In a recent discussion about Bernie Sanders, someone said that he could never have been elected because he was a self-avowed socialist. I called that into question, and (of course) the person responding conflated communism and socialism. After some back-and-forth, they brought up the often-repeated idea that the United States defeated communism. To which I replied…
I don’t know why people keep clinging to the idea that we somehow defeated communism. It’s the same kind of broken logic that leads us to think we can defeat terrorism. We didn’t defeat communism (just ask the billion+ communists) and we didn’t defeat socialism (just ask the millions of socialists living among us). We outspent Russia, which is a wholly different thing. The Cold War ended because the Russians ran out of funds to fight it and the recognition that a nuclear war was pure insanity, not because we beat them with our superior intellect or high morals. And now they’re back to being one of the world’s superpowers. We didn’t defeat shit. We just didn’t end the world through nuclear war. If you don’t shoot yourself in the foot, you don’t get to claim you won the gun fight.