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0 pointsLeifCarrotson6mo ago0 comments

I (like GP, most likely) did not live through the events that occurred in Moscow during 1991. The only news media I consumed at the time was Sesame Street and Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, which did not cover Soviet politics, and we did not cover any of this in school later in the 90s and early 2000s. Most of what I learned after the fact has been from Fox and MSNBC and Red Alert 2 and Call of Duty - that commies and socialists and Soviets are bad people who want to give kids free school lunches, will disrupt the temporal equilibrium, and give adults universal health care. I can skim the Wikipedia article about the coup [1] and I recognize the names of Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin, but I cannot even begin to articulate the political philosophies of their platforms or the power dynamics, coalitions, and incentive structures that either used to leverage one position or the other.

The intro paragraph, I think, is trying to use this to its advantage by describing an unfamiliar political landscape with conservatives and parlimentarians and Stalinists and "putschists" (what even is that word?). I barely know what conservativism means as distinct from "whatever the American Republican party does". I clicked on the article because I've observed that liberalism/conservativism/libertarianism/socialism/populism/marxism/fascism/neo___ism/etc. are bandied about more like sports team names to be cheered or derided rather than comprehended, and hoped to understand this phenomenon better.

I'll push through the article eventually, with frequent dictionary lookups for "societas civilis" and "diptych" and "affairs curricula". But it's clearly written for an expert in political philosophy and will take me a long time to do so. I'm an expert in computer engineering and pretty innately talented at understanding that, I'm not an expert in the social sciences and they don't come easily to me. But I still live in a society, and try to participate in its governance as best I can...while neither journalists nor public education have really helped me to get there. I don't observe my peers reading Chomsky, Hayek, Putnam, Piketty, Turchin, and Zinn before they go to the voting booth, but they get one vote each just the same.

I've actually looked it up and found that my local community college offers a "PL230 - Introduction to Political Theory" course, this winter it's held mid-day for full-time students but they're offering it virtually in the evenings next summer so that people who work during the day can participate.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1991_Soviet_coup_attempt

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17186274406mo ago

While I also neither lived through 1991 nor knew those terms, I found the text fairly understandable. But that might be, because I'm familiar with the political landscape the text describes.

I think this text is touching the basis of what became known of as the story of "the end of history" which we did cover in schools history lessons although not very detailed.

The article describes a trend of both the political right and left to the center, i.e. modern liberalism, which means that these distinction became less extreme. However this trend has now reversed. On the right that trend led to a rising of a new political party (AfD) that poses as the old conservatists to frustrated voters, but are actually more fascistic. On the left the party previously called communistic now calls for more aggressive "actions", accelerated by the split of of the not more conservative, but more aligned with more "bourgeois interests" flavored wing of the former. This also explains while the latter now is also seen favorable by voters who would previously would have been more aligned with the political right.

Thus, the text is neither outdated nor topical. It does not describe the current political landscape, but the origin and causes for it that lay in the previous one. As such it is very topical again.

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