prescient

where to start? This proposition seems so insulting. Economists in the preceding six years have been quarter after quarter unexpectedly surprised or taken aback by the results of the previous quarter. These same economists made predictions or assessments for the next quarter and again unexpectedly surprised to be off the mark where reality fell short of their attempts to talk up dysfunctional policies.This fellow is no different. His making a comparison between a society formed around principles of minimal governance and respect for the individual against societies of the past formed around monarchical, centralized governments and the economies therein would seem to be too dishonest to be taken seriously.
To his assertion the American dream is dead, I think he is missing a basic point the American Dream is not a dead but has been put on a severely shortened leash by onerous, statist politics. The American dream when put into practice rewards the individual who is motivated, has skills and is inclined to act on his or her abilities and skills to reap the rewards for that hard work and perseverance. The American society has in the preceding decades, going back to the great society policies anyway, been incrementally boxed in, hemmed in and restrained by statists motivated a social engineering agenda rooted in the artificial outcomes based on fairness. The opiate of fairness has been the fuel which has driven the welfare state, sapped individuals of their individual motivation and thereby fed a perception that because the trappings of success have not been handed out there is no longer an American Dream.

An essential tenet of the American dream is we have the right to nothing but the pursuit of everything.

In as long as society accepts success is rewarded from a government program, the American Dream will be perceived as non existent. In as long as there are Americans willing to reject this idea of the state as guarantor of success, the Dream is alive and well. Society must reset expectations where It is not the state's role to guarantee outcomes based on fairness or even define the starting line, much less the finish line. Success is not defined or declared by the state. Success is achieved and earned by the individual. We must dispense with this tyranny of altruism which decides to confiscate the earnings of a person to reward another person has chosen not to take the initiative be productive and earn.
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An interesting question indeed.
In the context of the two states which practiced these ideologies in the past century, both discarded God based theologies in favor of the person and installed the head of state as the deity on earth.
Both systems were essentially fascistic.
Both established the state as the church.
Both espoused anti-capitalist philosophies.
Both practiced systematic murder of identified enemy groups based on a system of camps employed to collect these perceived enemies and then dispose of them accordingly.
Oddly, in the case of communism, their system started before the Nazis and succeeded the Nazis.
I think part of the answer of why the Soviets were idealized lies in that the Soviet style fascism sought to address class distinctions as did socialists in the U.S. had striven to do prior to the 1917 revolution. They spoke in a common language. The communists sought to address the differences by embarking on a campaign against the middle and upper classes. This was a strategy which used tactics the socialists in the west either admired or in extreme cases ignored preferring to focus on the end goal. Socialists in the west could identify with targeting the bourgeois as a catchall net capturing the middle and upper classes who had somehow prospered at the expense of the lower class. The idea of attacking an ethnic group is anathema to western thought, at least in the sense of organized political movements anyway. This does not explain such groups as the Ku Klux Klan. Although, the KKK did have a tangential relationship with socialists and democrats early in the 20th century.

The national socialists of Germany addressed disparities in classes in their rhetoric but for some reason targeted ethnic groups rather than an entire class. Specifically the Jews. Jews as an ethic group occupied all strata of society. While the socialists in the Soviet Union confiscated wealth in the name of the state and ran enterprises as state functions, the national socialists rather embraced capitalism and made it an extension of the state. The national socialists allowed commerce to operate separately but under the watchful eye of the state. Both systems tolerated capitalism in some manner but it was the soviet style system which at its outset punished capitalists as the manifestations of social evil the same way those sympathetic socialists in the U.S. saw commerce.

Perhaps those socialists in the west were willing to overlook, even condone, the level of murder committed by Russian socialists because both held compatible anti-capitalist, political outlooks. But, the socialists in the U.S. could not condone the national socialists in Germany because they committed mass murder in conjunction with state capitalism.