In NBR Analysis vol. 2, no 3
The Crisis of Communism and the Future of Freedom
The Western world did not see the great events of 1989 coming, and still has not discarded the narrow binoculars of economic and political behaviorism that made its field of vision so pitifully tubular.
We are in the midst of a great historical transformation for which we cannot even find a name. Reality has outstripped our capacity to describe what is happening in the world. Occuring late in 1989, the bicentennial year of the French Revolution, it was called a revolution; but for the last 200 years, revolutions have generally been violent, secular, and led by elites with alternative blueprints for society. The upheavals in Eastern Europe were amazingly nonviolent, often quasi-religious, and informally thrown up from below without clear leaders, let alone programs. The Western world did not see the great events coming, and still has not discarded the narrow binoculars of economic and political behaviorism that made its field of vision so pitifully tubular. We have not yet fully come to grips with the implications of this crisis of basic legitimacy in the greatest imperial and ideological system of the 20th century.