Twins?
How the USA and Russia are far more alike than most people realize
At first, the proposition that the USA and Russia share a great many common elements may strike the reader as absurd. After all, Russia is famously a failed state, riddled with corruption and ruled by a puffy little halfwit dictator with delusions of grandeur. No one wants to go and live in Russia (not even Russians) but the USA still attracts would-be immigrants by the tens of thousands. Russia has always been a nation of serfs whereas the USA bills itself as “the melting pot” where supposedly anyone can make good provided they work hard and are a team player.
In reality, however, the two nations are shockingly similar in so many ways and thanks to the mindless creature Trump and his slithering coterie of ultra-wealthy sycophants, are becoming more so by the day. Republicans voted for the total destruction of the USA — which Trump promised in every speech he made before and during the election campaign — and now the nation is getting what it so eagerly voted for. So as the last shreds of US normality burn to ashes, it’s worth taking a look at why the USA and Russia have been so very similar for so long and are now becoming almost identical.
First and most notably, Russia is a democracy. One man, one vote. Putin is the one man, and his is the one vote. Everything in Russia revolves around the whims of the Tzar. The parliament (duma) is just a rubber-stamp institution devoted to praising the Tzar. Russia’s domestic and foreign policies are simply whatever Putin thinks will keep him in power. The USA is a democracy. Trump is the one man and his is the one vote. Congress is nothing more now than a rubber-stamp institution that waves through literally everything Trump wants, including nominees of such staggering incompetence and venality that even a reality TV show producer would hesitate to stack a set with them for fear of being told viewers wouldn’t believe it.
Russia is suffering from inflation combined with an ageing, profoundly unhealthy, and largely badly-educated population. Russia used to provide excellent technical education but because the salaries of teachers and professors won’t stretch to paying for food and accommodation, it’s now just a question of selling grades in return for “voluntary contributions.” The result: stupid rich kids get bogus degrees (sounds familiar?) while earnest students pretty much have to teach themselves from whatever course materials may still exist. The USA is about to create the second Great Depression (inflation combined with mass unemployment) courtesy of Trump’s inane tariffs and were it not for the small number of immigrants who until very recently were still able to enter the USA, the USA would be suffering the deleterious consequences of an ageing, profoundly unhealthy, and badly-educated population. Most US citizens simply aren’t aware of how low-quality their educational system is, but statistics tell the story: even in the richest State in the nation (California) 25% of all High School leavers are functionally illiterate and 40% are functionally innumerate. A US High School graduate is a full two years behind their European peers. More than 80% of students studying STEM subjects at postgraduate level are foreign-born because US kids are so poorly-educated they’re stuck on courses about Media Studies or Intersectional Gender Politics or Business Studies or Journalism.
Now let’s look at the rule of law.
Russia under Putin has reinforced the gulag system and today thousands of political prisoners are rotting and dying there. Arrest and permanent detention is a function of ease and perceived threat, so that local officials line their pockets by accepting bribes from terrified low-level (and probably innocent) detainees. People whom Putin has ordered to be removed from society will, however, be unable to bribe their way to slightly less horrific treatment because they are intended to be examples whose unpleasant end serves as a lesson to all other Russians: keep your head down, do whatever the Tzar commands, praise the Tzar at all times, and perhaps (maybe…) you and your family will be spared, at least until tomorrow.
Trump has clearly shown that the only rule in the USA is whatever he happens to want at any point in time. In his first administration Homeland goons illegally snatched citizens exercising their First Amendment rights and after kidnapping them, held them illegally in unregistered detention sites. No one was ever held to account. During his first Administration Trump also initiated the creation of vast concentration camps in which small children were torn from the arms of their parents and disappeared (likely sold on to Republican pedophile gangs) and even today more than 1,300 small children remain unaccounted for — and likely will never be found. The spineless Biden administration simply didn’t want US citizens to have to face up to the reality that the USA under Trump 1.0 was a dictatorship. So much easier to brush everything under the carpet. Trump’s second administration is no longer interested in maintaining even a pretense and so the USA is now quite overtly an Imperial dictatorship.
Russia threatens to invade its neighbors in order to secure what it believes is in its “national interest.” Trump is not bashful about doing precisely the same thing, although because he’s a spineless baby-man, he restricts his threats to invading only former US allies because he’s hopeful they won’t respond (and, sadly, he’s 100% correct).
As both the USA and Russia comprise largely ill-educated low-status citizens, religiosity is rampant in both nations. Putin co-opted the “flexible” Russian Orthodox Church to appeal to the tens of millions of simple-minded Russians who think a low-quality mélange of various myths is “truth” and Trump plus the US Republican Party in general has long co-opted the tens of millions of simple-minded US voters who think that same low-quality mélange of various myths is “truth.” Putin also appeals to the industrial-age religion of Nationalism, and Trump famously leverages the same strategy to ensure the millions of dupes whose votes he so easily garners all chant MAGA together as they thrust out their right arms in proud Nazi salutes.
Then there’s income disparity. In Russia, fewer than one hundred families control nearly half of all Russian wealth. In the USA things haven’t yet gone quite as far but the forthcoming Second Great Depression will permit the ultra-wealthy to acquire assets at knock-down prices and thereby complete the transition to full-on oligarchy. Trump and his slithering enablers make no secret of the fact they all believe that anyone who hasn’t been “smart enough” to rig the system in their favor and benefit from all the billionaire tax breaks the Republican Party has authored over the years is a “loser” and deserves to have everything taken from them. Trump’s tariffs will guarantee a rapid fulfillment of this outcome.
Both nations are profoundly shaped, from a psychological perspective, by their size and geography. The USA is the largest and most powerful of the three countries that occupy the North American continent and the USA is bounded on either side by two vast oceans which gives it an insular mentality. As the most economically powerful of the three North American nations, the USA dominates its neighbors. Russia, meanwhile, is literally the largest nation on Earth, has for centuries dominated its neighbors, and likewise sees itself bounded by vast oceans as well as by strange cultures, which gives it an insular mentality.
And despite their sizes and power, both nations labor under a nagging sense of inferiority. Members of the Russian elite know that despite a reasonably rich culture, Russia has always been outclassed by Europe and much of Russia’s “greatness” was built literally on the backs and bones of countless millions of serfs who were little more than slaves. Much of the USA was literally built on the backs of slaves and even today racial prejudice is striking in comparison to European countries. Moreover, as de Tocqueville noted long ago, because the USA lacks a rich intellectual foundation, it substitutes wealth as a supposed signifier of importance. Even today, most US citizens mistakenly assume that if a person is rich they must be intelligent — despite endless piles of data showing clearly that the two most significant factors involved in wealth are (i) the family one is born into, and (ii) luck. If anyone thinks that you have to be clever to be rich, the mindless creature Trump (the only person in history stupid and incompetent enough to lose money owning a casino, not once but twice!) is the best possible riposte.
Both the USA and Russia suffer from chronic levels of addiction. The USA famously is the world’s greatest consumer of illegal narcotics, while Russians used to drink vast quantities of cheap vodka; now they supplement alcohol with a variety of narcotics sourced from places like Afghanistan, Syria, North Korea, and China. This speaks to deep and systemic unhappiness in a huge percentage of the population which arises from hopelessness. In both nations, a great many ordinary people recognize that they have no way to extricate themselves from relative poverty and so they try to mute their despair with mind-altering substances.
When it comes to perceived corruption, Russia and the USA diverge. Russians recognize their nation is hopelessly corrupt while most US citizens remain in a fantasy world more akin to the productions of the Walt Disney Corporation than to any empirical reality. The USA is an astonishingly corrupt nation in which pay-to-play is the default nearly everywhere and most famously in politics where its influence is the most corrosive. By contrast, however, Russia has nationalized corruption and turned it from a bug into a feature. It is highly probably that the new Trump administration will do something similar, institutionalizing deep systemic corruption throughout the USA from top to bottom in order to ensure that only the (far) right lackeys benefit from the spoils.
Continuing with the similarities, citizens in both the USA and Russia have wildly unrealistic notions of the powers their leaders can deploy. Russians imagine that if only they can reach the Tzar with their appeals, he will swoop in and right whatever wrongs happen to be troubling them (lack of electricity, lack of drinking water, lack of sanitation, lack of health services….). In the USA, nearly every citizen is so profoundly ignorant that they think the President controls the price of gasoline. In other words, as is always the case, uneducated ordinary people project fantasies onto the Great Powerful Leader and never comprehend why these fantasies are disappointed. It must be the fault of the Boyars or Bureaucrats who block the Tzar/Emperor from learning what’s really happening.
Moving now to food, the standard Russian diet is appalling: potatoes, a few other root vegetables, various things soaked in vinegar, cloyingly sweet “salads” comprising mainly low-quality mayonnaise, and some heavily salted meats or fish when possible, washed down by gallons of cheap sugary soda. Although Russian teens tend to be slightly less obese than their US counterparts, by the time they reach their thirties the game is over. The US diet is even more appalling: fatty, salty, sugary slop devoid of nutrients. US teens are increasingly obese and nearly half of all US adults are now obese. Crap food leads to blubbery citizens in both nations.
In addition to all these extremely depressing similarities, there are some less depressing similarities. Both nations do have a few cultural elements of which they can justifiably be proud. Russia has Pushkin and Dostoevsky and Tolstoy and Gogol, to name just a few. The USA has Hemingway and Henry James and Walt Whitman and Eugene O’Neill, among many other great writers. Musically, Russia gave us Tchaikovsky, Shostakovich, and Prokofiev while the USA gifted us Lauridsen, Gershwin, and Copland. But it has to be said than in terms of per capita cultural outputs, neither nation is particularly impressive and this is doubtless because in general peasant societies have little regard for high culture. Wealthy Russians and wealthy US citizens both go to the ballet and opera not so much to enjoy the productions but to show that they “have arrived” and have enough money to spend on expensive seats or, more often on expensive boxes. Neither in Russia nor in the USA are the super-rich actually meaningful patrons of the Arts because it’s all about display, not about enjoyment.
When it comes to spectacular natural scenery, Russia has the Kamchatka peninsula and the USA has Yellowstone National Park. But the wealthy of both nations share an equal interest in exterminating live animals for “fun” and to prove how “manly” they are despite their flabby bodies. In Russia, oligarchs charter ex-military helicopters from which they can blast away at endangered species in much the same way as US bloatards used to ride on railroad cars blasting away at bison with Gatling guns. Today in the USA obese white folk can go to ranches where animals have been trained to walk toward the hunters so as to make things as easy as possible for trophy-hunters too bloated and weighed down by their own blubber to be capable of walking toward the animals, while in Russia some oligarchs just send their servants out to kill animals which will later be displayed as trophies in huge dachas as “proof” of the “manliness” of the oligarch in question.
There are many other aspects of life in which Russia and the USA are so similar as to be virtual twins, but the above brief list of the most obvious features should be sufficient to make the point. While neither Russia nor the USA can be saved, the sad thing for me is that European nations could in theory attempt to preserve their values and thus remain as bastions of rapidly-vanishing civilization. Alas, due to the very same fundamental human instincts that enable Putin to cling on to power and that enabled Trump to waddle into the highest office the USA has to offer, the European nations are moving in the same direction. Wherever we look we see far-right demagogues rising to power or remaining in power because they offer empty-headed citizens the same atavistic soundbites.
We in the West thus become the first civilization in human history to vote itself into extinction. Apparently the lure of self-destruction Russian-style / USA-style is simply too great to resist.
