A big milestone of 2021 was the 30-year anniversary of the end of the Soviet Union in December 1991. I was born in 1975, so I was 16 when this occurred. I didn’t have a good understanding of it at the time, and I am not sure the average person has a good understanding of it today. As I read about it now, Russia, somewhat oddly, essentially declared independence from itself (aka, the Russian empire, aka the Soviet Union), and Mikhail Gorbachev found himself in charge of a political entity that no longer existed. I have vague memories of Boris Yeltsin and tanks in the streets of Moscow. I have no memory of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989. This suggests to me my parents and teachers did not spend much time talking to me about current events, or talking to each other about current events within ear shot. Maybe I can do a bit better with my children, while trying not to make the world seem too depressing.

Is the cold war over? Not really. There are many, many ways its legacy affects us today. The most obvious ones are all the nuclear weapons the U.S. and Russia have pointed at each other, nuclear proliferation around the world, and the tensions at the Russia-Ukraine border. Less obvious but crucially important is the extreme free market propaganda that constrains possibilities for the U.S. and economic and political systems around the world to this day. First, I think globalization had a lot to do with cold war propaganda. The U.S. invested heavily in industrializing and trading with Japan and South Korea after World War II at least in part to keep them out of the Soviet orbit. At first, the exports the U.S. was buying were a tiny trickle compared to the economy. The policies were so successful though, that those economies grew to rival and out-compete U.S. industry. The propaganda suited U.S. multinational corporations just fine because it provided access to cheap labor and lax environmental regulations abroad, while keeping the U.S. market wide open. Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Singapore copied the model with spectacular success, and then China copied it on a massive scale, and the system the U.S. had created swallowed it (the tail wagged the dog, the pig swallowed the python? I struggled to come up with the right animal-based metaphor here). Certainly, this economic growth lifted a lot of people out of poverty in Asia. It is somewhat ironic though that the biggest beneficiary turned out to be a (nominally, at least) Communist empire.

Back to those U.S. corporations and the propaganda that suits them. To this day, they are able to use that Cold War anti-tax, anti-regulation propaganda to scare the public into voting against “socialist” policies that would benefit the vast majority of citizens and even the economy as a whole, but would trim the profits of a tiny minority running mega-corporations. Commie red policies like having health care, education, and child care systems that are not failures and that would allow the U.S. to stop falling toward the bottom and eventually getting shit out of its peer group of advanced nations (I think I got that metaphor about right!) The mega-corporations can then invest a small fraction of their profits to ensure election of politicians who will continue to spew the propaganda and in some cases even actively work to undermine voting itself. This is a cycle that is going to be very hard to break, if it can be broken.