[lbo-talk] Gorbachev: I Should Have Left the Communist Party Earlier

[// ravi]

On Aug 17, 2011, at 10:03 PM, SA wrote:
> On 8/17/2011 9:46 PM, Michael Pollak wrote:
>> On Wed, 17 Aug 2011, SA wrote:
>> 
>>>> If you consider unintentional consequences the mark of a Great Man, then he's your boy.  Breaking up the SU was not what he was trying to do.
>>> 
>>> Yes, that's absolutely right - the ultimate consequences were unintentional. (Unlike Lenin?) But I'm not nominating a Great Man in any normative sense, just a person whose individual actions were exceptionally historically consequential.
>> 
>> In that case, we live in the era of Bush.
> 
> I take your point, but do you really think the Iraq invasion is of the same magnitude as the collapse of Communism?
> 

But we are in the era of Bush, aren’t we? By stealing an election from a country that was converging to a reliable neo-liberal minimal welfare state run by credentialists, popularising a sort of muscular and proud ignorance that Reagan could only dream of, providing massive tax cuts and launching two soul and economy destroying wars, Bush has set the tone, direction and limits of the future of the US (the most powerful entity in the history of the world) for the first 50 years of the 21st century, hasn’t he? If Obama gets reelected, that will make 16 years of essentially Bush rule (and I don’t mean that merely in polemical sense: Obama’s administration is loaded with Bush appointees and behave-alikes) starting with 2000.

	—ravi