The Cold War was a clash between two extreme ideologies: the extreme collectivism of the USSR and the extreme individualism of the USA and its satellites. Both belief systems were pointed towards collapse.
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When the Soviet Union collapsed, the Western powers believed their system had been vindicated. It hadn’t. It’s just that the other one fell first.
The gathering chaos in the US, which some people believe is leading towards fascism, civil war or both, is driven by the impossible expectations raised by extreme individualism: everyone can have everything, regardless of the interests of anyone else.
Some people believe this so strongly that the word “freedom” has come to mean freedom from any constraint whatsoever: they no longer feel they owe any obligation of decency, kindness or care to others.
The ideological pillars of this belief – such as Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged and Friedrich Hayek’s The Constitution of Liberty – are as mad as any Soviet tract. I mean properly batshit crazy. Those who seek to live by them demand conditions that the real world cannot provide.
Almost as bonkers are the much older tracts that these books draw on, such as John Locke's Second Treatise and Bernard Mandeville's The Fable of the Bees. Their claims and justifications fall apart immediately. Yet we have built on this quicksand.
It is the chasm between theory and practice that systems collapse into. Right now we are watching the US system (with the UK’s not far behind) beginning to topple into this chasm.
Chaos, conflict and collapse in the US now seem entirely plausible. Resolution, peace and stability look ever less likely. When people fervently believe the impossible, there tends to be no peaceful way out. You can’t negotiate with them.
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