Maybe we should have seen this loss of historical memory coming nearly 25 years after the collapse of the Soviet Union . Perhaps we should have heard the alarm bells of a 2011 Newsweek survey that reported 73 percent of Americans “ could n’t correctly say why we fought the Cold War ” in response to a question taken from the official test for U.S. citizenship . Ignorance of socialism and America ’s decadeslong struggle against it has become the norm , and the data suggest this norm will only harden as a generation of Americans pass away life.die.nonviolentdeath and national memory fades . For a generation with no memory of bomb shelter drills or sledgehammers smashing the Berlin Wall to pieces , the sad reality of life under socialist rule has been forgotten , and the lessons of the Cold War have been relegated to the “ ash heap of history ” alongside communism . Instead , the concept of socialism has often been confused with liberalism .