"The Sovietization of American Life"
Victor Davis Hanson is arguably our nation's preeminent historian and sociologist. His most recent post in American Greatness is a must-read.
If election integrity, and with it, confidence in free and fair elections, is the capstone of democracy, then the rule of law is its bedrock. And both are under assault. Victor Davis Hanson:
The law is no longer blind and disinterested, but adjudicates indictment, prosecution, verdict, and punishment on the ideology of the accused. Eric Holder is held in contempt of Congress and smiles; Peter Navarro is held in contempt of Congress and is hauled off in cuffs and leg-irons. James Clapper and John Brennan lied under oath to Congress—and were rewarded with television contracts; Roger Stone did the same and a SWAT team showed up at his home. Andrew McCabe made false statements to federal investigators and was exempt. A set-up George Papadopoulos went to prison for a similar charge. So goes the new American commissariat.
VDH, as he is often called, provides the clearest, but hardly a complete list of examples of our two-tiered system of justice. One could also compare the treatment of the January 6th rioters with those who inflicted an estimated $2 billion in damage during violent protests during the summer of 2020. Real Clear Investigations compares them.
The term “Sovietization” may puzzle younger readers. I doubt many of them were ever taught about the fall of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), their “Warsaw Pact,” or the impact of Soviet life on their citizens. I caught a glimpse of that when visiting Estonia on behalf of the International Republican Institute (IRI) in 1993, shortly after the USSR’s collapse.
People who never looked you in the eye when crossing streets, or acknowledged your presence. They didn’t stop to ask why when seeing something unusual happen. A dark, repressive, and foreboding way of life. It was hard to shake off those scales after 70 years. At least my formerly Aeroflot-now-Estonian Air flight still served cognac with breakfast.
A revisit to Estonia’s capital city of Tallin in 2019 revealed a colorful and vibrant city loosed from the shackles of Sovietization. We are moving in the opposite direction, where ideology reigns supreme, a raison d'être of existence. Think 1984 by George Orwell, which the Left, apparently, sees as an instruction manual. That’s not what Orwell intended. There are more recent dystopian movies, but some say we’re living in one now.
Where does woke Sovietization end once accountability vanishes and ideology masks incompetence and malfeasance?
We are starting to see the final denouement with missing baby formula, epidemics of shootings and hate crimes, train-robbings reminiscent of the Wild West in Los Angeles, Tombstonesque shoot-up Saturday nights in Chicago, spiking electricity rates and brownouts, $7 a gallon diesel fuel, unaffordable and scarce meat, and entire industries from air travel to home construction that simply no longer work.