The Soviet Union Gave American Proceduralism an Undeserved Sheen of Legitimacy

by John-Michael Kucyznski

For decades, American patriotism was animated by what appeared to be a deep moral belief in freedom. But what if that belief was never about freedom per se? What if it was about contrast—about not being the Soviet Union?

During the Cold War, the United States defined itself against a truly ghastly regime: the USSR, with its gulags, its show trials, its secret police, its thought control. In that moral mirror, even the most mechanized and procedural aspects of the American system—electoral formality, bureaucratic structure, judicial process—shimmered with the aura of righteousness.

Proceduralism looked like moral clarity because it was framed against overt totalitarianism.

But once that adversary fell, once the Soviet Union dissolved and the Cold War frame dissolved with it, Americans were left to see their system in isolation. And what they saw was not freedom incarnate, but procedure without purpose.

The U.S. legal and political system had not been betrayed. It had not collapsed. It had simply revealed itself—a structure designed for scalability and stability, but with no affirmative moral vision at its center.

What was once interpreted as justice now looked like machinery.

The Cold War gave American proceduralism a borrowed halo—a glow it did not earn on its own.

And when that halo disappeared, so did the belief. Patriotism declined not because America had become something new, but because Americans began to see what it had been all along.