Soviet America

It's a shame that Jim Henley's a family man, because he keeps writing things that make me want to head south for a hot anarchofag make-out session (Who leads? No one leads? It's a self-organizing make-out phenomenon!) In this case:

There is, as they say, a lot of ruin in a nation. I expect the yoke of our weirdly Brezhnevite future to fall relatively mildly on most necks for quite awhile, including mine. People like me and all the other cranks with blogs are fundamentally unimportant, and the genius of one-party rule in this country is, so far, to let the unimportant slide.

You talk about Soviet America, or Fascist America, and people look at you like you're nuts because, after all, where are the bread lines? Where is the uniform drabness (well, okay, there's plenty of that)? Where is the oppressive misery?

We seem to believe that every single person in an oppressive regime or one party state spends his days smoking stale cigarettes and waiting to buy stale bread with his stale government paycheck on a dim street in atmospheric drizzle while the party newspaper blows by and a baby carriage rolls down the stairs, or whatever. But hey, there were plenty of Muscovites who lived high and fine during even the slender years of Soviet decline, and there were certainly plenty of Germans and Italians living fine and dandy pretty much until the bombs started falling on their cities. Repressive governments do not produce uniform misery; they produce class and caste like every other society on earth.

This is all to say that it will be a bad and very distant day in America when we're all drowning together. And because of that, it will be very easy for your basic suburban technocrat-salaryman to go right on believing that only terrorists get tortured, only black people go to jail, and if his little girl gets knocked up, well, there are ways, baby. There are ways.