[POST] Did America Lose the Cold War?
And that collapse just took longer than it did with the Soviet Union?
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This is how I first raised this question in America’s New Map:
A 1970 book by Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik posed the then-inconceivable question, “Will the Soviet Union survive until 1984?” Amalrik doubted the multinational USSR could handle a future in which that empire’s non-Slavs challenged the dominance of Russians and their militarized nationalism, which, “although it may prove temporarily useful to the regime, is very dangerous for a country in which those of Russian nationality constitute less than half the total population.” Russians were never more than 59 percent of the USSR’s total population, but by 1970 they had fallen to just over 50 percent while remaining a distinct minority in all fourteen republics attached to Russia. The coup de grâce was Amalrik’s prediction of a destructive war with Communist China triggering the Russian empire’s violent “deimperialization.”
Swap in an America where (a) minorities already outnumber Whites through age twenty; and (b) our military identifies China as its number-one threat, and one is tempted to ask, Will the United States survive until 2044?That is the year by which Whites, currently 59 percent of the US population, are slated to lapse into majority-minority status across the nation, meaning they are the largest racial group but collectively a minority—like the rest.
You want to know why White Christian Nationalism is such a big deal today in the US? Well, the above chart explains the path we’re on and it’s an unprecedented one:
No great power has survived its dominant racial group declining so precipitously. How America navigates this new reality determines its global standing.
Indeed.
Going back to his start in business, Donald Trump’s political views, leading to his political career, campaign strategies, and ruling ethos, have always aligned with, and promoted, White Christian nationalist ideas and their underlying socio-economic and political infrastructures.
Trump’s messaging and policy positions have galvanized White Christian nationalism in America, and these adherents make up a significant portion of his base—especially among White evangelical Protestants, the strong majority of whom self-identify as Christian nationalists. Indeed, that increasingly political identity better defines evangelicals today than does their actual religious beliefs.
Now again in office, Trump has flipped the notion of gender and race discrimination in this nation from its long-time focus on women and minorities to a fierce defense of White men. Christianity, despite its majority status, is likewise singled out as a key victim of modern-day discrimination — along with allied Judaism. Trump’s whole campaign to root out “wokeism” and DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) fits this pattern, along with the demolition of the “wall” between church and state that has long defined our republic (i.e., many of us came here to escape either state-imposed religion or state-suppression of religion).
PPRI: Across All 50 States, New Survey Finds Strong Correlation Between Support for Christian Nationalism and Voting for Trump in 2024 Election
Trump’s Republican Party, now armed with unified control of Congress and a conservative supermajority on the Supreme Court, has created a political environment wherein Christian nationalist ideas can be pervasively institutionalized, shifting from grassroots activism to actual authoritarian rule. Surveys show a strong correlation between support for Trump and support for Christian nationalist beliefs, with hot-button issues like abortion being where those belief systems overlap to foster anti-democratic tendencies and racial anxiety over the looming loss, for both Whites and Christians, of their perceived and actual centrality in American culture — thus the required anti-immigrant fervor and even their demonization. This is, in their minds, a battle for the White Christian soul of America and anybody who stands in their way must obviously “hate” America and completely disavow its history.
A White Christian nation under assault by godless, immoral globalist forces … isn’t this exactly what Vladimir Putin is selling in Russia today?
The vision promoted by Trump and his allies is not one of pluralism or compromise, but of establishing a "Christian America" where freedom is redefined as adherence to religious law — a sort of Catholic sharia as being shaped by a Catholic-dominated Supreme Court. They seek the unification of church and state and nothing less.
The question of whether or not Trump truly believes in anything other than the superiority of White males and the superiority of America is meaningless. White Christian nationalism fits his ambitions, and so he runs with it.
Clearly, where Trump and his allies see resurrection, I spot a self-defeating narrowing of American identity in a world and a future far more defined by non-Whites than Whites, non-Christians than Christians, and non-Westerners than Westerners. Admitting that demographic reality amidst globalization’s ongoing evolution is not to “hate” America but simply to acknowledge — with some realistic sense of proportion — the future makeup and character of a global economy once defined and ruled by a dominant White Christian identity stretching back centuries and through a series of European and then North American empires both real and virtual.
I’m not saying the history isn’t there for White Christian nationalism — just that such history has essentially ended or played itself out. And, yeah, you can chalk that up overwhelmingly to American-style globalization, meaning we did this to ourselves, thus explaining the “enemies from within” fear factor that so animates White Christian nationalism.
If America must remain White, Christian, and nationalist to the degree mandated by Trump’s base, then we are most definitely headed into a post-American world — in effect, giving up all pretense of shaping globalization’s next phase that will feature the effective end of state-based warfare and imposition of sub- and transnational social control technologies that will clearly come with certain political and social and even religious biases.
After all, AI is what it eats.
Yes, we can, in some Hermit Kingdom-like manner, erect a very high fence around our increasingly smaller yard, but we will become an outlier from our world rather than a shaper of that world. China, India, and Europe will fill that leadership space, likely dismembering sick man Russia in the process, and we will end up as trade supplicants to the resulting world economic order in which the Eastern Hemisphere defines all and the Western Hemisphere — or let’s be more brutally honest here and say just Anglo/North America — submits to that global leadership dynamic.
Will that be the end of the world? Hardly. Just the end of America’s world.
And, yes, that is the only tragedy I find in these history-bending, world-restructuring dynamics as unleashed by American-style globalization. I have no fear of that global future, so long as we stay in the fight to define it. What I fear is that we have lost that will.
Look at how MAGA and America’s alt-Right find their inspiration and cues from the likes of Moscow and Budapest — de facto stop-the-world-I-wanna get off losers in today’s evolutionary landscape. They offer no way forward but merely escapes to the past.
Ask yourself what happened to Russia with the collapse of the Soviet bloc?
It has narrowed its global leadership to a racial and religious identity.
It pulled back from global commitments and wrote off large swaths of previously recognized allies.
It suffered a spiritual crisis evinced by widespread substance abuse and an almost suicidal take on the future that saw its life expectancy and fertility rates stall and actually retreat for shocking periods.
Its federal institutions became supremely politicized and thus were captured by, and subordinated to, corporate interests that arose — in classic oligarch fashion — to fill that leadership void.
Its politics became purely performative, as the oligarchs took control of the economy and the political system through their preferred avatar, Vladimir Putin, who, as a result, became one of the world’s richest men — if not the world’s richest man. So, of course Musk buddies up with him and Trump admires him.
Russia’s social safety nets were allowed to fray and even collapse.
Corruption surged throughout society, and nationalism shifted from civic pride to exclusionary, ethno-religious-defined identities.
The list goes on and on.
We are picking the wrong role models when we reject the EU and embrace the Russians. The former takes on the right ambitions while the latter succumb to the most pathetic of retreats from a future they rightfully suspect has little-to-no-place for them.
To see such a defeatism spread throughout our society saddens me to no end, particularly as the Singularity approaches in all of its possibilities and precedent-setting moments.
History may well look back upon the bipolar Cold War as yielding two great losers while the (largely) non-combatants (Europe, China, India) eventually came to define and thus rule what became of America’s pioneering creation of an international liberal trade order — now known as globalization.
We are not being “left behind” but are choosing to stay behind.
You may find the broader contexts to be different, but the echoes between the US today and the collapsed Soviet Union are striking: crises of legitimacy, identity, and cohesion; the sense and reality of increasing social and political fragmentation; the normalization of political violence and the growing belief that only a strongman can save our civilization; and the deep and animating fear of losing racial identity and centrality both at home and abroad.
Swap out Russia’s widespread alcoholism for America’s widespread drug addiction and the suicidal ideation is sobering for anyone who assumes that America’s Cold War victory is irreversible.
And, yeah, that should scare all of us.
I’m reminded of a few conversations I had with Russians in Moscow in the mid-90s in which a few Russians agreed that Russia itself was also a Cold War winner because freed of the burden of the Soviet Union it no longer had to bear the costs of maintaining that empire under Russian control. You lay out some interesting points here.