Imagine a four-kilometre-long train shooting through Siberia at a breakneck speed. It is 1951. The heroic engineer Blinov knows no fear; the tireless locomotive pulls four hundred wagons at an incredible 150 km/h. Blinov is the "New Soviet Man," quite used to performing such feats; he joyfully drives more hours, and faster, every single day. The train, built with Soviet steel and sweat, puts the mighty synergy of socialist mechanics and proletarian work ethic on display. A master of his train, Blinov is but a cog in the machine of the Soviet state. He has two goals: first – to build communism and defeat capitalism through peaceful labour; second – to shame America by showing that in the USSR, the daily conquest of the impossible is the new norm.

Casting aside a longstanding tradition of American exceptionalism, Trump is remaking the United States into a more consumer-friendly version of autocratic Russia. This is alarming and deeply demoralising. But it could also suggest that the American and Russian societies now simply share the same underlying plight.