What I like about speaking to Ukrainian audiences is that nobody perceives me as particularly conservative. Here my opinions are far-right and there they are simply normal. I don’t think people even see them as political but more common sense than anything else.
Every time I tell one of my stories about the ideological compliance in North America, people at first look puzzled and then invariably say, “so it’s like in the USSR?” Because yes, it is. Not Stalin’s USSR, of course, but Brezhnev’s and, increasingly, Andropov’s.
“The first thing that neoliberalism does is create a moral and ethical catastrophe on a society-wide level,” said during today’s event the Dean of Liberal Arts of the university that hosted it. I jumped up in my seat because it’s almost literally what I’m saying in the book I’m writing right now. I never hoped to see the day when a Dean would talk about morality like it’s a good thing.