Western Perestroika: Is Trump The West's Gorbachev?

Reformations can be more deadly than revolutions

I was recently listening to a stream by Apostolic Majesty in which he brilliantly illustrated the collapse of an ideologically incoherent, bankrupt Empire riddled with bureaucratic inertia under the watchful gaze of exhausted geriatrics. These days it’s considered to be a bit boomerish to draw comparisons between the USA and USSR, it’s a cheap shot, a centre-right version of the “everything I dislike is Nazism” of Western liberals. To allude to the United States of America as the “USSA” or whatever smacks a bit too much of libertarians worrying about Obamacare or gun restrictions. I get it.

However, when viewed through a purely realist lens in which James Burnham’s Managerial Revolution has not only prevailed but become hegemonic, we can look anew at what are, essentially, two managerial empires with remarkably similar characteristics.

Consider:

1. Both empires are fanatically materialistic with the production of consumer goods being of the highest priority.

2. Both empires both fear and detest Nationalist sentiment among the core population.

3. Both empires have constructed top-down, macro-managed economies.

4. Both empires have an ideological formula seemingly at odds with reality.

5. Both empires are ruled by a nepotistic “Inner Party” that differentiates itself from the masses.

I could go on. For example, both empires utilize Germany as a forward outpost and military base (more on that later) and both are technocratic.

Despite what Western liberals might like to tell themselves, Mikhail Gorbachev was not one of them. He was not a revolutionary firebrand who wanted to Westernize the USSR. He wanted to save it from its own stagnation and sclerotic bureaucratic rot. The economic competition with the West had amounted to fridge production as much as tank production and the Westerners had more fridges, televisions, and washing machines.

There’s nothing worse for a Marxist than looking backward with nostalgia, at viewing the past in a positive light, because to do so is inherently reactionary. The sunny uplands of the Socialist Dream are only ever a few more firing squads and phone tappings away and if everyone just focused on the horizon instead of the past that never really happened, progress would be assured.

Gorbachev’s plan to reignite a sense of idealism and purpose in the Soviet Union was known as Perestroika. According to him:

The essence of perestroika lies in the fact that it unites socialism with democracy... We want more socialism and, therefore, more democracy.

Once more it is to be noted that Gorbachev was a reformist, not a revolutionary. He found himself at odds with the “Old Guard” and instead appealed directly to the people, idealistically believing that such reforms would elicit a more flourishing and rejuvenated USSR. The danger with chemotherapy, of course, is that too strong a dose often kills the patient faster than the cancer.

The problem that reformers pose to a totalitarian system is that, in the act of “easing up” or abolishing key institutions containing power, the entire edifice begins to crumble. Like too much sun eroding the foundations of a glacier, massive chunks begin to inadvertently slide into the sea.

With all of this in mind, we can now turn to a perennial question of the Online Right; why does the regime fear Donald Trump so much? Or, to put it another way, is Donald Trump a revolutionary or a reformer?

The mainstream certainly holds to the line that Trump is a revolutionary, literally so given the January 6th affair. The standard line of the West’s managerial bureaucracy is that Donald Trump is a wannabe dictator who has already tried and failed once at an insurrection and next time he will be locking up Democrats and journalists as he formalizes his Trumpen-Reich. To most of us, this seems like absurd hyperbole, but the fact remains that for whatever reason the Regime dreads Trump.

Is it not possible that what the acolytes of the system fear is that, like the Old Guard of the USSR, too many shocks and sudden jolts to the arthritic power structure can unmoor it, weaken it, and perhaps even make it break?

Gorbachev wanted to deliver the promise of Communism, and in order to do that he had to drastically alter the way the system had evolved over decades. In “easing off the gas” of authoritarianism and control, he unleashed a multitude of forces such as free market economics and Nationalism that suffocated the old Soviet bear in its sleep. Donald Trump also believes in the promise of America, but what is that exactly?

I would argue that as a man of the 1980s, Donald Trump views the promise of America as being socially liberal, though not the top-down social engineering madness of today’s corporate DEI managers. It is a race-blind individualism and a can-do attitude for everyone striving to get ahead within the warm embrace of capitalism and private enterprise. It’s hardly anything particularly radical. Indeed, this is essentially the world of the average ‘80s Hollywood movie. Yet, such reforms, if implemented, would see the destruction and abolition of entire strata of the American power structure — careers, mortgages, and salaries all sliced off the back of the American taxpayer like a tumour, and the tumour doesn’t want that. Furthermore, such an easing off of managerialism could have the unintended consequence of unleashing white identitarianism and ethnic resentment among the (still) majority population — there’s a reason the regime has acted as it has.

It is commonly held that Gorbachev’s reforms led directly to the fall of the Berlin Wall and the USSR’s satellite states in Eastern Europe wriggling free. Today, Germany is of course a key client state of the American Empire, now doubly so after the mysterious destruction of the Nord Stream gas pipeline. Donald Trump said of the Nord Stream affair when asked by Tucker Carlson:

I don’t want to get our country in trouble, so I won’t answer it.

But I can tell you who it wasn’t – Russia. It wasn’t Russia.

How about when they blamed Russia. You know they said 'Russia blew up their own pipeline'. You got a kick out of that one too.

It is reasonable to assume, then, that if Donald Trump were president he would not have allowed the bombing of Nord Stream. However, this becomes more complicated when we factor in the most likely reason for the destruction of the pipeline: to nullify Germany’s dependence on Russian energy and remove any conflicted thoughts they were having concerning American foreign policy and the Russia/Ukraine war. If Trump were president, then, Germany would be more independent and the American Empire as a whole would be weaker for it. Furthermore, Trump has in the past expressed the view that Europe more generally should be footing their bill for NATO defense, once again, loosening the American grip on the continent.

It is easy to become despondent when viewing the seemingly insurmountable power of the “Liberal West” as led by America. This is primarily because all eyes await a force outside of the system itself, a “revolutionary vanguard”. However, a perhaps even greater force of destabilization is somebody from within the power structure who is unaware of the unintended outcomes of merely trying to reform a sclerotic and corrupt managerial system.

The antibodies of the Regime seem to sense in Trump the threat that comes with reforming the system even if, as some argue, the West in general would benefit from an easing of ideological dogma, a decrease in censorship, and a throwing open of the discursive parameters that currently throttle the intellectual, economic and cultural life of the civilization.

The Soviet Union failed on its own terms because its only real reason to exist was to provide copious quantities of materialism and consumer products to its citizens. When this promise failed there was nothing much left except a bloated police state, power for power’s sake with ideology bolted on. In his 1991 Nobel speech, Gorbachev said:

A period of transition to a new quality in all spheres of society’s life is accompanied by painful phenomena. When we were initiating perestroika we failed to properly assess and foresee everything. Our society turned out to be hard to move off the ground, not ready for major changes which affect people’s vital interests and make them leave behind everything to which they had become accustomed over many years. In the beginning we imprudently generated great expectations, without taking into account the fact that it takes time for people to realize that all have to live and work differently, to stop expecting that new life would be given from above.

This is an optimist’s way of saying, “While trying to reform the system we killed it!”

The revolutionary seeks a root and branch overturning of the entire political paradigm and power structure, though usually they merely slide into the already existing institutions themselves and create more. The danger of the reformist is that he thinks the underlying foundations of a system are more coherent, secure, and deeply rooted than they actually are. Unlike the revolutionary, the reformist is unaware that most of the ontological priors they hold dear are bullshit. For example, Donald Trump could take measures to ban affirmative action because we’re all just individuals and race doesn’t matter. However, the left is keenly aware of what such a policy would lead to (though they squirm when questioned as to why). Similarly, an idealistic Tory (however unlikely) could, in theory, abolish all of the insidious censorship regulation in the UK in order to return to “Classical Liberalism”, with the unintended result that old-school blood and soil Nationalism reappears in political discussion.

Dialectically, the reformist adorns the mantle of the progressive because implied in the title is the idea that things have gone awry and we need change. In the contemporary West, this frames Political Correctness as the oppressive dogma to be endured by hapless victims while casting the critic as the positive force for change rather than a pissed-off reactionary pleading for the world to stop.