The skills of a psychiatrist, and not a political scientist, may be required to understand why one half of the American electorate are fanatically devoted to an obvious mountebank. Likewise, only a psychiatrist is qualified to explain why a supposedly dynamic, fairly young, diverse and soon-to-be majority-minority nation found no one better to represent it but a group of septuagenarian white people, all but one of them men.
There was an old Soviet joke. Stalin, Khrushchev, and Brezhnev are traveling by train. Suddenly, the engine stalls. Stalin orders the engineer arrested and shot. The train doesn’t move. Khrushchev gets the engineer posthumously rehabilitated. The train remains stationary. Then Brezhnev gets up, draws the curtain and says: “We’re moving.”
Donald Trump is an American Brezhnev. He has even started to noticeably slur his speech the way Brezhnev was doing by 1980, when he reached Trump’s current age of 74 years.
On the surface, Brezhnev’s Soviet Union was enjoying the fruits of “developed socialism” and ruling over a mostly quiescent global empire. It even seemed to be winning the Cold War as America was in retreat during the traumatic post-Vietnam era. Yet, in reality, the country’s communist system was rotting away and Soviet influence around the world was waning. When the Brezhnev generation finally died out in the first half of the 1980s, claims of Soviet economic prowess suddenly proved to be a total sham. The empire collapsed, the Soviet Union quickly followed suit and Russia found itself irrelevant in the New World Order proclaimed by George Bush, Sr., in 1990.
Vladimir Putin is making spasmodic efforts to make Russia a global player once again but Russia lacks what it takes to be a world leader. Worse, its economy, educational system, infrastructure, technological base and other basic components of global power continue to deteriorate. Its misadventures around the world are only making it fall behind further.
Trump, much like Brezhnev in that old joke, is making claims that have little to do with reality. He’s bragging that his administration has accomplished more than any other in history, which is an outright lie. In fact, Trump has done nothing except surf the economic recovery whose foundations were laid by the Obama administration. The already strong economy has been sustained by an unprecedented laxity of monetary and fiscal policy, globalization and the technological revolution.
Trump not only didn’t help the American locomotive run better but has been systematically and deliberately vandalizing its moving parts. He is hampering international trade, antagonizing allies, sowing distrust for Washington and dismantling government institutions. Immigration is a key ingredient in America’s economic success in a globalized world, which his administration has inhibited. And so is education, which Trump’s Education Secretary Betsy DeVos is dismantling, while making sure that college-educated Americans continue to carry a crippling student debt burden well into their middle age.
All of that has been accompanied by propaganda from the White House that is every bit as brazen and deceitful as what Soviet citizens used to be fed by Pravda.
The stock market, which Trump has been touting as a marker of the success of his economic policies, is already emitting distress signals. Having gained more than 50 percent of its value following Trump’s election on nothing more tangible than a budget-busting tax cut, Wall Street has caught a coronavirus. I have long been saying that the $10 trillion in paper wealth created during the “Trump rally” will have to be repaid — with interest.
The American system is very different from Soviet communism. As Leo Tolstoy famously stated in the opening lines of Anna Karenina, “All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in each own way.” Nevertheless, the American political system is in crisis, and it is this sense of a terminal illness that it shares with the late-stage Soviet Union. And no symptom is more telling than the aging of the two nations’ leaders. It stinks of stagnation, lack of fresh ideas and decay.
Once the younger contingent has been knocked out from contention after Super Tuesday, the field of U.S. presidential candidates featured Trump on the Republican side and four Democrats: Joe Biden, 78, Bernie Sanders, 79, Mike Bloomberg, 78, and Elizabeth Warren, 71. Bloomberg has since dropped out and so did Warren, the baby of the group. The nomination looks to be sewn up by Biden, the frailest, saddest and least inspiring retread from the Obama era, but even Sanders, the favorite of America’s young people, is but a throwback to the Students for a Democratic Society days of the 1960s.
It is not just the end of an era; it is the ultimate exhaustion of a political system. Not surprisingly, it is starting to collapse under pressure from the right. A criminal known as Individual One is in the White House. He and his cronies are up to their ears in ties with the government and common thugs from a hostile foreign power which helped put the current US President into the White House. The system of checks and balances is broken. The independent judiciary is trashed. Corruption and self-dealing are accepted as a new norm. The independent media is attacked as “enemies of the people” when it tries to report the truth. The country is hopelessly split along racial lines and between urban and rural, coastal and inland and other characteristics.
America has a considerable room for error, which Trump has skillfully exploited. Unlike the Soviet economy, the United States is an economic powerhouse that should give its political system more time to rot. On the other hand, global competition has intensified, climate change has generated new challenges and the internet and social media have provided a platform for radicalizing and organizing large groups of the population.
The new decade is starting with political stagnation and a breakdown of social and political institutions. But once this generation of leaders is gone, a very different United States will emerge — by the end of the 2020s at the latest, and, probably, already by the country’s 250th anniversary in 2026.
