The Bolsheviks had an ideology, a plan to destroy the old social order and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat. But a motley array of other people—advocates of free love, avant-garde painters, grifters fleecing ex-aristocrats—took advantage of the chaos to promote their own agendas. Different kinds of revolutionaries are now pushing the “Make America Great Again” movement in different directions too.
~ Anne Applebaum via The Atlantic
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Much of the world has always believed America’s defense of democracy to be hypocritical, and that American-led economic integration was self-serving. But now even the people who sincerely believed in the postwar American project are discovering that it no longer exists.
~ Anne Applebaum via The Atlantic
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In modern times, every major revolutionary movement has sought to change not just the politics of a single country but the international system itself. Napoleon marched the French Revolution across Europe. Lenin and Trotsky believed that their Bolshevik Revolution would succeed only when the Soviet Union was surrounded by other Communist states. Ayatollah Khomeini and his successors built proxy movements to spread their ideology across the Middle East.
~ Anne Applebaum via The Atlantic
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Donald Trump does not think strategically. Nor does he think historically, geographically, or even rationally. He does not connect actions he takes on one day to events that occur weeks later. He does not think about how his behavior in one place will change the behavior of other people in other places.
~ Anne Applebaum via The Atlantic
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