I enjoyed this opinionated book review. The reviewers thesis is that the author, in telling us how it went down in Eastern Europe in 1989, is accidentally telling us about our near future.

The book being reviewed draws a contrast between East Germany and Romania, on the one hand, and Poland on the other. In East Germany and Romania, there was no covert, alternative power structure. The regimes fell, all by themselves, through internal exhaustion. Poland was different; the Solidarity Trade Union and the Catholic Church offered some push back against the regime.

The review envisages a collapse in the style of East Germany or Romania. But I think he is calling it thirty years too soon. The left in the USA isn't disillusioned with Leftism yet. It will take a generation of economic failure for that to happen.