Brilliant insight buried deep within the comments on the Sydney Morning Herald

[quaker bill]

43. There was corruption and hubris, no doubt

Neither side never got that once they could deliver 100+ thermonuclear weapons on their enemies, they were as safe as they were ever going to get with that tool, and building more of them was a massive waste of resources. Neither we nor them ever read Machiavelli seriously and came to understand that projecting military power to maintain empire was predictably unsustainable over the long haul.

The Soviets never had the natural resource and industrial base to project cold war power for very long. The US had a huge advantage having not been massively bombed in WWII and having become the allies industrial base when Europe was destroyed.

We still suffer with the illusion of control, or that we could be in control if we spent just a bit more on defense. Rmoney has used such language in his stump speech, at least when he isn't "clarifying" his latest gaffe. If we do not back away from it, the illusion will break us just the way it did the Soviets.

We have plenty of corruption and hubris here, and in the absence of a competitive somewhat egalitarian ideology have allowed our country to slip back into the gilded age for income distribution. The problem with this is that real democracy was born from the rise of a middle merchant class 300+ years ago, and it was strongest when that prosperity was even more broadly shared among the workers.

WE are rapidly heading to a place where we have hollowed out society to the point of a new feudalism. A place where there are the wealthy and those who serve them. Real democracy was not born of and will not be sustained in that sort of wealth distribution. This is not theory or speculation, there is no real democracy on the planet that has ever sustained this. There are places that have "elections" that on rare occasion change the specific group of owners running the place, but most actually exchange governments by coup. Between the coups they have rigged elections for entertainment where the owners magically get 99% of the vote.