Plenty of good comparisons to the late Soviet era. People in general - from the presidium all the way to the regular people - were largely just "going through the motions" of it all. The entire leadership was a gerontocracy and completely out of touch with what younger people wanted and were unresponsive. In the face of numerous economic challenges, instead of being pragmatic and trying out new ideas, the leadership just stuck with all the "old ways of doing things".

Red Plenty is a great book about this, but you have to go into it with the right mindset. It's easy to read it and become a real doomer because the USSR genuinely tried to get socialism right but they just couldn't put it all together. It depressed me at first but I later realized all the mistakes the USSR made don't have to be repeated. Instead, Red Plenty basically reads like the present-day USA. We (US Americans) can see the problems in our system and are both unwilling and unable to fix them. And think it's gonna lead to some sort of collapse.