We mourned the passing of the Queen of England (Sept. 8), a nation that once fought every country on earth and ruled one quarter of the world’s population–inspiring Hitler how easily so few could control so many. But sadly, the passing of the two greatest experiments has gone by practically unnoticed and surely unmourned. Still, the silent bells are tolling for what might have been humanity’s most daring pursuit of happiness that failed: American liberal democracy founded by Thomas Jefferson and Soviet communism inspired by Karl Marx, whose obituaries were announced only last week, although their actual demises occurred earlier.
The week before the queen’s death, American president Joe Biden, for the first time in his presidency, spoke of the dire threat America faces from Trumpian-fascism. The betting is heavily on the radicalized and well-organized GOP to take back power in the 2022-24 electoral cycle, and, with it, very likely the end of American democracy as we have known it since the founding. Symbolically, the beginning of the end of America’s democratic system had appeared in 2020 when Donald Trump, the outgoing president rejected the incoming president’s legitimacy and refused to attend the latter’s inauguration. The losing president continued to claim that the election was stolen from him and he was the true “legitimate” president of the United States. Not surprisingly, half of American citizens still give credence to Trump’s claim.
Two days before Biden’s memorable speech, Mikhail Gorbachev, the last leader of the Soviet Union, which had formally ceased to exist in 1991, died at 91, symbolically ending the communist era in Russia. Equally symbolically, Vladimir Putin, the present president of Russia, heir to the Union of the Soviet Socialist Republics, denied a “state funeral” for the Union’s last president and refused to attend his funeral. Putin, greatly aggrieved at the fall of the Soviet empire, dreams of returning Russia to its czarist glory of imperialism, but not to Marxist-Socialism to which the Soviets had aspired. In this perspective of personality and history intersecting in Russia, the future of the once-world-reaching Soviet empire is uncertain. The world is still not sure as to what the nascent baby of Russia, just born after the fall of Marxist Russia, might grow up to be.
But in all this historical uncertainty, one thing is certain: The failures of the two colossal events — the two greatest experiments ever conducted in the laboratories of human history — marked the end of Marxist-Socialism in Russia and the (coming) end of Jeffersonian liberalism in America. Humanity will forever mourn the two daring experiments that did not live long. Through these short-lived experiments, both Americans and Russians had dared to see if they could actually replicate a Garden of Eden in their real time and place.
It may be quite surprising to most people that both Jefferson’s America and Marx’s Russia — both as “new-types” of nations and people — aspired to the same ideals and dreams. As history-makers on epic scales, the two visionaries and idealists aspired to exactly the same goals for their respective generations. Jefferson wanted his countrymen to be politically free and economically equal. In a new nation that was endowed by “nature’s God” with unlimited land and personal security — and the young settlers eager to work on their own land and for their own enterprises, Jefferson dreamed of a free and happy nation in his vision of America. This was the essence of Jefferson’s liberal democracy and egalitarian political economy. Such was also the grand design that Marx had built in his socialist utopia, the “Workers’ Paradise,” and the later Soviets tried to realize in their real time and place. Neither Marx nor the Soviets would have had any objections to Jefferson’s vision or reality that was experimented on in the New World. In fact, the Soviets so admired America’s Jeffersonian vision and idealism that they borrowed wholesale from the American Constitution when they were designing their own Soviet-Socialist Constitution in Russia.
Thomas Jefferson, the founder of Americanism, and Karl Marx, the founder of socialism, lived roughly a century apart. On the surface, no two historical personalities could be more dissimilar from each other, Jefferson from wide-open frontier America and Marx from tumultuous crowded Europe. Yet, both as disciples of the Enlightenment, no two visionaries — erroneously considered representatives of two opposite political ideologies — could be more similar in their visions and longings. In essence, Jefferson’s liberal America and Marx’s Soviet Russia were both theoretically and practically identical in their visions of society and happiness. Jefferson’s free Americans, free to own whatever their honest labor created — preordained to be the same as everybody else’s since every free American had a similar labor capacity — would have been quite similar to Marx’s laboring peasant or worker living in the “Workers’ Paradise” where everyone’s needs would be met regardless of their laboring capabilities. America’s free citizens would get what they need by their free labor on their own land and business, and Russia’s free peasants and workers would satisfy all their needs from their collective ownership and management of resources. In Jefferson’s “perfect union,” each man ended up with one vote and one dollar by the sheer logic of nature’s evenhandedness; in Marx’s perfect socialism, each man’s needs were fully satisfied by the sheer logic of human necessity. In neither system would there be rich people leveraging their money or wealth for power and control.
But both experiments have come to an end, never to be tried again. Capitalism destroyed Jeffersonian liberalism, whose replacement is unknown; Capitalist America induced the collapse of Soviet socialism, whose future is equally unknown. Yes, capitalism triumphed over humanity’s greatest dreams, both in America and in Russia, and neither will ever dream so daringly again.
Jon Huer, columnist for the Recorder and retired professor, lives in Greenfield.