Forever Winter: Politics of the Infinite Cold War

Art by Lynn Le

In the halls of history, there are few national rivalries more iconic than that of the United States and Russia. Certainly, there are none that have more thoroughly shaped the topography of modern geopolitics. 

For nearly fifty years, the U.S. and the Soviet Union spread their dominion over their opposite halves of the globe, staring each other down across the Pacific while the world held its breath. After the fall of the Soviet Union, the U.S. and Russia saw a short period of reluctant coexistence, with Obama-era leaders even sharing hopes of a “reset” in relations between the two countries. In recent years, these hopes have dissipated into renewed hostility, with many forecasting a new era of Cold War between the countries.

As much as the rivalry between the U.S. and Russia has shaped international relations, though, there is another area of politics where it has left just as deep of scars: the domestic politics of both nations. In many ways, the two countries are siblings — for all their cultural differences, their inner lives are both ruled by the memory of that formative rivalry. 

Both countries matured into their modern domestic political systems within the context of this rivalry. When the Cold War ended, both were left with political cultures reliant on a concept of bipolar opposition. The effects of these cultural scars on modern domestic politics are worth examining.

A Brief History of East vs. West

During the Cold War, the United States and Soviet Union divided the world along sharp lines. Countries fell into alignment with one of these two powers, often at the cost of bloody and prolonged proxy wars. The Cold War remade the world in its image — one of dichotomy, with two diametrically opposed sides who sucked up all the air in the geopolitical room. This culture of bipolar opposition was the period’s central feature.

The bipolar divide was not purely international. The “us versus them” mindset of the Cold War also featured heavily in the domestic politics of both the U.S. and the Soviet Union.

Red Flags in the USA

In the 1950s and 1960s, U.S. politics was steeped in anti-communism. Political and cultural leaders pervasively instilled a fear of communist subversion into the minds of the American people, leading to what is today known as the second Red Scare. The most dramatic showing of this paranoid atmosphere, of course, was the career of Wisconsin Senator Joseph McCarthy, who led a campaign of anti-communist probes into various wings of the federal government, culminating in the infamous Army–McCarthy hearings.

During this time, a large coalition of Americans, especially conservatives and religious groups, lent support to the anti-communist fervor. Many citizens felt compelled to keep their political opinions to themselves for fear of unemployment and social ostracism. Americans avoided joining social and activist organizations for fear of being seen as radical and blacklisted. During the peak of the Red Scare in the 1950s, investigations into federal government employees’ politics led to approximately 2,700 dismissals and 12,000 resignations. Investigations reached into other areas of the workforce, including government-associated industries, education, and Hollywood.

As the Cold War continued, it gave rise to a new breed of politicians — the cold warriors. As the central foreign policy issue of the day, a political candidate’s stance on communism and the Soviet Union was essential. Candidates rose to the highest levels of government on promises of hardball opposition to Soviet expansion and stemming the invisible “tide” of domestic subversion. This was a political environment of bipolar opposition, one that incentivized candidates to sell the narrative of “us versus them.”

Iron Curtains in the USSR

The Russian story of internal strife was even more extreme. Ideological policing and a crackdown on freedom of expression began early in the Soviet Union. During the 1930s, General Secretary Joseph Stalin began a series of political purges in which he expelled anyone who disagreed with his policies from the Communist Party, which meant barring them from any kind of political influence entirely. These purges accelerated quickly from dismissals to arrests and executions, culminating in the Great Purge. 

Beginning in 1936, the Great Purge saw Stalin organizing mass trials, leading to hundreds of thousands of party and military personnel being executed or sent to forced labor camps. More than a third of Communist Party members were killed during this period. The purges affected citizens at all levels of society, and ordinary Russians were persuaded or coerced into denouncing their acquaintances as anti-communist radicals.

After Stalin’s death in 1953, the new General Secretary Nikita Krushchev denounced the purges and rolled back most of Stalin’s most extreme policies. However, political repression remained in place well into the 1980s. Throughout the Cold War, the Communist Party tightly controlled the press, censored the arts, exiled political dissidents, and used informants within the general populace to perpetuate a culture of political repression. Similarly to the United States during the Red Scare, Soviet citizens self-censored outside the circle of their family and close friends for fear of being persecuted for expressing the wrong political opinions.

Central to this culture of enforced ideological orthodoxy was the concept of the West. Those punished were those who expressed alternate political beliefs, which usually aligned with the liberal democracy favored in Europe and the United States. Communist Party officials warned of the malignant infiltration of Western ideology within the country — and despite their resentment of their own government, many Russians bought into this idea. It was a tool for the party to justify its oppressive policies, but it was also a powerful ideological and cultural movement. After the Soviet Union fell, even once the Communist Party was gone, the fear and resentment of the West remained.

America’s Autoimmune Politics

Fast-forward to today. American politics is no longer centered around a rabid paranoia of communism. One might be inclined, at first glance, to think that the culture of dichotomy has faded from our political system — but that couldn’t be further from the truth. American politics is still wholly reliant on division. Now, though, the division is directed inward.

The word of the day in American domestic politics is polarization. The two prominent parties have grown steadily further apart, and voters are gathering into two opposing camps accordingly. Pew Research found in 2022 that the average ideology of Democrats and Republicans in Congress was further apart than it had been at any time in the previous fifty years. In addition, a 2014 study by Pew found that the number of Republican and Democrat voters who expressed “very unfavorable” opinions of the opposing party had more than doubled since 1994. 

Any American alive today could expound upon the utter irreconcilability of the left and right. They are fundamentally opposed to our way of life. Their ideology is incompatible with our continued freedom and democracy. Americans’ ideas and anxieties about the opposite party ring eerily similar to the paranoia their parents and grandparents expressed about the Soviet Union. And that’s no accident.

The Cold War may have ended, but its fingerprints are all over the crime scene. The deep reliance on distrust of the outgroup and bipolar division that steeped the United States’ political system as it matured into its modern form has not left it. The political actors in power have not lost the incentive to exploit that flaw; their options to tap into it have just changed. Instead of channeling that need for clean-cut division toward a foreign enemy, the system has turned back on itself.

The mechanism of this shift is the decades of culture wars, identity politics, and partisan hostility the U.S. has weathered since the Cold War began to cool down. Rhetoric from both sides seeks to paint the opposing party not just as political rivals, but as moral and spiritual ones. This kind of rhetoric persists because it is profitable and effective. Exploiting Americans’ desire for a black-and-white outgroup enemy is a sure way to get elected, stay elected, and get your policies through Congress. The Red Scare of the 1950s has reiterated itself as a simultaneous Red-and-Blue Scare for the twenty-first century.

The Specter of the West

In Russia, the culture of dichotomy has taken a different path. Rather than turning inward, the need for bipolar opposition has been deftly angled outward again by the Putin administration, creating a powerful cultural movement based on hostility to the West.

Over the years, Putin’s regime has grown increasingly authoritarian, sparking civil unrest. In response, he has leaned heavily into anti-Western propaganda to harness the thirst for an external enemy. Putin’s brand of populism has won him a solid base by focusing on Cold War themes — the encroaching hostility of a foreign enemy and the fear of domestic subversion fomented by that enemy. The bread and butter of Putin’s support is defensive nationalism and an aggressive reactionary socially conservative sensibility. Hostility to the infiltration of Western cultural values is widespread.

This populist cultural resentment is facilitated by Putin’s propaganda machine, which pumps out misinformation meant to perpetuate the idea of a hostile and encroaching West — to Russians at home and abroad. Media scholars have compared the modern Russian propaganda machine to that of the peak of the Soviet period. The Heritage Foundation estimated that in 2010 alone, the Kremlin spent $1.4 billion on propaganda.

As in the U.S., Russian politicians have continued the Cold War tradition of harnessing a political culture of indwelt division to maintain and increase their power. The fact that this thirst for division has been turned outward rather than inward is a superficial difference — the mechanism is the same.

Infinite Cold War

For all the differences that exist between the United States and Russia, both countries suffer from the same affliction. They are both stuck in the Cold War. Both domestic political systems matured into their current state within the context of the Cold War, and now they don’t know how to leave it behind.

In both countries, this culture of dichotomy, of bipolar division, has created the perfect conditions for ethno nationalist populist movements. The political culture of both Russia and America nurtures the kind of fears within its polity that these movements thrive on — paranoia, resentment, self-righteousness, and the need to fix blame upon some discrete outside group. Movements of this kind have already gained steam in Putin’s party and the American far right, and they will only continue to grow.

Russians and Americans are more alike than you might imagine. We all grapple with this hamartia, this fatal flaw that has been baked into us for over fifty years. During the Cold War, as strange as it might seem, the United States and the Soviet Union needed each other. They were reflections of each other across the Pacific, two sides of the same coin. And once they were separated, that essential twinned-ness didn’t go away; it just doubled over and folded back on itself.

We are all still struggling with that same sickness. We are all still fighting the Cold War.

If we do not find a way to overcome it, things can only devolve into more cold wars, or more civil wars. Of course, the United States and Russia will not be allies anytime soon. A renewed conflict is inevitable. But if both countries want to survive it, they will have to let go of the scars of the last one. That lingering outgroup hatred, the imprint of the old Cold War, led us directly into this new one.

If we can’t let go of them, they will lead us to much worse.