Are We Living in Late Soviet America - Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg

Filed with Politics MOC · Related: Ideology & Foundations · 60.10 Argumentation

• Debate: Niall Ferguson vs. Jonah Goldberg Are We Living in ‘Late Soviet America’? Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg Debate.

  • Schools are banning mandatory DEI statements
  • Reinstating SAT last few years
  • Public confidence in Congress at 8%
  • Howard Zinn: Good stuff in America is invisible or actually bad.
  • Illiberalism is strong on both left and right
  • Suicide rate
  • Deaths of dispair
  • Cold War II
  • Demise of Capitalism according to Joseph Schumpeter
    • Schumpeter’s most popular book in English is probably Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy. While he agrees with Karl Marx that capitalism will collapse and be replaced by socialism, Schumpeter predicts a different way this will come about. While Marx predicted that capitalism would be overthrown by a violent proletarian revolution, which occurred in the least capitalist countries, Schumpeter believed that capitalism would gradually weaken itself and eventually collapse. Specifically, the success of capitalism would lead to corporatism and to values hostile to capitalism, especially among intellectuals.
    • “Intellectuals” are a social class in a position to critique societal matters for which they are not directly responsible and to stand up for the interests of other classes. Intellectuals tend to have a negative outlook on capitalism, even while relying on it for prestige because their professions rely on antagonism toward it. The growing number of people with higher education is a great advantage of capitalism, according to Schumpeter. Yet, unemployment and a lack of fulfilling work will lead to intellectual critique, discontent, and protests.
    • Joseph Schumpeter - Wikipedia
  • “Loss of faith and trust in institutions, loss of faith and trust in our leaders, the erosion of religion in people’s lives. These are very, very serious problems. They were not the Soviet problems.” -Jonah Goldberg
    • “Well, from a monarchist perspective, Jonah, both of these revolutionary republics began with the same acts of overthrowing monarchical governments. And it’s just that one republic went down one path using the Enlightenment’s handbooks of the late 18th century. And then the other, the Russian, went down a different path with the Marxism handbook of the mid-19th century.” -Niall
  • Objective: America restored to founding principles in which individual liberty is at the core of the enterprise.

• Niall Ferguson: We’re All Soviets Now

  • I first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. In articles for The New York Times and National Review, I tried to show how the People’s Republic of China now occupies the space vacated by the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991.
  • China is clearly not only an ideological rival, firmly committed to Marxism-Leninism and one-party rule. It’s also a technological competitor—the only one the U.S. confronts in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It’s a military rival, with a navy that is already larger than ours and a nuclear arsenal that is catching up fast. And it’s a geopolitical rival, asserting itself not only in the Indo-Pacific but also through proxies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
  • Infant mortality in the late Soviet Union was around 25 per 1,000. The figure for the U.S. in 2021 was 5.4, but for single mothers in the Mississippi Delta or Appalachia it is 13 per 1,000.
  • 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.
  • annual average growth rate of productivity in the U.S. nonfarm business sector has been stuck at just 1.5 percent since 2007, only marginally better than the dismal years 1973–1980.
  • 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?)
  • On paper, the U.S. defense budget does indeed exceed those of all the other members of NATO put together. But what does that defense budget actually buy us? As Wicker argues, not nearly enough to contend with the “Coalition Against Democracy” that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have been aggressively building.
  • federal government will almost certainly spend more on debt service than on defense this year.
  • According to the CBO, the share of gross domestic product going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3 percent of GDP this year to a projected 2.3 percent in 30 years’ time. This decline makes no sense at a time when the threats posed by the new Chinese-led Axis are manifestly growing.
  • Gerontocratic leadership
    • But by current American standards, the later Soviet leaders were not old men.
  • 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.
  • epidemic of mental ill health
    • Younger generation
      • Smart phones
      • Social Media
    • Older Generation
      • Deaths of Despair
      • In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
      • 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.
      • 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 deathsamong 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.
  • Peter Sterling and Michael L. Platt argue in a recent paper that this is because West European countries, along with the United Kingdom and Australia, do more to “provide communal assistance at every stage [of life], thus facilitating diverse paths forward and protecting individuals and families from despair.” In the United States, by contrast, “Every symptom of despair has been defined as a disorder or dysregulation within the individual. This incorrectly frames the problem, forcing individuals to grapple on their own,” they write. “It also emphasizes treatment by pharmacology, providing innumerable drugs for anxiety, depression, anger, psychosis, and obesity, plus new drugs to treat addictions to the old drugs.”
  • 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.”
  • As for climate change, the world is now awash in Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, and solar cells, all mass-produced with the help of state subsidies and coal-burning power stations. At least we tried to resist the Soviet strategy of unleashing Marxism-Leninism on the Third World, the human cost of which was almost incalculable. Our policy elite’s preoccupation with climate change has resulted in utter strategic incoherence by comparison. The fact is that China has been responsible for three-quarters of the 34% increase in carbon dioxide emissions since Greta Thunberg’s birth (2003), and two-thirds of the 48% increase in coal consumption.
  • Them vs. Us poll
    • To see the extent of the gulf that now separates the American nomenklatura from the workers and peasants, consider the findings of a Rasmussen pollfrom 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 population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check.

• No, We Are Not Living in ‘Late Soviet America’ - The Dispatch

  • There are numerous areas where I am in complete or near-complete agreement with Ferguson’s descriptions of America’s problems. Looking at the data around suicides, overdoses, and other “deaths of despair,” there’s no sugarcoating the very real problems facing parts of our society. His description of the folly of making climate change the driver of so much of our political—and politicized—economy amid our geostrategic competition with China; his condemnation of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) commissars; his contempt for the misbegotten views of progressive elites; his criticisms of our healthcare system and our military (un)preparedness. All of these claims resonate with me to a considerable degree.
  • (I think the depiction of our military as something of a paper tiger is overstated, though, as evidenced by the success of our weapons systems in Ukraine and Israel).
  • America remains the top recipient of foreign direct investment for reasons that have little to do with ideology. Capital markets, not to mention millions of migrants, are not making ideology-driven calculations about the American economy. The proof that America’s economy has been an unrivaled success story can be found in hard data and the staggering wealth of the American consumer, not the equivalent of Soviet propaganda about banner wheat harvests.

References

Are We Living in ‘Late Soviet America’? Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg Debate.
Niall Ferguson: We’re All Soviets Now