Actually, there is quite a lot of evidence that the USSR kept the US in check -- if you read the memoirs of the various secretaries of state, presidents, and other high officials, you will find frequent references to the need to avoid confrontations with the Soviets. One particularly prominent example was the '73 Yom Kippur War, where the US fired a thinly veiled nuclear threat at the USSR, but (according to Kissinger, Nixon, Haldeman, and Roger Morris) decided to stay out of the war because of the potential for escalation.
Apart from acting as a constraint on adventurism, there is also good evidence that the Cold War and the existence of the USSR spurred a lot of the effort behind the social advances of the postwar years. Mary Dudziak has written an important book on how Brown, the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, and the elite support for black equality was caused in some part by the fact that Jim Crow was creatinga disadvantage for the US in the third world during the cold war.
I think is is also plausible that the stengtyh of social democracy (including the New Deal and the Great Society, taking SD braodly) had to do with the potential threat posed by the existence of an alternative to cap[italism; Adam Pzrzworski hasa couple of book on capitalism and social democracy that argue that social democracy is a class compromise forced on the upper classes by the strength of the working classes, and, though he doesn't discuss this, it has to be true, and there might be studies on this, that the USSR enhanced the global strength of the world;s working classes. You don't have to think that it was a deformed worker's state or anything of the sort, but the pro-Soviet Communist movement provided a lot of militant unionist activism in the West, as wella s serving asa pole of attraction in the third world; and the ruling classes had to be looking back over their shoulders in a way that they don't now.
jks
--- joanna bujes <jbujes at covad.net> wrote:
> Luke writes:
>
> "So you're a fan of tyranny with a socialist face?"
>
> Read some history. It was a popular revolution that
> brought russia and the republics out of the middle
> ages and into the twentieth century.
>
> "Further, what's the evidence that the Soviet Union
> kept the US in check?"
>
> I don't know about keeping the US in check, but boy
> it sure helped the working class and the
> intelligentia of this country that there was a
> Soviet Union around - no triumphalism then, oh no!
> Sputnik goes up, and lo and behold, there's money
> for science education and new math in the schools.
>
> Joanna
>
>
> ___________________________________
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