{"id":6114,"date":"2016-10-23T05:14:19","date_gmt":"2016-10-23T05:14:19","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/10\/23\/did-the-united-state-defeat-the-soviet-union-only-to-become-another-soviet-union\/"},"modified":"2016-10-23T05:14:19","modified_gmt":"2016-10-23T05:14:19","slug":"did-the-united-state-defeat-the-soviet-union-only-to-become-another-soviet-union","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/2016\/10\/23\/did-the-united-state-defeat-the-soviet-union-only-to-become-another-soviet-union\/","title":{"rendered":"Did the United States Defeat the Soviet Union Only to Become Another Soviet Union?"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have posed this question in several forms over the past few years.  In his latest<\/a>, Publius Decius Mus offers an excellent exposition and answer:<\/span><\/p>\n

\n

Comprehensive Conservative Failure<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

If I may address professional conservatives directly: It seems to me undeniable that you <\/em>have already failed. Don\u2019t take it personally. I can rephrase that as \u201cwe\u201d if you like, even though I was never much of an operative within Conservatism, Inc. But I was a fellow traveler and supporter, so if you want to lay part of the blame on me, fine.<\/span><\/p>\n

We failed. We didn\u2019t do what we set out to do. We lost the political and culture wars decisively. Our economic victory turned out to be fruitless: all the gains have accrued to those we nominally \u201cdefeated,\u201d as evidenced by the fact that the Democrats are now the party of the super-rich. Our victory in the Cold War also turned to ashes, as we lost our heads pursuing unrealizable foreign ambitions while fighting in ways that preclude the possibility of victory. Not that we know what victory entails or have any idea what to do with it if we achieve it\u2014but that doesn\u2019t matter, because since 1991, we never have. Worse, we were crushed in the war of ideas:<\/span><\/p>\n

It would not be the first time that a nation, defeated on the battlefield and, as it were, annihilated as a political being, has deprived the conquerors of the most sublime fruit of victory by imposing on them the yoke of its own thought.<\/span><\/p>\n

You don\u2019t have to be alt-right<\/a> to see that this is a perfect description of the USSR\u2019s posthumous intellectual victory in the form of \u201cCultural Marxism.\u201d Climb down from the egghead mountaintops and the defeat becomes even clearer. A principal Soviet export was crude anti-Americanism\u2014grounded in high theory, to be sure, but simplified to be understandable by even the meanest capacities. We \u201cwon\u201d the Cold War, but that export nonetheless spread like a virus\u2014so much so that anti-Americanism is now and has been for at least 20 years the civil religion not just of all Third World populations, not just of Western allies, but of American elites and their foot soldiers.<\/span><\/p>\n

We failed to preserve a true understanding the principles of the Declaration of Independence. We failed to preserve the proper working order of the Constitution. We failed to protect and nurture that virtue in the people necessary to sustain<\/a> the Constitution. We failed to defend the family from relentless assault. We failed to maintain any semblance of a shared public morality. We allowed\u2014through a combination of active cheering and ineffective opposition\u2014demographic and cultural replacement. We lent a great deal of our talent to serve rapacious interests in the name of \u201ceconomic freedom.\u201d All the things we were supposed to conserve\u2014the nation, its people, its way of life, its governing structure\u2014we have not conserved.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

This is exactly right.  It also helps explain the rise of Donald Trump — and why you ought to vote for him despite his manifest negatives. He is our only hope to stop, or at least impede, America's leftward slide into oblivion.<\/span><\/p>\n

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I have posed this question in several forms over the past few years.  In his latest, Publius Decius Mus offers an excellent exposition and answer: Comprehensive Conservative Failure If I may address professional conservatives directly: It seems to me undeniable that you have already failed. Don\u2019t take it personally. I can rephrase that as \u201cwe\u201d … Continue reading “Did the United States Defeat the Soviet Union Only to Become Another Soviet Union?”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[102,64,180],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6114","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-communism","category-conservatism","category-decline-of-the-west"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6114","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6114"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6114\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6114"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6114"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/maverickphilosopher.blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6114"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}