The current media fight with Democrat Party donors over how to handle Joe Biden’s public senility recalls inter-Communist Party struggles just before the Soviet Union’s collapse.
Before the Soviet Union collapsed, its puppet leaders Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko were also publicly senile. They were, however, allowed to pose as in charge because that allowed bureaucratic underlings to consolidate power and top Soviets had no new ideas for reviving a self-destructing country.
A 1982 Washington Post opinion article about Brezhnev notes he had trouble speaking and walking, especially down airplane ramps. “[H]e also had slurring of his speech,” especially when tired. To stay alive, Brezhnev limited meetings with foreign leaders, and lackeys stayed at his side “lest he fall.”
On July 8 the Wall Street Journal detailed how Biden’s advisors “aggressively stage-managed” him “to minimize signs of” age. They take Brezhnev-like steps such as early bedtimes and limiting his meeting time, foreign travel, and interactions with voters.
“At the top of the [Communist Party of the Soviet Union],” wrote Angelo Codevilla in 1992, “politburo members struggled for primacy by acquiring the right to hire and fire chunks of the Party and governmental apparatus below them. Subordinate officials would try to do the same thing in turn with respect to their subordinates, while trying to retain as much autonomy as possible with regard to their patrons and protectors.” He describes this as “a latter-day feudal system” in which access to power determined economic and cultural prestige, instead of merit.
Others have also described the United States as lurching into “neo-feudalism,” including the writer Joel Kotkin. Here at The Federalist and elsewhere, Stella Morabito has noted that all forms of totalitarianism, including socialism and its desired end state, communism, make false promises of equality to the masses while actually delivering a Byzantine system of privileges controlled by a “power clique.” That’s exactly what Democrats do.
At The Free Press, Niall Ferguson recently compared the United States to the late Soviet system, citing our decrepit leadership class, rock-bottom trust in institutions, and deaths of despair. He explained further in an UnHerd podcast (transcribed here by Robert Malone), “One of the really interesting things about the disintegration of the Soviet Union was the sense amongst ordinary people that the whole system was completely and utterly a sham, that the people, the nomenklatura who ran it, the Communist Party elite were just running it for their own benefit.”
The writer N.S. Lyons wrote insightfully last year of a Western-Communist “convergence,” noting that Western bureaucracies are not expanding freedom globally, as they’d promised when sending our manufacturing jobs and technological advantages abroad, but importing Communist-style bureaucratic tyranny. However distasteful it may be to admit, there are indeed some parallels between the United States today and Communist systems.
Indeed, our bureaucracy that unites the executive, legislative, and judicial powers is exactly what our founding fathers directly described as “tyranny.” So long as unelected bureaucrats run the government and elected officials function as window dressing, the United States cannot be called a free country, a republic, or even a democracy. Biden’s puppet presidency is therefore a symbol of systemic corruption in our ruling class and the erasure of our American birthright to representative self-governance.
For a long time now, smart people have read Western media as one does Pravda — to discern reality by reading their propaganda backwards. If the press suddenly starts blaring about “democracy,” one can be sure that democracy is in decay. If it starts talking about how inflation is actually a good thing that’s not really happening, one can understand that inflation is at its highest point in 40 years. When they call videos of Jill Biden and Barack Obama leading Biden around “cheap fakes,” their denial confirms it’s true.
n the age of Obama, corporate media moved beyond long-documented bias to practically running the Democrat Party and thus the country via outright propaganda. The Big Covid Stampede was a demonstration of their power to inflate a worse-than-usual flu season into a massive global power grab that still hasn’t ended.
Biden’s performance on the debate stage last month glitched their Matrix of deceptive projections that keep half the country obedient to tyrants. While it was no surprise to the Americans aware lockdowns helped an already mentally incapable Biden in 2020 by enabling vote harvesting among low-information voters, corporate media’s inability to cover up his debate dementia scared them.
Those media clearly worry, not about far bigger problems such as foreign adversaries more deeply understanding the United States lacks an elected head of state, but that they might not be able to drag Biden’s corpse across the finish line in 2024. Even if they do, what’s the plan when he does finally keel over? Democrats’ other options aren’t even as plausible for “most votes ever” as this ice-cream-stuffed octagenarian addicted to foreign bribes.
The result is front-row seats to an internal power struggle between rival factions inside America’s ruling class. Ominously, when that happened inside the Soviet Union, it didn’t lead to an outpouring of freedom. It led to a period of chaos and mobster turf wars that were quelled essentially by the KGB re-imposing dictatorial order.
Contrary to what we’re told about “citizen uprisings” like Communist revolutions and the Arab Spring, they tend to replace one tyrant with another. The American Revolution was a very rare exception to that pattern of history. So the question is, what opportunities can be seized now to prevent the usual rotation of tyrants?
I’d suggest people get involved in vote harvesting for Republican candidates, for one. Republican politicians are stupid, but the propaganda press is telegraphing Democrats’ designs by projecting their plans onto their enemies: