About The Americans

Jonah Goldberg.

The Americans and the Slipperiness of Popular Culture

I’m a fan and I have no trouble seeing the Jennings as bad guys.

As for their “lost cause,” I’m not sure it was lost because it’s not really clear it was ever communism.

In the first few episodes, the hubby wanted to give it up, defect, and live a normal American family life in what he openly regarded as a “normal country,” but the wife, whose role has been to repeatedly make bad choices resulting from emotional damage, wouldn’t go along.

She was volubly loyal, in those episodes, but it’s not clear to what besides her Russian homeland.

In other words, her motivation seems more patriotic and nationalist than ideological.

Her few displays of loyalty to Marxism or socialism seem little more than reflections of her loyalty to her homeland.

In fact, the two of them are about as far from being real ideologues and would-be global revolutionaries as you could imagine, as is their boss, “Granny.”

And that, really, is why the Soviet Union collapsed, is it not?

As a motivating ideology, communism had no staying power while patriotism and nationalism eventually complemented rather than precluded the desire to “live a normal life in a normal country.”

And that was it for the absurd delusions of Marxism-Leninism.

It was done for the minute enough people saw the chasm between their living Russian patriotism and the dead body of Soviet Communism.

The minute they saw the defeat and collapse of communism was not the defeat and collapse of Russia, but the beginning of Russia’s redemption.

On the other hand, as for Carter, it’s entirely possible to have an “inordinate” fear of anything.

And America’s reaction to its own war putting Stalin in Berlin was quite inordinate.

That was a nasty result of a war that had to end badly, a war we would have done better to stay out of.

And we made it worse by instantly becoming global players and permanent players in Europe for the sole purpose of making the world – though it was by no means sufficiently threatened – safe from communism.

We had seen no need to undertake such a mission after The Great War left Russia in the hands of the Bolsheviks and set off several red revolutions in Central Europe.

And we had been right.

Of course, by the Reagan years a great many dice had been cast.

But Carter was essentially right and containment was as gratuitous and absurd as, though less dangerous than, roll-back.

Seeing it this way, I disagree with JG, just as I do with regard to the motives of the principal characters of the show.

Dan Foster, I think, makes the same mistakes as Jonah, chief among them being the notion the wife is a dedicated Marxist-Leninist when in fact she comes across far more as a merely dedicated Russian.

For her, as I said, I think commie-speak is just the lingo of patriotism.

Spies like us?

Was that an accusation that Chambers and Hitchens were both pro-Soviet reds and neither really ever converted that Foster stuck in there?

That’s a lie once about Chambers and twice about Hitch.

On the other hand, to read Brzezinski, the cold war between the US and Russia isn’t over and was never about communism, really, anyway.

It was and is, for this Polish Russia-hater, all about a sheer great-power contest for control of Europe perhaps as far east as the Urals.

Brilliant and talented exiles from Eastern Europe have done nothing but make us fight their stinking European battles for many decades, now.

I, for one, am really sick of it.