A week later I was in Moscow. Beggars were quite common: amputees, destitute pensioners, old war veterans wearing their threadbare uniforms and tarnished medals, the very old and the very young, as armies of orphans took to the streets of Russian cities. Street vendors, often educated people who had worked in industry or for the state apparatus, hawked all sorts of cheap goods, often Chinese in origin, on the sidewalks of the dingy capital's streets.

Through it all, I noted the good will of many of the Russians I met, people who seemed glad that the Cold War was behind us.

That emotional warmth would not survive the "shock therapy" economic policies of the Russian government that, on the recommendation of Western advisors, had gone all in on neo-liberal reforms, lifting price controls and beginning the massive selloff of Soviet era assets. Gradualists had warned that the country might collapse under the strain, and it nearly did. The political and economic dislocations that followed the Soviet collapse, along with the unpopular economic policies ("shock without therapy") helped ignite a political conflict between President Boris Yeltsin and the legislature, the Russian Supreme Soviet, that would end with a mini-civil war in Moscow, when tanks commanded by Defense Minister Pavel Grachev (the tank crews were reluctant to take such orders from lower ranking officers) blasted the parliament into submission in October,1993.

The "Wild 90s" traumatized the Russian people in ways Westerners failed to fully understand at the time. And they also failed to account for historic Russian distrust of the West—the flipside of the good will I had seen so much of early on in Yeltsin-era Russia. By the end of the 90s, with NATO intervening in the ruins of Yugoslavia, bombing, among other sites, targets in Serbia, a traditional Russian ally, even Yeltsin had had enough and made his displeasure known to "friend Bill," as he called President Clinton, to no avail.

The passage of the Hart-Celler Immigration Act of 1965 was a key point in the evolution of the Left-Liberal managerial regime during the Cold War. Opening the immigration flood gates was part of the Cold War architecture of the era. The propaganda aspect of the Cold War was fought in ideological terms as a clash between Communism and Capitalism (“the Free World”), a war of ideas, not of countries with concrete national interests and distinct peoples. Hart-Celler, which opened the door to non-European immigration, was an ideological extension of the Civil Rights legislation of the era, which was used in Cold War information campaigns to counter Soviet anti-capitalist and anti-U.S. propaganda.

Discrimination of any kind was viewed by U.S. elites as arming the Communists with useful propaganda points—a Western democracy discriminating against the colored peoples of the earth undermined the global anti-Communist line.

Universalist language in American political discourse wasn’t anything new, but the Cold War went a long way toward promoting America as an idea, not a real place or a people with national interests to defend.

Thus, a global elite spawned during the Cold War, bolstered by Cold War era ideological abstractions, had consolidated its stranglehold on power in the Western world. The United States wasn’t exactly the leader of “the Free World,” but, rather, had become the seat of an expansive globalist project.