My interest in World War II always aroused my curiosity about the fall of the Iron Curtain in East-Central Europe, in 1989, and the demise of the Soviet Union two years later. The more I understand these world-historic events, the greater the lessons I discover for our own political situation here in Oakland.
My premise is that Oakland is analogous to the old Soviet client states in Eastern and Central Europe. These ancient states—Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, the Baltics, and of course East Germany—were compelled by their Soviet masters to become Communist vassals, adopting Marxist-Leninist command-and-control systems and obliterating all traces of free-market capitalism.
From Stalin’s point of view, this was all good. He was able to provide “cradle to grave” social services for the hundreds of millions who lived on his side of the divide: guaranteed employment, cheap housing, stable prices, universal medical care, and decent retirement benefits (in the estimation of the American academic Lonnie R. Johnson). These are the aspirations of Communism and its junior partner, socialism, and they also are the goals of the Democratic Socialists who run Oakland. Any political issue in this town can be understood in the light of this struggle.
There’s something attractive about this ideology. People, especially the poorer working class, labor hard for what little they have. In most cases, they find themselves on the wrong side of the wealth divide, and suffer accordingly. Idealistic intellectuals like the Communists wished to repair this broken system, and the managed economy, overseen by the authoritarian state, is what they came up with, financed by confiscatory taxes that transferred wealth from productive people to the government, which then claimed to redistribute it to the rest of society.
Unfortunately, what the Soviet system produced was egalitarian mediocrity. Everybody had something, yes, but nobody had much of anything, and the Eastern European societies were drab, uncreative places where—so the old joke went—“the state pretends to pay us, and we pretend to work.” After forty years of this charade—even as Western Europe developed spectacularly with U.S. aid—the captive states had had enough. One by one, they threw off their Communist overlords and tried to figure out how to evolve their societies into Western-style economic and political democracies (a process which has been far from easy).
Oakland is in a situation analogous to that of, say, East Germany or Hungary in 1989. The Communists had already lost the Cold War, but they didn’t yet know it. The people for their part had recognized the futility and indecency of Communism, but what were they to replace it with? No institutions of democracy existed, no tradition of free markets. What did exist, sadly, was the old Communist bureaucracy, calcified, entrenched and paranoid. This was a network of apparatchiks that ran every aspect of citizen life, and was very unhappy about having to give up power. As Ronald Reagan once quipped, “No government ever voluntarily reduces itself in size. Government programs, once launched, never disappear. Actually, a government bureau is the nearest thing to eternal life we'll ever see on this earth!”
After the people of Oakland recalled Thao and Price and revolted so thoroughly against lawlessness and defunding the police, I hesitate to think there might remain a residue of Communism here. And yet everywhere I look tells me there is: from the employee unions to the City Hall bureaucracies, from school teachers to the Department of Transportation, from leftwing special interests to the ambitious maneuverers who manage to climb the greasy pole to power (Lateefah Simon is a perfect example), from the Mayor to the City Council, and certainly at the Police Commission, there remains in Oakland a dangerous, ignorant and vengeful cult whose methodology is little different from that of Joseph Stalin and his minions. With one difference: where the Soviets were obsessed with economic matters, Oakland’s ruling class is obsessed with race. But in many respects, the two dictatorial movements are the same. If our wokes enjoyed absolute power (which thank God they don’t), they’d indulge in the same purges and show trials the Communists did—and the accused in their kangaroo courts would be you and me.
I’m not saying terminating this repressive and regressive Oakland regime will be easy, or without consequences. There will be thousands of government jobs lost, as we dissemble state control, lay off the redundancies, and return power to the free market. There will be a period of transition, some of it painful, with the possibility of citizen unrest (for which we’ll need a strong police force). The revanchist forces of wokeism will screech and scream and demand to have their authority restored. Let them howl. Like surgically removing a cancer tumor, it has to be done, if the patient—Oakland--is to survive.
Steve Heimoff