Glasgow-born historian Niall Ferguson — formerly of Harvard, then of the was just knighted in the annual King’s Birthday Honors, and therefore is now styled Sir Niall Ferguson.
He’s now joined the Free Press as a regular columnist. This is his opening salvo: https://www.thefp.com/p/were-all-soviets-now
A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?
Read the whole long thing. But let me offer a few excerpts:
The comparison to the Soviet Union, you might argue, is nevertheless risible.
Take a closer look.
A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future, and to rise inexorably to 8.5 percent by 2054. The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.”
[…] We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker’s report—and I recommend you do the same—I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world.
On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?)
[…] Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.
[…] In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda from 1990, for example, a reader decried the “ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR.” Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a “miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery.” By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie novosti felt that theirs was an “unjust society.”
Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.
He then continues to draw parallels between “deaths of despair” and fentanyl overdoses in today’s USA, and the massive mortality from alcoholism in the former USSR (and to a degree, today’s Russia).
The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries. The main explanations, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, are a striking increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide, and a rise in various diseases associated with obesity. To be precise, between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths—again of working-age Americans—over the same period. Metabolic and cardiac causes of death such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease also surged in tandem with obesity.
This reversal of life expectancy simply isn’t happening in other developed countries.
[…] Of course, the two healthcare systems look superficially quite different. The Soviet system was just under-resourced. At the heart of the American healthcare disaster, by contrast, is a huge mismatch between expenditure—which is internationally unrivaled relative to GDP—and outcomes, which are terrible. But, like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy, brilliantly parodied by South Park in a recent episode—is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.
Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in. […]
In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”
As for the current direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is not so much to help other countries defend themselves as to egg on others to fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning. This strategy—most visible in Ukraine—makes some sense for the United States, which discovered in the “global war on terror” that its much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. But believing American blandishments may ultimately doom Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to follow South Vietnam and Afghanistan into oblivion.
[…] To see the extent of the gulf that now separates the American nomenklatura from the workers and peasants, consider the findings of a Rasmussen poll from last September, which sought to distinguish the attitudes of the Ivy Leaguers from ordinary Americans. The poll defined the former as “those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile,” and having attended “Ivy League schools or other elite private schools, including Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.”
Asked if they would favor “rationing of gas, meat, and electricity” to fight climate change, 89 percent of Ivy Leaguers said yes, as against 28 percent of regular people. Asked if they would personally pay $500 more in taxes and higher costs to fight climate change, 75 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said yes, versus 25 percent of everyone else. “Teachers should decide what students are taught, as opposed to parents” was a statement with which 71 percent of the Ivy Leaguers agreed, nearly double the share of average citizens. “Does the U.S. provide too much individual freedom?” More than half of Ivy Leaguers said yes; just 15 percent of ordinary mortals did. The elite were roughly twice as fond as everyone else of members of Congress, journalists, union leaders, and lawyers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 88 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said their personal finances were improving, as opposed to one in five of the general population.
[…] A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.
[…] We can tell ourselves that our many contemporary pathologies are the results of outside forces waging a multi-decade campaign of subversion. They have undoubtedly tried, just as the CIA tried its best to subvert Soviet rule in the Cold War.
Yet we also need to contemplate the possibility that we have done this to ourselves—just as the Soviets did many of the same things to themselves. It was a common liberal worry during the Cold War that we might end up becoming as ruthless, secretive, and unaccountable as the Soviets because of the exigencies of the nuclear arms race. Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway.
ADDENDUM: via Instapundit, one of my other history gurus, Victor Davis Hanson:
Anatomy of a Full Leftwing Meltdown The media is afire with warnings of the impending Trump “dictatorship”. Celebrities, the Squad, and Biden administration grandees vie to conjure up the most nightmarish things that Trump might do to them.
What drives their current mounting hysteria?
1) The Left feels it may be heading to an historic 1972 McGovern-like or 1980 Carteresque blowout. And it is terrified at this late date that it cannot do anything either about the escalating dementia of Joe Biden, or the terror instilled by the specter of either a President or continued Vice-President Kamala Harris.
2) It knows that a first-term novice Trump had a successful four years, and that he now is savvier four years later—and far more likely and able to overturn the entire four-year Biden catastrophe and thus enjoy an even more successful second term.
3) It fears that all it did to destroy democracy—the Russian collusion hoax, the Russian disinformation laptop farce, the two first-term impeachments the moment the Republicans lost the House, the Senate trial of ex-President Trump as a private citizen, the effort to remove Trump from state ballots, and the five criminal and civil show trials designed to bankrupt the leading presidential candidate and keep him off the campaign trail—might boomerang on the Left. So, it is in full panic that its unconstitutional efforts to destroy Trump will obviously be used against itself—given it knows that if it returned to power it would go after its enemies in precisely the same, any-means-necessary ways that it had sought to destroy Trump. That is, they have destroyed norms and have established dangerous new precedents that they just assume, given their Jacobin nature, must rebound against themselves.
4) The Left is terrified that growing voter repugnance now extends even to traditional Democratic constituencies—Latinos, Blacks, Asians, Jews, the young, and even the college educated. And the Left privately grasps that these defections are fueled not just by the obnoxiousness and dementia of Joe Biden, but due to his far-left agendas that left us with abhorrent inflation, wild unsustainable federal deficits, a lethal open border, 10-million unaudited and often dangerous illegal aliens, foreign policy catastrophes, woke racial and tribal disunity, spiraling urban crime, and cultural extremism. Leftists accept that while in secret they blame the cognitively challenged Joe for their dilemmas, deep-down they know that “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves”—that is, in their own failed revolution that has utterly repulsed Americans and nearly destroyed the country.
5) In the next five months, the Left and Democrats know that they must pander to try to save themselves. But the more Biden panders, the more obvious, repugnant, and counterproductive the pandering becomes. The public is growing sick of Biden’s 11th-hour groveling to save himself from his self-created oblivion. And the more in his last days as President he drains even more the strategic petroleum reserve, the more he cancels student loan debt, the more he abandons Israel to win a few thousand votes in Michigan, the more he pressures the Fed to lower interest rates, the more he flips on tariffs, and the more he grants blanket amnesties to illegal aliens—all the more the country at large becomes disgusted at the low effort to temporarily appease particular voting blocs at the expense of the general interest of the country.
6) As we watch the Left go through the proverbial cycles of “denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance”, it will increasingly deny the accuracy of supposedly inaccurate swing state polls, then angrily damn the supposedly clueless, deplorable electorate, then turn to all sorts of dreams of remedies (changing or violating more voting laws being the most prominent), then get sullen about the entire American project, and only finally accept the inevitable of what likely lies ahead.
ADDENDUM 2: a DEI-addled US military that once could build “Mulberry” harbors in Normandy at the drop of a hat spent $230M on building a “humanitarian pier” in Gaza that never worked, and will now be dismantled. The Babylon Bee comments: To Save Time, Biden To Drop Next $320 Million Cash Directly Into Ocean
ADDENDUM 3: closer to home, translating a Hebrew joke I overheard:
On ‘career day’, three schoolkids are discussing what their fathers are doing for a living:
Moshe: my father is a doctor
Shlomo: my dad is a software engineer
Shalev: my daddy is a lawyer
Yair: my father is a male prostitute who does sex work in a brothel for homosexuals.
Scandalized teacher takes him aside: “why do you tell such disgusting lies about your father?”
Yair: because I’m afraid to tell the truth — he’s a politician
ADDENDUM 4: Arbel’s Law in action (“the trouble with fighting stereotypes is that some people are hell-bent on affirming them”): https://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2024/06/a-cultural-stereotype-comes-to-life.php
Spin, strangeness, and charm 