With the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, the Cold War virtually disappeared. Further, In the 1990s, the People’s Republic of China (PRC) was admitted to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Under Deng Xiaoping (premier of China, 1978–1992), the PRC had begun to set up empowerment zones and allowed capitalist multinational corporations to operate within their borders. McDonald’s has some nice fast food outlets in China, and many of our medicines as well as our Barbie dolls are manufactured there. Chinese restrictions on child-bearing won the hearts of Western liberals, who are convinced that over-population combined with climate change (formerly “global warming”) is the cause of poverty on our planet. “Sustainable” use of resources became a new mantra. For many, sustainability means capitalism and communism working together side by side. How else can we arrive at the fulfillment of the Marxist principle “from each according to his ability to each according to his need”?
The highly educated of the West neatly combined all these avenues of discourse — climate change, population control, compatibility of communism and capitalism — with the widely accepted utilitarian doctrine of the greatest good for the greatest number (believed by most if not all of Western Civilization). Our own left-wing/liberal elite easily accepted John Stuart Mill’s belief that the “greatest good” could best be discerned by the more educated, informed classes of people. What a neat package!
The only snag is that it leaves out of the equation two important dimensions of the problem. Dimension One: What happens to the individual in this process, and in particular, what happens to the liberty of the individual? Dimension Two: What is the role of God and of individual morality in this collective vision? Does subjecting oneself to the decisions of the new experts of the greatest good (sic) become a “new morality”?
There is one paradigm of capitalist economics where private ownership and management of one’s assets is justified, and another opposing paradigm where ownership, product design, prices, wages, and uses of goods and services are governmentally regulated and/or controlled. There is one paradigm where God, Creator of Heaven and Earth, is mainstream, and there is the more recent paradigm, where the human caretaker model — taking care of society and nature — is the end-all and be-all.
Those, like this writer, who grew up before 1991 were brought up in a world that was anti-communist. The majority view, held by both our major parties, emphasized private ownership of property and individual liberty restrained by Judeo-Christian morality. Despite the banning of prayer in our schools in 1962, faith in God was perceived as legitimate (varying on an individual-by-individual basis), and not as a somewhat out-of-date interest merely to be tolerated. We had “rights,” and those in the USSR didn’t. We had prosperity, and the commies did not. We were good guys, and they were bad guys. People wanted to become citizens and emigrate to the USA, and nobody wanted to go to commie countries. We were in a fight against those who sought to disrupt all the positives of the USA and looked to the Soviets for leadership in doing so
However, once the USSR collapsed, it seemed that the idea of two sides in the world also evaporated from American consciousness. A paradigm shift began to take place. Now we are struggling through a great identity crisis between leftist programs and policies and programs and policies based on private property and liberty. The left, following the example of Mao’s Long March, has kept pushing forward, pushing forward, and now has taken over one of our two major parties.
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