America's Brezhnev Years

Both Sides Lost the Cold War

Since the late years of the George W Bush administration (remember them?) I have been telling people that America has entered its Brezhnev years. I have written about it on my blog and in more august publications. Bringing it up has been one of my intellectual party tricks, and I am beginning to wonder if it’s still an applicable metaphor.

For those who don’t know, Brezhnev led the Soviet Union in the years of its long stagnation and decline, from 1964 to 1982. He replaced Khrushchev, who held out the promise of a post-Stalin USSR able to meet the needs of its people and even surpass the West in its standard of living. The Brezhnev years exposed that false promise and failed to provide anything to replace it with other than stasis. Outwardly the Soviet Union looked strong, from its massive military to its space program to its bushels of Olympic medals. Underneath the nukes and May Day parades through Red Square, the rot had set in.

I initially made this comparison due to America’s own decline and also because most people in this country have stopped believing in its animating ideology. That’s why the seemingly mighty Soviet empire could crumble so quickly and why so many governments in the Eastern bloc acquiesced without bloodshed in 1989. It’s why a former USSR operative like Putin can now lead as a promoter of Russian orthodoxy, fascism, and right wing reaction. He never believed in Marxism, and by the end most of his fellow Soviet citizens did not, if they ever had.

A belief in America as a beacon of democracy undergirded support for the Cold War conflict. While that narrative obscured more complex realities and America’s glaring failures to live up to its ideals, most Americans bought into it. Once belief in democracy no longer served that larger purpose, it was seriously undermined. George W Bush’s “war on terror” rhetoric attemped to revive it and put the conflict into a continuum with the Cold War and World War II. Bush’s failed wars, in particular the use of torture, undermined this narrative. More than that, most Americans who supported these wars did so because they wanted to punish brown Muslims, not because they believed in spreading democracy abroad.

Back then, I thought of the loss of belief more as the result of apathy from ordinary people as opposed to the results of a specific project. However, the last decade has illustrated that while most people in the middle don’t really believe in America’s system, conservatives are openly waging a war on democracy. The Tea Party movement began in 2010 as the manifestation of rage over the democratic system elevating a liberal Black man to the Oval Office. Conservatives in my life started watching Glenn Beck and said “we’re a republic not a democracy.” Republicans took over state houses and gerrymandered them so that they still held power after winning a minority of the vote. (Wisconsin is a case in point.) In other states, gerrymandering was used to create supermajorities that could rewrite state constitutions and turn them radically to the right.

Trump fed on that energy, and unlike other Republican presidential candidates, explicitly disowned the notion of the US as a beacon of democracy. In one interview as president when asked about his support of Putin, a man who had killed his political enemies, Trump’s response was “we’ve had a lot of killers too.” Such a response by any other president in my lifetime, regardless of party, would be unthinkable. A lot of gullible leftists interpreted this as some kind of expression of Trump’s refreshing realism, when it really just reflected his contempt for any kind of higher ideals. I still remember the stories of his refusing to visit US graves in France for the centennial of World War I, calling the fallen soldiers “losers” for being so gullible to give their lives for their country.

It was fitting then that Trump became president after losing by three million votes, in itself a repudiation of democracy. Unlike other election winners who lost the popular vote, Trump did not even pay lip service to the idea that he represented the whole country, not just the people who voted for him. Trump’s administration continued the anti-democratic trend by packing the courts. A man who would not have been president in any other system filled the federal bench with judges who would simply overrule progressive legislation. The disastrous last session of the Supreme Court showed how large majorities of Americans could support gun control and legal abortion and have their wishes overruled by unelected judges appointed mostly by presidents who gained office without winning a majority of the vote.

So about 40% of the country is totally fine with subverting democracy to get what they want. At least another 10% will overlook it if it means they get lower taxes.

The political party that’s supposed to be fighting all of this is lost at sea. In a parallel with the decline of the Soviet Union, its leadership is an out-of-touch gerontocracy. Biden is almost 80. Nancy Pelosi is 82. Steny Hoyer is 83. Jim Clyburn is 81. Chuck Schumer is a relatively spry 71. After the aged Brezhnev died his elderly replacements, Andropov and Chernenko, died in quick succession. Biden and every member of the House leadership are much older than all of these supposedly desicated Soviet leaders were at the time of their deaths in their 70s.

Just as Brezhnev refused to make reforms to counter stagnation, the Democratic Party’s aged leadership still treats their opponents like it’s 1985. When faced with anti-democratic extremism they have no clue what to do because they have lived their entire political lives not thinking something like the current reality is possible. They seem to believe that everything will naturally go back to an era of bipartisan comity. They are also too old and tired to fight the fight that needs to be fought. Their constituents can see this dynamic but don’t believe in democracy enough to fight for it, either. If they did, the streets would not be so quiet right now. Recent public opinion polling shows Congress’ approval at seven percent and the Supreme Court and the presidency in the twenties. The police and military rate far higher. This is not a sign of widespread belief in democracy. Before long, our Brehznev years may very well be our Putin years.

For that reason, I think I am going to modify my Brezhnev Era metaphor. We are well past the point of stagnation and into a far more volatile period. I often think about how in the summer of 1989 hardly anyone in the USSR would have thought that it would cease to exist in two and a half years. This country’s collapse might not come, or it could come tomorrow. At this point, both options seem equally likely to me.

Beneath all of this, I believe both superpowers lost the Cold War, but it took 25 years or so for the United States’ belated defeat to be clear. Waging a total global war for multiple decades is just not sustainable. It’s enough to wreck any nation. In 1975, with the fall of Saigon, it seemed that the United States had learned this lesson. Then came the mass Reagan delusion followed by Dubya’s GWOT, temporarily sustaining the illusion of American hyperpower.

Now, however, we are left with cold hard reality staring us in the face. This is a country with collapsing bridges and crumbling infrastructure, a country where people go broke from medical bills and a fearsome number of women die in childbirth. Children are regularly murdered in schools and our highways are a bloody battleground. Housing prices are out of control, but any attempts to build more housing are met by people lighting their hair on fire and refusing to have it built in their neighborhoods, regardless of their political party. Due to drug addiction, alcoholism, and suicide, life expectancy was going down even before COVID. (The late Soviet Union experienced similar mortality trends.) Any policy solutions are impossible to implement, and what changes that are allowed to happen only make things worse. For example, the US does not provide maternity leave, universal health care, or subsidized child care but the Supreme Court is still allowing states to force women to give birth against their will.

When Trump was defeated, I was hoping Democrats, now holding the levers of government, would provide what Lincoln called a “new birth of freedom.” Trump did not come out of nowhere and his presidency should have been a wakeup call to fix so much of what is broken in this country. Back in early 2021 there was all kinds of talk of reform by Democrats, including voting rights, subsidized child care, and affordable housing. Instead, this week brought the news that Joe Manchin decided he didn’t want any of that. He is a deficit hawk and protector of tax cuts for the rich, still preaching that old-time neoliberal religion while everything is falling apart due to that very ideology’s failures. Leonid Brezhnev would be proud.