A warning from the Gulag Archipelago

A Soviet dissident warned us what might happen if the West's young people turn against the republic.

A lot of people are talking about recent poll results that show young American voters are virulently anti-Israel and, I would argue, viciously antisemitic. Some, apparently, are more or less fine with Hamas’ genocidal ambitions and think its Oct. 7 rampage of atrocities was essentially justified.

This phenomenon appears to correlate with results from many surveys that show other disturbing attitudes among young Americans. For example, they tend to support socialist ideas and policies, which is not a bad thing in itself, but very ominous when the American far-left has basically gone Nazi.

Young voters are notoriously left-wing, of course, but there are new developments that bode very ill for the republic. In particular, young voters more or less openly oppose free speech—as the professoriate regime has taught them to do—meaning that they reject what is perhaps the most important foundational principle of any republican society. For me, this is a deeply frightening development. As a writer, if I do not have free speech, I have nothing.

I’ve largely ignored this issue, because it frankly doesn’t surprise me, given that young Americans educated by the professoriate regime have been relentlessly indoctrinated with genocidal antisemitism. Most people are of mediocre intellect, especially in a culture dominated by social media—which enforces idiocy—so one can’t expect much more of them.

I’ve also heard from some people who have studied the polls in depth that the results are a bit more ambiguous than the media portrayal of them—which also doesn’t surprise me. Most of the media is also a product of the professoriate regime and either sees what it wants to see or seeks to manufacture it when it isn’t there.

Nonetheless, the issue came to my mind recently when I read Warning to the West by the great Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. Solzhenitsyn is one of the very few examples of the pen actually being mightier than the sword. I strongly believe that his Gulag Archipelago, an account of his own experience in the Soviet prison camps, contributed mightily to discrediting communism among Western intellectuals and thus aided in the USSR’s eventual downfall.

Warning to the West is a series of speeches Solzhenitsyn gave to various organizations (including labor unions—how things have changed…) in the 1970s. In them, he denounces the then-fashionable policy of detente and seeks to remind his audiences of the essentially evil nature of the Soviet regime and communism in general.

What prompted me to consider the issue of the younger generation was Solzhenitsyn’s warning that aspects of Western culture resembled conditions that preceded the 1917 Bolshevik takeover of Russia. He points to “a certain retreat by the older generation, yielding their intellectual leadership to the younger generation. It is against the natural order of things for those who are youngest, with the least experience of life, to have the greatest influence in directing the life of society.”

He states, “One can say then that this is what forms the spirit of the age, the current of public opinion, when people in authority, well-known professors and scientists, are reluctant to enter into an argument even when they hold a different opinion. It is considered embarrassing to put forward one’s counterarguments.”

The result, Solzhenitsyn asserts, “is a certain abdication of responsibility, which is typical here where there is complete freedom.”

He also warns of “a universal adulation of revolutionaries, the more so the more extreme they are! Similarly, before the revolution, we had in Russia, if not a cult of terror, then a fierce defense of terrorists. People in good positions—intellectuals, professors, liberals—spent a great deal of effort, anger, and indignation in defending terrorists.”

“What we see is always the same as it was then: adults deferring to the opinion of their children; the younger generation carried away by shallow, worthless ideas; professors scared of being unfashionable,” he concludes.

I think it’s pretty clear that Solzhenitsyn was right then and he’s right now. We see more or less everything he describes in today’s culture: The deference to the stupidities of youth, professors and intellectuals terrified of telling the truth, the idolatry of the terrorist, the cult of political violence, and so on. Nor is the problem confined to the left. The right has similar problems in terms of political violence and general hostility towards republican norms.

I do not mean to say that something like the Bolshevik coup d’état is in the offing. There are countervailing forces at work in the West that were not present in pre-Bolshevik Russia and they could well prevail. Nonetheless, in the form of the dictatorship of the professoriate, the left has already succeeded in building one totalitarian regime, and we cannot dismiss the possibility that it could succeed in building another on a much larger scale.

What this means, I think, is that we should do everything possible to a) change this debased culture, b) smash the mini-totalitarianisms that already exist in Western society, and c) do everything possible to ensure that republicanism is defended effectively.

This is a task for both the left and the right, both of which have elements determined to put an end to the republic and impose—de facto or de jure—a totalitarian regime. I do not think the task is hopeless, but it will require us to heed Solzhenitsyn’s warning and act accordingly.

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Interestingly, I’ve had some Jewish friends tell me recently that they may vote for a third party in the upcoming presidential election. One of them went so far as to ask me what I know about the No Labels party (not much). Clearly, most Jews consider a vote for Trump unthinkable, but the possibility of not voting for the Democrats is thinkable, which was not at all the case pre-Oct. 7.

While it’s unlikely that most Jews will follow through on a third-party vote, even the possibility that they may do so has serious implications for the Democrats.

Jewish Americans are one of the most reliable blocs of Democratic voters in the US and an essential part of the Democrats’ coalition, which is a very tenuous one. At the moment, the Democrats appear to be obsessed with somehow retaining the antisemitic Muslim and progressive vote while still supporting Israel, but they ought to consider what might happen if they tilt too far toward the Hamas supporters and the Jewish vote defects as a result.

At the moment, the US is split more or less right down the middle, with every election decided in a handful of swing states. The Democrats simply can’t afford to lose one of their oldest and most reliable blocs of supporters if it wants to win. If they turn against Israel to satisfy the antisemitic wing of the party, they could well lose the Jews or at least lose enough of them to scuttle the Democrats’ hopes for victory.

The Democrats have taken the Jews for granted for a long time. Perhaps they ought to reconsider their position.