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Is Failed Progressivism the New Failed Communism?

Dr. Munr Kazmir
5 min readJan 13, 2025

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“Why can’t you show me in New Jersey or Washington state that we’re doing this, and it’s working great?” liberal media mogul Matthew Yglesias lamented recently. Is progressivism progressive if it can’t deliver?

Photo by Lily on Unsplash

Which system is better, communism or capitalism? While some may still debate the topic, in truth, the question was settled long ago — right around the time the Berlin Wall fell.

The Iron Curtain opened onto the stage of the greatest, most thorough-going experiment in communist history. The world was at last able to penetrate the veil on the almighty Soviet Union.

What the world witnessed wasn’t good — for communism. Soviet medical care was only around 20 years behind medical care in the U.S. — for the wealthy politburo of Moscow. Outside the city, medical care lagged by over 100 years. Boris Yeltsin — one of the first soviets to allowed to travel outside the USSR after the Iron Curtain fell — later confessed to being utterly unmanned during his tour of the U.S.

“If my countrymen could see the incredible wealth I’ve seen in America,” he wrote in his memoir, “there would be riots in the streets.”

But it wasn’t NASA, NYC, or Capitol Hill: Yeltsin broke down over an American grocery store. It wasn’t even a supermarket.

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