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Alexander Solzhenitsyn Takes On The Progressives
January 29, 2021
If there is one thing that 2020 has taught me, it is that the real political and cultural divide in our country is not between Republicans and Democrats, or even conservatives and liberals, but between traditionalists and progressives.
At the core of progressivism is not the optimistic American belief that things are improving and that our children can live better lives than we did, but the belief that man is a perfectible product of evolutionary forces. Rather than being made in God’s image and then fallen, progressives believe we must throw off the shackles and prejudices of the past in order to move forward to build utopia.
Solzhenitsyn, Russia, and America Print this article
When I was stationed in Germany years ago, some of my fellow soldiers would get bored and pick fights with young Russian men in the local clubs. The German locals never seemed to have the heart to duke it out, and the Russians were not only eager and willing to trade blows, they were an even match. On particularly debauched nights, the club floor would suddenly transition from dancing to punching, a roiling frenzy in the loud dark of Schweinfurt’s Rockfabrik club. What stood out the most to me in those moments wasn’t the violence itself young soldiers abroad get restless, after all but how similar the Americans and Russians appeared. Both “sides” were tattooed and weighted down by jewelry, with close-cropped hair and tank tops. Sometimes, you couldn’t tell who was who. In those moments, I couldn’t help but feel a resonance between our two cultures, deeply buried, perhaps, and difficult to articulate, but there al