TWO STEPS FORWARD, ONE STEP BACK | 2007-03-26
People find it confusing that, even after it became anti-Israel, Jews kept backing the USSR. No one but me seems to remember the desperate all-out fight against the Strategic Defense Initiative, Kennedy's "Star Wars," that was waged by the entire political left just before the USSR collapsed.
Of course SDI was a fake. It was a strategic fake at the time, because it called the USSR's bluff. For the entire forty years of the Cold War, people were convinced that the USSR and the US were neck-and-neck in science. Meanwhile, the Soviets had almost nothing they didn't get via spies. The most astounding accomplishment of the USSR was that in seventy years, it did not come up with ONE SINGLE consumer good anybody outside their prison WANTED. Over two hundred million white people, and not one thing!
SDI was accompanied by some unknown security measures. The USSR, strained to the limit, simply could not compete with the West on breakthrough like this, any more than they could ever send a man to the moon. The legitimacy of the whole image of the USSR was threatened, and that image meant everything to the left.
What the left wanted was a world divided into a left and a far left. It was a well-known strategy called "Two Steps Forward, One Step Back." The left would make huge demands and then settle for half in a compromise with moderate Republicans. They did not distinguish between foreign and domestic policy.
The left wanted all pressure to come from the left. That was the function the USSR served. If we didn't appeal to the third world, the Soviets would. Each foreign policy initiative on the let, each domestic policy, had some reference to the Soviets. They used the USSR in the opposite way that they used Hitler.
This was not a world that the Birchers were capable of understanding. I had many a Mr. Webb to deal with then, too.