modern EHC is far from Bolshevik party hardened in revolution and civil war).

Open defections are so far rare.

No other system presents better QOL for the UMC. As I’ve said before, you can go see the Waldsiedlung in East Berlin where the rulers of the richest communist country lived…like the US lower middle class of the Reagan era.

“I see the Soviet system as what can stroika, unburdened by what has stroika-ed” —Gorby, probably

Seriously though, what do you mean by this? That Harris is supposed to be an infusion of new blood, a last-ditch effort to stave off gerontocratic stagnation?

Yes, basically. She's relatively new in the sense that she's much younger than either Biden, Trump or many senators and political bosses. Assuming that she wins the election one way or another, which does seem likely to me, she'll probably be promoted in the mainstream as a youthful (again, relatively speaking) reformer and the nation's new hope (but not an outsider by any means) after a long era of political gerontocracy (when the political class showed a clear unwillingness to entrust anyone under 65 or so with any significant responsibility on a national level), economic stagnation, vibecession and social anomie. And if Soviet history is anything to go by, she'll be a spectacular failure.

Obama was 47, Bush was 54, and Clinton was 46. There has been no "long era of political gerontocracy".

Obama was relatively young, but I think it was already observable back during his double term that the political class in general is unwilling to let people of his age or younger to enter electoral politics as candidates. I can only assume that such politicians are generally seen as too radical and too likely to screw up in elections, and maybe the entire Democratic Party become too conceited after Obama's win to recruit and train younger cadres who can appeal to the normies. Either way, I think that era didn't start in 2016 or even 2008.

It’s been 84 8 years.

In fairness, Obama is the only president we’ve ever had born after the 40s. Gerontocracy is probably too general but there is a dynamic of Clinton, W, Biden, and even Trump all belonging to the same era.

It wasn’t gerontocracy 30 years ago but now it can feel that way. It’s probably more accurate to say the same generation has kept a hold on power. Scanning through a table of presidential birth years it’s not obvious to me how uncommon it is. It’s definitely frustrating though.

ELI5 for those less historically well-read of us?

See my reply to @stuckinbathroom above.

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