President Donald Trump chats with Russia's President Vladimir Putin as they attend the APEC Economic Leaders' Meeting, part of the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) leaders' summit in the central Vietnamese city of Danang on Nov. 11, 2017. (Photo: Mikhail Klimentyev/Getty Images)
The United States Didn't Lose the Cold War. Racist Plutocrats Won It.
Watching the way that Vladimir Putin has bent the American government through his agents in the White House and the conservative movement, it is unsurprising that many leading thinkers recoil at the vision of the United States becoming in many ways a client state of Russia. Any patriotic American or (more importantly) anyone concerned with global justice and human rights should be equally revolted.
But it's also important to understand how and why this happened so that we can fix what went wrong and avoid similar missteps in the future. Dana Milbank's latest piece titled "It's official. We lost the Cold War" does the discourse no favors in this regard. Milbank cites all the ways in which U.S. policy has bent in a manner convenient to Russian interests to suggest that the U.S. lost the nearly century-old struggle with its adversary. A typical passage reads below:
The TV series "The Man in the High Castle" imagines a world in which Nazis won World War II. But we don't need an alternative-history show to imagine a Soviet victory in the Cold War. We have Trump.
This is extremely misguided, and ironically plays right into Trump's Westphalian nationalist worldview. It ignores historical and ideological context. And it conveniently forgets how Putin rose to power, what his interests are, why they align perfectly with Trump's, and how bipartisan American policy toward Russia led us to this pass.
First, the obvious: the Soviets did not win the Cold War. Stalinism collapsed mostly of its own weight, unable to sustain a battle for global dominance against a more economically dynamic and structurally open foe. Capitalism won the day on the world stage.
But American capitalists were not gracious winners. As the Soviets struggled to transition from total state control of the economy, American interests insisted (as they often have) on rapid and near-total privatization of government resources. As Naomi Klein explains at length in her excellent book The Shock Doctrine, many in Europe and in Russia were working toward a gradual offramp into a gentler democratic socialism in Russia, maintaining a protective welfare state while opening the government to democratic reforms and privatizing only the non-essential goods and services to which the free market is better adapted, rather than the core utilities to which it is not. But the U.S. was insistent on radical privatization, which-as it has done in so many other countries-caused massive social and political unrest in Russia.
The eventual winner of the coups and calamities in Russia was Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB agent who proceeded to do the worst of all worlds: privatize the core functions of the Russian economy, but deliver them entirely into the hands of his immediate friends and mob connections. Russia is now run as a right-wing kleptocratic dictatorship in which all gains are privatized and all losses are socialized, where the people suffer increasingly while all profits accrue to the very rich.
In order to pacify the populace during this process, Putin and allies used the standard timeless conservative tactics: they allied themselves with rural and socially conservative religious elements, ramped up hostile rhetoric toward supposedly corrupt outsiders, leveraged racist and sexist sentiments against domestic minorities and women's rights groups, and portrayed themselves as the only ones who could make Russia great again.
It was unsurprising, then, that a Russian government aligned with racist, sexist and plutocratic principles would find an easy friend in Donald Trump and the American Republican Party. They are natural allies. It is less that America became Russia's client state, than that the conservative movements in both America and Russia made a semi-secret criminal global compact that neither could acknowledge publicly. Since Trump's election, their wealthy patriarchal white supremacist movement has sought and encouraged allies in Britain, Europe, Brazil and elsewhere, seeking to align the world against socially inclusive economic progressivism in favor of plutocratic ethnonationalism.
Eventually Trump will be gone from the American stage via resignation, removal or electoral accountability. When decent Americans try to set things right, it will be essential to acknowledge how all of this happened.
It didn't happen because a nation-state called America allowed itself to be controlled by a nation-state called Russia. It happened because American insistence on corrupted privatization policy destabilized an entire country and threw it into the arms of an ethnonationlist right-wing dictator. Then that dictator used his influence to put a would-be right-wing ethnonationlist dictator in charge of America itself-an eventuality that the Republican Party of right-wing ethnonationalism accepted with scarcely a whimper, and now seeks aggressively to defend.
America does not need a renewal of jingoistic Cold War sentiment against Russia. It needs to reject both the economic and social agenda that brought both countries to their knees in an unholy alliance.
We are at a crossroads
This country and this world are at a monumental crossroads. In a few short weeks, US voters will have an opportunity to beat back the forces of fascism and confront the billionaires who are rigging the economy, our media system, and our democracy, making it increasingly impossible for ordinary people to get by. We’re not just talking about the election. We’re talking about what must be done once these fascist elements are vanquished from power. We need a bolder set of solutions than what either major party has so far been willing to offer and a working-class movement ready to fight like hell for it. Trump didn't emerge from nowhere. The conditions that fueled MAGA authoritarianism were created by decades of radical neoliberal economic policies and a corrupt political system dominated by corporate interests. They slashed taxes on the super-rich, promising that the benefits would trickle down. They said giveaways to the corporate titans would make life more affordable for the rest of us. It was all bullshit. And when a bitter, betrayed populace searches for someone to blame, right-wing demagogues have little trouble finding scapegoats. People know when they're being lied to, but you won't hear any of this from the corporate media. Only independent journalism—powered and funded by people who believe in building a better world—can deliver truly trustworthy daily news. Our Fall Campaign is underway, and we need your help. To power our newsroom through the rest of the year, we need to raise $125,000 by midnight on October 31. So if you share our vision, please contribute whatever you can to sustain our work. |
Watching the way that Vladimir Putin has bent the American government through his agents in the White House and the conservative movement, it is unsurprising that many leading thinkers recoil at the vision of the United States becoming in many ways a client state of Russia. Any patriotic American or (more importantly) anyone concerned with global justice and human rights should be equally revolted.
But it's also important to understand how and why this happened so that we can fix what went wrong and avoid similar missteps in the future. Dana Milbank's latest piece titled "It's official. We lost the Cold War" does the discourse no favors in this regard. Milbank cites all the ways in which U.S. policy has bent in a manner convenient to Russian interests to suggest that the U.S. lost the nearly century-old struggle with its adversary. A typical passage reads below:
The TV series "The Man in the High Castle" imagines a world in which Nazis won World War II. But we don't need an alternative-history show to imagine a Soviet victory in the Cold War. We have Trump.
This is extremely misguided, and ironically plays right into Trump's Westphalian nationalist worldview. It ignores historical and ideological context. And it conveniently forgets how Putin rose to power, what his interests are, why they align perfectly with Trump's, and how bipartisan American policy toward Russia led us to this pass.
First, the obvious: the Soviets did not win the Cold War. Stalinism collapsed mostly of its own weight, unable to sustain a battle for global dominance against a more economically dynamic and structurally open foe. Capitalism won the day on the world stage.
But American capitalists were not gracious winners. As the Soviets struggled to transition from total state control of the economy, American interests insisted (as they often have) on rapid and near-total privatization of government resources. As Naomi Klein explains at length in her excellent book The Shock Doctrine, many in Europe and in Russia were working toward a gradual offramp into a gentler democratic socialism in Russia, maintaining a protective welfare state while opening the government to democratic reforms and privatizing only the non-essential goods and services to which the free market is better adapted, rather than the core utilities to which it is not. But the U.S. was insistent on radical privatization, which-as it has done in so many other countries-caused massive social and political unrest in Russia.
The eventual winner of the coups and calamities in Russia was Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB agent who proceeded to do the worst of all worlds: privatize the core functions of the Russian economy, but deliver them entirely into the hands of his immediate friends and mob connections. Russia is now run as a right-wing kleptocratic dictatorship in which all gains are privatized and all losses are socialized, where the people suffer increasingly while all profits accrue to the very rich.
In order to pacify the populace during this process, Putin and allies used the standard timeless conservative tactics: they allied themselves with rural and socially conservative religious elements, ramped up hostile rhetoric toward supposedly corrupt outsiders, leveraged racist and sexist sentiments against domestic minorities and women's rights groups, and portrayed themselves as the only ones who could make Russia great again.
It was unsurprising, then, that a Russian government aligned with racist, sexist and plutocratic principles would find an easy friend in Donald Trump and the American Republican Party. They are natural allies. It is less that America became Russia's client state, than that the conservative movements in both America and Russia made a semi-secret criminal global compact that neither could acknowledge publicly. Since Trump's election, their wealthy patriarchal white supremacist movement has sought and encouraged allies in Britain, Europe, Brazil and elsewhere, seeking to align the world against socially inclusive economic progressivism in favor of plutocratic ethnonationalism.
Eventually Trump will be gone from the American stage via resignation, removal or electoral accountability. When decent Americans try to set things right, it will be essential to acknowledge how all of this happened.
It didn't happen because a nation-state called America allowed itself to be controlled by a nation-state called Russia. It happened because American insistence on corrupted privatization policy destabilized an entire country and threw it into the arms of an ethnonationlist right-wing dictator. Then that dictator used his influence to put a would-be right-wing ethnonationlist dictator in charge of America itself-an eventuality that the Republican Party of right-wing ethnonationalism accepted with scarcely a whimper, and now seeks aggressively to defend.
America does not need a renewal of jingoistic Cold War sentiment against Russia. It needs to reject both the economic and social agenda that brought both countries to their knees in an unholy alliance.
Watching the way that Vladimir Putin has bent the American government through his agents in the White House and the conservative movement, it is unsurprising that many leading thinkers recoil at the vision of the United States becoming in many ways a client state of Russia. Any patriotic American or (more importantly) anyone concerned with global justice and human rights should be equally revolted.
But it's also important to understand how and why this happened so that we can fix what went wrong and avoid similar missteps in the future. Dana Milbank's latest piece titled "It's official. We lost the Cold War" does the discourse no favors in this regard. Milbank cites all the ways in which U.S. policy has bent in a manner convenient to Russian interests to suggest that the U.S. lost the nearly century-old struggle with its adversary. A typical passage reads below:
The TV series "The Man in the High Castle" imagines a world in which Nazis won World War II. But we don't need an alternative-history show to imagine a Soviet victory in the Cold War. We have Trump.
This is extremely misguided, and ironically plays right into Trump's Westphalian nationalist worldview. It ignores historical and ideological context. And it conveniently forgets how Putin rose to power, what his interests are, why they align perfectly with Trump's, and how bipartisan American policy toward Russia led us to this pass.
First, the obvious: the Soviets did not win the Cold War. Stalinism collapsed mostly of its own weight, unable to sustain a battle for global dominance against a more economically dynamic and structurally open foe. Capitalism won the day on the world stage.
But American capitalists were not gracious winners. As the Soviets struggled to transition from total state control of the economy, American interests insisted (as they often have) on rapid and near-total privatization of government resources. As Naomi Klein explains at length in her excellent book The Shock Doctrine, many in Europe and in Russia were working toward a gradual offramp into a gentler democratic socialism in Russia, maintaining a protective welfare state while opening the government to democratic reforms and privatizing only the non-essential goods and services to which the free market is better adapted, rather than the core utilities to which it is not. But the U.S. was insistent on radical privatization, which-as it has done in so many other countries-caused massive social and political unrest in Russia.
The eventual winner of the coups and calamities in Russia was Vladimir Putin, an ex-KGB agent who proceeded to do the worst of all worlds: privatize the core functions of the Russian economy, but deliver them entirely into the hands of his immediate friends and mob connections. Russia is now run as a right-wing kleptocratic dictatorship in which all gains are privatized and all losses are socialized, where the people suffer increasingly while all profits accrue to the very rich.
In order to pacify the populace during this process, Putin and allies used the standard timeless conservative tactics: they allied themselves with rural and socially conservative religious elements, ramped up hostile rhetoric toward supposedly corrupt outsiders, leveraged racist and sexist sentiments against domestic minorities and women's rights groups, and portrayed themselves as the only ones who could make Russia great again.
It was unsurprising, then, that a Russian government aligned with racist, sexist and plutocratic principles would find an easy friend in Donald Trump and the American Republican Party. They are natural allies. It is less that America became Russia's client state, than that the conservative movements in both America and Russia made a semi-secret criminal global compact that neither could acknowledge publicly. Since Trump's election, their wealthy patriarchal white supremacist movement has sought and encouraged allies in Britain, Europe, Brazil and elsewhere, seeking to align the world against socially inclusive economic progressivism in favor of plutocratic ethnonationalism.
Eventually Trump will be gone from the American stage via resignation, removal or electoral accountability. When decent Americans try to set things right, it will be essential to acknowledge how all of this happened.
It didn't happen because a nation-state called America allowed itself to be controlled by a nation-state called Russia. It happened because American insistence on corrupted privatization policy destabilized an entire country and threw it into the arms of an ethnonationlist right-wing dictator. Then that dictator used his influence to put a would-be right-wing ethnonationlist dictator in charge of America itself-an eventuality that the Republican Party of right-wing ethnonationalism accepted with scarcely a whimper, and now seeks aggressively to defend.
America does not need a renewal of jingoistic Cold War sentiment against Russia. It needs to reject both the economic and social agenda that brought both countries to their knees in an unholy alliance.