Lessons from the Past

I've been doing some reading lately about spying during the Cold War, so it's not surprising that I might come across some references to the fall of the Soviet Union. In fact, I read the following in The New York Review of Books about The Sword and the Shield: The Mitrokhin Archive and the Secret History of the KGB by Christopher Andrew and Vasili Mitrokhin (emphasis mine):

The real importance of Andrew's book is not to be found in the three-day wonder of uncovered spies, however, but in the sheer weight of accumulated detail which reveals a madly compulsive Soviet overreliance on clandestine means for conducting its foreign policy, maintaining social and ideological control at home, and acquiring the technological infrastructure of a modern state. For decades it all seemed to work, until Mikhail Gorbachev began to tinker with the system, hoping to breathe the pink back into the wheezing body of communism. He might have addressed his efforts to the waxen cadaver of Lenin with greater success. The anti-Soviet hostility of client states in Eastern Europe, the alienation of ordinary Russians from the Communist regime, a position in the world based entirely on military might, and the reality of a barely functioning economy helpless to compete in world trade were the reverse of the coin—an illusion of monolithic control and legitimacy on one side, police and mirrors on the other.

Hostility from allies, alienation of common citizens, overreliance on military strength--this sounds like it relates to more than just the Soviet Union. The "barely functioning economy" may not ring completely true, but the Bushies are working on it. Here's some of what Bob Herbert (subscription to TimesSelect or nonsubscription) had to say yesterday:

A Page 1 article in The Times on Tuesday carried the following headline: "Liberal Hopes Ebb in Post-Storm Poverty Debate."

I might have started laughing if the subject weren't so serious. Who in their right mind - liberal, moderate, Rotarian, contrarian - could have possibly thought that George W. Bush and his GOP Wild Bunch (Dick Cheney, Karl Rove, Tom DeLay et al.) had suddenly seen the light ("Eureka! We've been wrong!") and become serious about engaging the problem of poverty in America?
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Poverty has steadily increased under President Bush, even as breathtaking riches (think tax cuts, cronyism, war profiteering, you name it) have been heaped upon those who were already wealthy. Class divisions are hardening, and economic inequality continues to increase dramatically.

Over in The Washington Post, E. J. Dionne weighed in, as well:

It has long been said that Americans have short attention spans, but this is ridiculous: Our bold, urgent, far-reaching, post-Katrina war on poverty lasted maybe a month.
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I was naive enough to hope that after Katrina the left and the right might have useful things to say to each other about how to help the poorest among us. I guess we've moved on. You can lay a lot of the blame for this indifference on conservatives. But it will be a default on the part of liberals if the poor disappear again from public view without a fight.

Poverty has been on the rise since 2001, and I'm sure most of us don't feel as secure in our "growing economy" as we're told we should. The price of gas is going up, and we still have the shock of home heating costs to come this winter. Those are the kinds of expenses that go across all levels of society and reverberate into the prices of a wide variety of goods and services. We haven't even begun to see the economy-choking inflation that's in store for us. We can go back to the USSR and other failed regimes for cautionary tales, but if we don't recognize them when we find them, we make it more difficult to avoid falling into the same traps that brought them down.