For Americans such as myself who came of age during the 1970s or early 1980s, the Soviet Union always carried the whiff of a decaying ideological empire, ruled by a decrepit political leadership class that had long since lost the trust of its own people.

Such was my opinion at the time, and nothing I have learned since then has changed it. Three Soviet leaders ruled during that era—Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko—all elderly and infirm, with the reigns of the last two being so brief that our own President Ronald Reagan once quipped that they died too rapidly for him to schedule a summit. Given that the top leaders of the USSR were so obviously enfeebled, analysts recognized that they were hardly the real decision-makers of the declining Soviet colossus that they nominally controlled; instead, most power was presumably vested in the hands of shifting coalitions of their senior aides and advisors, persons often obscure to the outside world. Perhaps partly as a consequence of this severe weakness at the top, the USSR entered a period of steep social and economic decline, and within just a few more years it had disappeared from the world.

All this was certainly true, but it is quite sobering to consult Wikipedia and discover the exact ages of those elderly Soviet leaders, who had been so widely ridiculed in the Western media as decrepit or even senile. Brezhnev was 75 when he died in 1982, while Andropov came to power at age 68 and died fifteen months later, replaced by his successor Chernenko, age 72, who only survived a year. So in today’s America, all those confused, befuddled Soviet leaders whom we regarded with such scorn would be youthful political figures compared to our own President Joe Biden, currently seeking reelection at the age of 80, or his leading rival, former President Donald Trump, age 77. Medical science has obviously advanced quite a bit in the last four decades, but I think the total Western domination of the global media is a more important factor in this large difference of perceptions. Is Biden really so much sharper than Brezhnev and Chernenko, or is it simply that our media is better at hiding his inability from most of the general public?

During his entire political career, Biden had been notorious for merely reading the scripts and speeches written for him by others, and even in his 40s he sometimes seemed completely unaware of the falsehoods and total absurdities he was spouting. Lately he has sometimes begun confusing our official positions on crucial policy matters, requiring his aides to quickly “clarify” them. I’m sure that Brezhnev or Chernenko would have done the same if they’d been put into that position.

Although he ranked as the world’s leading Communist, Brezhnev personally indulged himself by accumulating a large collection of luxury automobiles, including Maseratis, Rolls Royces, and Jaguars, an embarrassing story widely promoted by the powerful Western media as proof of Soviet hypocrisy. But although the direct evidence of the Hunter Biden laptop revealed that Biden and his family had taken many, many millions of dollars in secret payoffs from foreigners, our mainstream media has hidden that reality, so much of the public probably still remains unaware of it.

Below the General Secretary of the USSR, political authority was held by the Supreme Soviet, a parliament generally portrayed in the West as a rubber-stamp body filled with corrupt, elderly time-servers, who mostly just approved the political decisions made by the figures who quietly pulled their strings. Such harsh criticism was probably correct, but is our own Congress today so very different? At the age of 81, Sen. Mitch McConnell has led the Republicans in the Senate for the last 16 years, and probably ranks as one of the two most powerful Republican leaders in America. But a few days ago, he revealed his inability to respond to a simple question due to a “brain freeze,” as shown in a video clip that drew many millions of views on Twitter.

Look, I don’t especially enjoy watching an old man suffer no matter how endlessly evil he might be, but it’s pretty clear that Mitch McConnell needs to retire.pic.twitter.com/MhgygCRizU

— Jo (@JoJoFromJerz) August 30, 2023

In his sneering commentary, Andrew Anglin noted that McConnell had grown up in modest circumstances, and then spent his entire career in politics, never earning more than $174,000 per year; but he had nevertheless somehow managed to accumulate a personal fortune in the tens of millions of dollars. The corrupt and decaying USSR had far less wealth to siphon off, but its Communist leaders similarly enjoyed lifestyles vastly superior to that of their miserable subjects.

California Sen. Dianne Feinstein has passed her 90th birthday and apparently is senile, yet still holds crucial positions on several important Senate committees. During her long decades in office, she exercised a great deal of political influence over our foreign relations with other countries, notably including China, and during exactly those years her late husband Richard Blum became a billionaire through his extremely successful investments in that same country.

In many respects, the signs of apparent political instability in the U.S. these days seem far greater than anything that had been visible to outside observers in the USSR of the 1980s.

Just last week extremely harsh sentences were imposed upon several additional January 6th Trumpist protesters, including those whose crimes hardly seemed to exceed trespassing or petty vandalism. Joseph Biggs received 17 years in federal prison for moving a portable metal fence, while Dominic Pezzola got 10 years for breaking a window. These individuals were protesting an extremely close Presidential election that had obviously been stolen from incumbent Donald Trump, and their angry political demonstration took place just months after an almost unprecedented national wave of riots, arson, and looting had resulted in few if any serious prosecutions. Moreover, some have noted that these Trumpist protests at the Capitol were really not so very different in kind from those that the Democrats had earlier organized against Brett Kavanaugh’s nomination to the Supreme Court; yet celebrity Amy Schumer and her allies received media accolades rather than a decade or two in federal prison.

Commentator John Derbyshire, a conservative now in his late 70s, is normally quite restrained in his sentiments, but he described these extreme sentences and other related political developments as so outrageous that the recent Republican Presidential debate seemed like something “irrelevant…the acting-out of some formal ritual that no longer has any actual significance, from which nothing of any consequence will follow.” Indeed, the title of his piece suggested that the U.S. was “moving beyond electoral solutions.”

Trump himself had bitterly challenged that stolen election and as a consequence is facing some 90 felony counts in state and federal court that would put him away for 500 years. Yet on Friday the latest poll revealed that these charges had caused his Republican Presidential support to grow even stronger, now rising to 59% and putting him 46 points ahead of his nearest Republican primary rival.

That same poll also placed him dead-even with President Biden, thus giving him an excellent chance of winning the November 2024 vote, whether or not he happens to be campaigning from a prison cell, an utterly bizarre situation that I had discussed at some length:

By a wide margin, Tucker Carlson is the most popular media figure for Republicans and conservatives, and his Trump interview on Twitter attracted some 15 million video views, an audience far larger than the one that had watched the Republican Presidential debate held around the same time. A few days ago Carlson said that he expected Trump’s political enemies will finally conclude that orchestrating his assassination is their best chance of preventing his triumphant return to the White House. In that same interview, Carlson casually mentioned that in 2008 it had become widely known in Washington media circles that Presidential Candidate Barack Obama had been having sex with men and smoking crack, but that no journalist, whether Democrat or Republican, was willing to report those astonishing facts to the oblivious American electorate.