[slt2021]

USSR had a lot of issues, and surprisingly, the same issues are plaguing the USA today:

  1. Geriatric leadership of 80+ y.o. dudes clinging to power
  2. Loose fiscal policy and huge deficit. Soviets were subsidizing communist regimes around the world and spending everything on military build-up and arms race
  3. Bloated and inefficient bureacracy that became its own class (Nomenklatura)
  4. Inefficient economy
  5. Military humiliation (Afghanistan) and industrial catastrophe (Chernobyl) that costs a lot in $ and regime reputation

Some people who believe in conspiracy theories, that Gorbachev was a Western agent, are cheering what Agent Krasnov is doing by shrinking and disintegrating the US empire

[miohtama]

Relatively, the US economy is quite efficient compared to the most of the world. Maybe not as efficient as before, but still better than Europe.

[Fricken]

History doesn't repeat but it does rhyme... it rhymes with "Afghanistan"

[Muromec]

In the same timeline Mustafa Nayem, a son of Afghani emigree is a person who started the Euromaidan revolution and became an MP after its success.

[vkou]

So, by any objective metric, #2, #3, and #4 have nothing in common between the two nations, and by the late 2010s, Afghanistan was a historic footnote that everyone stopped giving a shit about.

The US is incredibly successful at exporting about half of the pain from its fiscal policy to other nations, (given that the dollar is the world's reserve currency), not the other way around. It's economy is incredibly productive, and its bureaucracy is roughly the same size to that of other developed nations.

What it does have is a tidal wave of propaganda, sponsored by a small group of robber barons and oligarchs people who would benefit from destroying that bureaucracy. Which somehow convinced ~49.8% of the country that the richest man in the world somehow has their interests at heart.

[briantakita]

> Which somehow convinced ~49.8% of the country that the richest man in the world somehow has their interests at heart.

Well...when you consider the competition you get what you get. In this case the richest man in the world positioned to be the "savior" from the previous regime.

> its bureaucracy is roughly the same size to that of other developed nations.

Slashing the bureaucracy is not the full story. Basically, most Americans have umbrage against the previous regime. So the enemy of my enemy is my friend...or at least useful.

[vkou]

> Basically, most Americans have umbrage against the previous regime.

80% of all of features in Word are useless to me, but for each user, it's a different 80%.

The same with government. There isn't a person alive that doesn't have issue with some part of it, but start going down the list, and you'll very quickly discover why so many parts of it are important, and why you shouldn't delegate picking and choosing to an unelected billionaire narcissist with no skin in the game, no consequences for bad behavior, and most of all, no legal authority to make any of those arbitrary choices.