I am currently reading my second book about Vladimir Putin and the response to him. The first book I read was Putinism: Russia and its Future with the West, written by Walter Laqueur, a French-Jewish author who has been studying Russia for decades. I am currently reading Kicking the Kremlin: Russia's New Dissidents and the Battle to Topple Putin.

I live in the United States. I speak with a West Coast American accent. While I am of French ancestry and my mom often is there, my social world is completely in the United States (and France and Western Europe in general are facing basically the same problem). I don't really have other options. I currently live in Berkeley, the part of the US that most liberally allows me to be myself and do what I want.

Nevertheless the decay is abundant here, even if it would make my life better to not notice it. All the things I often heard about the Soviet Union in its final years seem to apply to the United States now - nothing works (I have had all sorts of really cool jobs and internships and still worried about finding myself on the streets), sadness and frustration seems almost on the faces of people here and everything seems institutionally in decay. I took this picture of a closed shop in Berkeley, a picture I thought basically said it all about modern America:

In Kicking the Kremlin, writer Marc Bennetts quotes one of Boris Yeltsin's parting speeches, which ominously reflects the state of modern America, "Many of our dreams failed to come true. Things we thought would be easy turned out to be painfully hard. I am sorry that I did not live up to the hopes of people who believed that we could, with a single effort, a single strong push, jump of our grey, stagnant, totalitarian past and in to a bright, wealthy, civilized future."

The second term of Barack Obama seems to greatly reflect the atmosphere of Boris Yeltsin's presidency, only on a grander scale. Most of the last four years seems to have been spent with Barack Obama responding to whatever calamity has befallen us, from Sandy Hook to the Paris attacks to the shooting of police officers to the shooting of people by police, etc. with only a momentary break in which Obama attempted to sell us an extension of the Middle East wars that caused much of this crisis during the Bush administration.

Donald Trump is a disgusting man. His rhetoric has been vile and he has helped stoke hatred in order to keep his momentum going. Nevertheless this is a vile country, with little sense of community, tradition or identity beyond capitol. It doesn't even have a bad case of these things - its embrace of free market economics above all else has resulted in none of those things existing in our culture at all. Americans only value money and they hate themselves because most of them don't have it. The current system as it is doesn't work for anyone - I don't know anyone in it for whom it does. Hillary is going to lose hard if she goes on with "America is already great." I don't know anyone who could say that without bursting with laughter.

As Trump has risen, so have accusations that he is heavily tied to Russia. Vladimir Putin has put extensive effort in to aiding the Alternative Right in the United States (and by "Alternative Right," I really mean right wing voices that are out of the traditional Reaganesque Republicans, not just white nationalists). He has provided money to the Ron Paul Institute for Peace and Prosperity and people employed there have been regulars on Russia Today, as has Ron Paul himself and figures like Gary Johnson. Putin's support of them is an exploitation of the weakness of the West, something that must be evident to him in part because it reflects the decay he saw in the former Soviet Union in the years before he rose to power.

There is an air of organized crime (mixed with a neo-Tsar attitude of authoritarian conservatism) to Vladimir Putin. Trump would not be the top dog in that relationship whatsoever and many of the promises he has made that would benefit Russia, from pulling back with NATO to pulling back in the Middle East, he would find himself having to go through on, lest Putin play hard as he has been known to do. Many Americans seem to carry a strange fondness for Vladimir Putin, as if the failure level in the US is so high that being controlled by a foreign Tsar is now attractive.

An authoritarian like Trump would not be the leader of the world's wave of strongmen. Benjamin Netanyahu (who is very much a strongman), Recep Erdogan and Vladimir Putin all garner more respect, attention and fear than the United States will at this point. The US is a sein.cond tier developing country - its idea of itself as wealthy about as valid as dreams of the Aztec empire rising again. Trump would be a tool of another regime - the credo that American leaders used to say about puppet dictators, "He's a sonofabitch but he's our sonofabitch," now applying in reverse.

It's not an ideal future for the United States - but it's really hard to see an ideal future when one looks at what this twisted country is like, even on a day to day basis. To be steered by a distant Tsar may be an improvement.