Reading the obituaries for Mikhail Gorbachev, who died yesterday in Moscow, I couldn’t help but reflect on the similarities between the old Soviet system, which Gorbachev effectively demolished, and today’s “progressive” regime in Oakland, which so closely resembles the failed top-down ideology of Communism.
Like the Soviets, Oakland’s progressives possess a Utopian idealism by which they imagine that imposition of their draconian policies, including radical wealth redistribution, will lead to an era of reduced poverty and greater happiness for all. The Communists believed that totalitarian government, with an intolerance of any opposition, would bring about their vision of egalitarianism. They interpreted everything in terms of the class struggles described by Marxism-Leninism. A ruthless reorganization of society from the top down was necessary, they believed, regardless of how many kulaks—ordinary working people—had to suffer and die.
Communists ruled by the use of idiotic slogans (“workers of the world”), constantly reassuring the suffering masses that “a bright future” lay immediately ahead, despite all the evidence to the contrary. While Russia became poorer and poorer, with empty store shelves, shoes made of paper, soaring alcoholism and birth rates plummeting, the governing Communist apparatchiks sank into corruption, with false statistics about factory output, budgets lavishly misspent, rampant bribery, and the news tightly managed.
Meanwhile, Western Europe was thriving. It was on a visit he made to Italy, France, Belgium and West Germany, well before he became Soviet President, that Gorbachev had an epiphany. “Why was the standard of living in our country lower than in other developed countries?” he recalled in his memoir. “People [in Western Europe] lived in better conditions and were better off than in our country. The question haunted me.”
Gorbachev’s reforms led to the collapse of the Soviet Union, in 1991. This had not been his goal: but, in pulling the supports out from under the old system, the inherent weaknesses of Soviet Communism proved unable to survive new winds of freedom, openness and democracy.
Here in Oakland, we have a City Council (and have had one for decades) that subscribes to the same radical experimentalism as did the Communists. In their intense desire to bring about egalitarianism, they resort to the same empty rhetoric, the same authoritarian edicts issued from on high, the same tolerance for corruption and secrecy, the same invalid economics, the same contempt for the new kulaks: those of us who work for a living, pay taxes and dislike crime. They resort to the same imposition of an irrational, rigid ideology that cannot possibly work in the real world; and their attempts to stifle critics remind us that, if they were to seize total power, we would see the same crackdown on dissidents as the Soviet dictators practiced. They pit class against class, race against race, neighborhood against neighborhood. We see the same indifference to the suffering of the masses, the same readiness to throw the contributing middle classes under the bus. We see the same use of rhetorical sloganeering: “social justice,” “communities of color,” “police terror,” “abolish the police”—phrases that are designed to appeal emotionally to their dwindling crackpot supporters. We see an economy in free fall in Oakland, a society cracking apart that resembles nothing so much as the Soviet Union prior to its collapse. And we see a revanchist cadre, people like Cat Brooks and Carroll Fife, stubbornly refusing to recognize that their progressive ideas are empty, and who are happy to embrace nihilism.
What we don’t see, yet, is a Mikhail Gorbachev, who will pull the whole rotten system down. Is there a Gorby on the horizon, someone who will ask, “Why is Oakland so much worse off than other cities?” Could this truth-teller be Seneca Scott? We won’t know unless we elect him. But I can tell you this: If it’s not Seneca, there’s no one else out there who will speak truth. If Sheng Thao is elected, she’ll be a tinhorn Leonid Brezhnev, pretending to govern while the corrupt, illegitimate system she helped create implodes, taking us down with it.
Steve Heimoff