WEEKEND LISTENING: Are We Living in ‘Late Soviet America’?

A few weeks ago, fresh from being knighted by King Charles, historian Sir Niall Ferguson officially joined The Free Press as a columnist. His first piece was a banger, provocatively titled “We’re All Soviets Now.” His argument: America today resembles the decaying Soviet Union of the ’70s and ’80s. We’re physically unwell—life expectancies are shockingly in decline—we’re drowning in debt, governed by an out-of-touch gerontocracy, and subjected to bogus ideologies pushed by elites.

This was published before the disastrous presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Since then, Ferguson has doubled down. He argued in his most recent column that the reason we face a campaign between a blowhard and a senile old man lies in America’s similarities to the late-stage Soviet Union.

The piece soon went viral. It even became an Instagram meme.

Unsurprisingly, Niall’s arguments drove some people crazy. And the rebuttals came pouring in. None was quite as passionate and thorough as the one written by Dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg. In his column “No, We Are Not Living in ‘Late Soviet America,’ ” Goldberg conceded some basic facts presented by Ferguson, but he aggressively pushed back against the comparison. Look at the wealth of American consumers, he wrote, or the migrants desperate to cross the border and live in this country. While the Communist regime stifled free expression and jailed dissidents, speech flows without restraint in America. At the end of the day, Goldberg argued, “America is simply not like the Soviet Union.” 

Ferguson fought back on Twitter in an 18-part thread, in which he accused Goldberg of “pure cope.” And back and forth they went for days.

We’re happy to announce that they agreed to hash it all out on our latest episode of Honestly. (The loser will not be sent to the gulag!)

The debate we ended up having was much bigger than merely whether the U.S. can accurately be compared to the USSR. It got to the heart of a core disagreement on the right in recent years about the health of American democracy—and whether the nation is still exceptional, albeit flawed, or if the country is in a state of inexorable decline. 

It’s a fitting conversation to have right after the Fourth of July as pundits and politicians fill airtime and columns with questions about our leader’s fitness for the job, presidential transparency, and whether it’s undemocratic to replace Biden on the election ticket. Today’s conversation digs into how the American project is faring, and what we should do to save the country we all love before it’s too late.

Click below to listen to the full episode of Honestly, moderated by Michael Moynihan, or scroll on for an edited version of the Niall vs. Jonah debate. 

Are Americans suffering from an excess of freedom? 

Jonah Goldberg: A lot of diseases have similar symptoms. That doesn’t mean the diseases are the same. Our problems come from an excess of freedom rather than a totalitarian control of freedom. I don’t think there’s a historical equivalence and I certainly don’t think that there’s a moral equivalence.

I think a lot of the sources of our political dysfunction in America on the right and the left stem from an excess of catastrophism. The post-liberals on the left and on the right want to say that the American experiment, the American project, is inherently corrupt and flawed. Arguments that say we are the “baddies” because we’ve got these problems take the intentionality out of things, misstate the source of the problems, and suggest a set of solutions that would make everything worse.

Michael Moynihan: Niall, would you concede that maybe we’re suffering from an excess of freedom rather than an excess of government control?

Niall Ferguson: Ordinary Americans don’t think that they’re suffering from an excess of freedom. Only people who went to Ivy League colleges think that. The polling is quite clear. In the Soviet Union, they had one party. In the United States, the political system is a duopoly with two parties. But the outcomes for ordinary people, whether they’re in Leningrad or San Francisco, are remarkably similar.

You get this curious combination of a crisis of public health and a crisis of public morale. Could you tell me about another advanced society where living standards declined, mortality rates rose, where 100,000 people a year die of overdoses? There’s no other society like that. I can only think of one other example, and that’s the Soviet Union. 

If you’re dying of an overdose, it doesn’t matter if it’s vodka or fentanyl. You died young. One’s living in the workers’ paradise and one’s living in the land of the free. 

Although you don’t feel constrained, you feel free, and you think you’re in a much better position than your counterparts in the Soviet Union, the ordinary people suffering premature death from overdoses are in a remarkably similar predicament. They think the system is completely a sham and life is simply not worth living. 

My ulterior motive in making this argument is to help Americans adjust to the reality of Cold War II. We are in a cold war with an authentically authoritarian totalitarian regime; we need to consider the possibility that we might lose. See, the defining characteristic of the Soviet Union, apart from its being a massive, organized hypocrisy, is that it lost the Cold War. And it lost it partly because its morale collapsed.

We have to consider the possibility that we could lose Cold War II because of the same inner collapse that robs ordinary Americans of the faith that they generally had in Cold War I.

Is this a uniquely terrible time in American history? 

NF: One hundred thousand Americans die every year from overdoses. The mortality statistics for young American males are worse than for their Russian counterparts. And this is the land of the free? This is all going really well? Please. 

JG: I have not said everything’s going really well. And I’ve conceded that the deaths of despair are a very significant thing to be concerned about. I am not here to defend the status quo. 

Fentanyl is a very different thing than Soviet vodka. Fentanyl is a new and unprecedented threat. The shockingly inexpensive nature of the manufacturing and distribution process of fentanyl makes it incredibly easy to flood into a society and flood into a market in a way that you couldn’t do with opiates, which require vast amounts of agricultural space. 

But contending that this somehow makes us like the Soviet Union as a moral matter or as a historical matter is a level of abstraction and literary flourish that I don’t think matches the facts on the ground.

MM: Jonah, if you remove the Soviet comparison, do you kind of generally agree with Niall’s premise that we’re in a unique time? Is this a uniquely horrible time in American history?

JG: There are a lot of really bad things going on. There were a lot of really bad things going on in the 1960s and ’70s. In one 18-month period, there were something like five domestic terror bombings a day in the United States. The head of the FBI in San Francisco said that San Francisco was the Belfast of North America. 

The crime rate in the New York City I grew up in blows today’s rate away. I mean, I grew up in the neighborhood where Death Wish was filmed. Crime is nowhere near the problem it was in my lifetime. 

And so there are always going to be things about contemporary society and a free society that one could point to and say, “it’s all going to shit.” But there is so much catastrophism and so much doomscrolling in the culture that wants to say that things have never been worse.

There are so many reasons to say that we are not economically like the Soviet Union. This idea that once you get outside the Washington, D.C., to New York Acela corridor, that it’s Mad Max territory out there, I just don’t think there’s data to prove that. There’s no data to prove that our standard of living is anything that conjures anything like a comparison to the Soviet Union. 

How do we explain the soaring number of deaths of despair? 

NF: What’s amazing to me is the difficulty of persuading Jonah that you need to take life expectancy and mortality rates seriously. 

Throughout American history, until very recently, life expectancy just kept going up like it did everywhere else in the developed world. 

But it has deteriorated so steeply in the last 20 years, and especially in the last decade, particularly for the bottom quintile of the income distribution. For most Americans, this isn’t palpable. But if you’re in the bottom quintile of the income distribution, your life expectancy is way worse than your counterparts in the other developed countries. 

The most disadvantaged people in Japan and Switzerland live to be 60. Guess what age they live to on average in the U.S.? Forty-one. Infant mortality for the bottom quintile, particularly with single parents, is almost emerging market developing country level. Almost Soviet level, actually. American life expectancy, mortality rates, all trended better for most of American history until recently. 

People are dying way, way too young in America. That isn’t doomscrolling. The data are truly appalling. And only the Soviet Union has matched this in all of modernity. 

JG: Your essay did not argue that because of the plight of the bottom quintile in the United States in terms of deaths of despair, we are now like the Soviet Union. Your essay was about our economics. Your essay was about our justice system. Your essay was about a whole bunch of things. You treat it like a Christmas tree, and you hang a lot more less persuasive points on it thinking people won’t notice the difference. 

I’m perfectly happy to say that we have a similarity with the Soviet Union in terms of deaths of despair. I think you have not demonstrated that they have the same root causes and therefore would require the same sorts of solutions. Nor do I think that they get to the fundamental indictment of the Soviet Union on a moral scale, on a philosophical scale, on an economic scale, that makes the comparisons between us and them, I think, fairly spurious. 

The British Empire failed and declined. That doesn’t mean it was like the Soviet Union. The Persian Empire failed and declined. That didn’t mean it was like the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union cannot be a metaphor for everything that goes bad in a country that is founded on completely different historical forces and intellectual concepts.

NF: When you try to explain the deaths of despair, the best you could come up with was that fentanyl’s really cheap. Vodka was really cheap in the Soviet Union. 

And you’ve got to come up with a better answer than you have so far for why America has totally deviated from the trend in all the other developed countries to the point that life expectancy has gone into reverse. 

Now, you’re right. I went through a list of what we have in common with the Soviet Union. We have a fiscal problem. We have a problem in that there’s a disconnect between the elite and the masses. 

The identity politics and illiberalism that now flourishes in all elite institutions in the name of diversity, equity, and inclusion is an ideology that certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with your American ideals. In fact, when you ask the proponents of critical race theory for their accounts of American history, it is that American history is white supremacy. 

The elites no longer believe a word you’re saying about the American founding, the distinctiveness of the United States. The elites who staff Harvard and Yale and Stanford and the foundations and run the Democratic Party and will decide whether Joe Biden is viable as a candidate, they don’t believe a word that you say about what makes the United States different from the Soviet Union. 

They would also say, in many ways, it is just another empire, probably a pretty evil one. Now, when you said just because the Soviet Union and the British Empire and other empires declined, that’s got somehow nothing to do with the United States—you have to consider the possibility that the United States could also turn out to be a declining empire. I argued that in a book called Colossus 20 years ago. And very few of the things I said then are less true today. 

I think you might be in denial about the pathologies not only of American public health but of the American political elite. And that’s what troubles me. There’s a certain insouciance about your response, as if it’ll all be fine. 

But it’s not doomscrolling or catastrophizing to say there’s a moral crisis. There’s a crisis of public morale and of public health. And the United States could conceivably lose Cold War II.

Are institutions getting any better? 

JG: There is self-correction happening as we speak. The L.A. school district just announced they’re going to ban phones in schools. On college campuses, the nomenklatura we’re talking about is pernicious and sinister, and it would be wonderful if they were all purged.

We are also seeing a natural corrective response from many institutions in this country, like the efforts by Robert George and his imitators and what Ben Sasse is doing at the University of Florida.

Ibram Kendi is now a joke, even according to The New York Times. Schools are banning mandatory DEI statements and reinstating the SAT just in the last few years. Are we back to a healthy, wonderful, elite campus culture? Absolutely not. We’re reaping the fruits of a long march through the institutions by the kind of people we both deplore. I’m not blasé about this; I just reject your framing that we’re repeating the mistakes of the Soviet Union.

NF: I’d love to believe it. I’ve been told over and over again that a wonderful pendulum is going to swing back, at least to the center. I’ve, of course, made my own efforts in moving it by creating the university in Austin, where we’ve created a constitution that enshrines academic freedom and meritocracy.

But the university landscape is still dominated by the Ivy League. They change presidents, but they don’t change much else. I haven’t read about any diversity, equity, and inclusion officers being fired from Yale, where the bureaucrats outnumber the undergraduates. We should be very careful about declaring victory prematurely. It’s a bit of an American habit.

In truth, the illiberal elite is institutionally very deeply entrenched—not only in elite universities, where the craziest protests in support of Hamas took place, but also in foundations, technology companies, the publishing industry, and Washington, D.C., in the federal bureaucracy.

If you come back to my original question: Why is there this crisis of morale? Let’s leave aside the public health question. Why do Americans have no faith in their own institutions? Public confidence in Congress, the elected representatives of the people, is like single digits—8 percent last time I looked. 

Trust in institutions, if you average it out over all the Gallup polling data, is about half what it was in 1979. That was the moment of malaise itself, a phrase associated with Jimmy Carter. If public confidence in institutions is half what it was at the end of the Carter presidency, that seems bad to me.

What’s happening is that Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford are pretending to change their ways. They’re pretending to get rid of discrimination in admissions. They’re faking it because the people who run those institutions are deeply committed to an ideology as foreign to you and me as the ideology of Brezhnev, Andropov, and Chernenko was back when we were young students. 

We underestimate at our peril the grip that these nomenklatura types have on American institutions and how demoralized that leaves ordinary Americans feeling.

How do we solve America’s political disillusionment?  

JG: Parties are supposed to be mediating institutions that take different and disparate interests of their coalition members and force compromises for the coalition’s benefit. Instead, they’re essentially just branding opportunities for whatever cult of personality might take over at any given moment.

Congress is supposed to be the place where political disagreements are adjudicated and hammered out. Instead, Congress is basically a parliament of pundits. They don’t actually care about writing laws. This fuels the cult of the presidency, which says we should just elect a king every four years.

Obama was part of that problem. Biden is part of that problem. And Trump is part of that problem. They all represent the idea that once the president is in office, they should be able to lawlessly do whatever they want.

That’s not how our system works. So you get gridlock and dysfunction everywhere.

For starters, I would push as much power down to the most local level possible. If you push power to the local level, the feeling that cold, unseen forces far away are controlling your life will seem less plausible. You can fire the people responsible for the things that are screwed up in your life. When all the power is concentrated among unelected bureaucrats, you feel like you have very little agency.

Force people to actually be involved in democracy and political contests rather than just giving small donations to various gargoyles, whether they’re Marjorie Taylor Greene or Ilhan Omar, and get back to a time when being a good citizen meant being involved in your community. Beyond that, I’d love to fire a lot of people in academia.

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