Are We Living in 'Late Soviet America'? Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg Debate.

This episode from The Free Press podcast features a debate between historians Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg on the provocative topic of whether contemporary America shares similarities with the late Soviet Union.

1. Niall Ferguson presents a grim comparison between the U.S. and the late Soviet Union, focusing on ideological exhaustion, political decay, and societal health crises.
2. Jonah Goldberg argues that while the U.S. faces significant challenges, it is fundamentally dissimilar to the Soviet Union, particularly in its foundational ideals and mechanisms for addressing issues.
3. Both participants agree on the severity of current American issues but diverge on their interpretations and implications regarding the nation's future trajectory.
4. The debate highlights a broader discourse on the right about the health of American democracy and the effectiveness of its institutions.
5. The discussion also touches on the role of cultural and technological changes in shaping contemporary societal issues, like the opioid crisis and political polarization.

1: Opening Remarks

Ferguson and Goldberg outline their positions on the analogy between the U.S. and the Soviet Union, setting the stage for a detailed debate. Niall Ferguson: "If your system can only produce senile men as potential leaders, you might be going a bit Soviet."

2: The Core of the Argument

The speakers dive deeper into their arguments, with Ferguson citing deteriorating public health and Goldberg emphasizing the lack of historical and moral parallels. Jonah Goldberg: "Our problems stem from an excess of freedom rather than totalitarian control."

3: Broader Implications

Discussion on the broader implications of their debate for American society and its future, considering both domestic and international challenges. Niall Ferguson: "We need to consider that we might lose Cold War two because of the same inner collapse that robs ordinary Americans of their faith."

4: Concluding Thoughts

Both speakers summarize their positions, reflecting on the potential paths forward for the U.S. amid current challenges. Jonah Goldberg: "Democracies have an enormous capacity for self-correction."

1. Engage in informed debates and discussions to better understand different perspectives on national issues.
2. Advocate for transparency and accountability in leadership to tackle disillusionment with political institutions.
3. Support policies that address public health crises, particularly those related to mental health and substance abuse.
4. Promote educational programs that improve public understanding of American history and its foundational principles.
5. Encourage civic participation to strengthen democratic processes and institutions.

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 rather provocatively called “We’re All Soviets Now.” He argued why he thinks today’s United States resembles the decaying Soviet Union of the ’70s and ’80s. We’re physically unwell, heavily in debt, run by an out-of-touch gerontocracy, and subjected to a bogus ideology pushed by elites.

This was published before the disastrous presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Since then, Niall has only doubled down. He argued in his most recent column that the reason our system only offers up an embarrassing blowhard and a senile old man lies in contemporary America’s similarities to the Soviet Union in the 1980s.

Unsurprisingly, these provocative arguments drove some people crazy. We’d scarcely updated the homepage with that first column before the rebuttals came pouring in. But none were quite as passionate and thorough as the one written by Dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg, who devoted an entire column to pushing back on Ferguson. In “No, We Are Not Living in ‘Late Soviet America,’ ” Goldberg conceded some of the basic facts presented by Ferguson, but aggressively objected to the idea that the United States was in any way similar to late-stage Soviet communism. “Do we have problems that have some superficial similarities with the Soviets? Sure. But. . . come on.” Goldberg continued: “The Soviet Union built a wall to keep its subjects trapped inside their evil empire. Many Americans understandably believe we need a wall to keep millions of people desperate to live here out.” Because 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 this very podcast. . . today.

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 and 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. Because today’s conversation gets to the heart of how the American project is faring, and what we should do to save the country we all love before it’s too late.

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Niall Ferguson, Jonah Goldberg

Companies

The Free Press, The Dispatch

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Michael Moynihan
From the Free press, this is honestly I'm Michael Moynihan. A few weeks ago, fresh off of being knighted by King Charles, historian Sir Neil Ferguson officially joined the Free Press as a columnist. His first piece was rather provocatively called we're all Soviets now. In it, he argued why he thinks today's United States resembles the decaying Soviet Union of the seventies and eighties. We're physically unwell, heavily indebted, run by an out of touch gerontocracy, and subjected to a bogus ideology pushed by elites. And this was published before the disastrous presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Since then, Neil's only doubled down. He argued in his most recent column for the Free Press that the reason our system is only offering up an embarrassing blowhard and a senile old man lies in contemporary America's similarities to the Soviet Union in the 1980s. All of it is vintage Ferguson, a thorough, audacious provocation, and unsurprisingly, it drove some people crazy. Wed scarcely updated the Free press homepage with that first soviet column before the rebuttals came pouring in Soviet America. Nyet. Exclaimed the free market economist James Petakukas. Petakukas, scolded Ferguson. I understand the temptation to be shocking in an opinion crowded media environment, but im not sure this attempt at shock commentary is effective. Another economist, Noah Smith, took issue, too. Ferguson throws in a number of talking points that dont make sense, he said. Dispatch editor in chief Jonah Goldberg devoted an entire column to pushing back on Ferguson in no, we are not living in late Soviet America. Goldberg conceded some of the basic facts presented by Ferguson, but aggressively objected to the idea that the United States was in any way similar to late stage soviet communism. Do we have problems that have some superficial similarities with the Soviets? Sure, but come on, Goldberg continued. The Soviet Union built a wall to keep its subjects trapped inside their evil empire. Many Americans understandably believe we need a wall to keep millions of people desperate to live here out, because 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 which accused Goldberg of, quote, pure cope. And back and forth they went, but were happy to report that they agreed to hash it out in this podcast. The debate we ended up having was much bigger than merely whether the US can be accurately compared to the USSR. It got to the heart of the core disagreement on the right in recent years about the health of american democracy and whether this nation is still exceptional, albeit flawed, or if the country is in a state of inexorable decline. Both Neil and Jonah agree that there are serious issues in american society, from the sorry state of our institutions declining deaths of despair to a pernicious, marxist inflected ideology that has infiltrated elite circles, especially academia. But they disagree on the gravity of the situation, on how far America is strayed from its ideals and whether Fergusons metaphor is helpful or just muddies the waters. Its a fitting conversation to have in the aftermath of July 4. And as pundits and politicians fill airspace and columns with questions about our leaders fitness for the job, presidential transparency, and whether its undemocratic to replace Biden on the ticket. Because todays conversation gets at the heart of how the american project is faring and what we should do to save the country we all love before its too late. We'll be right back.

Josh Hammer
Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the first podcast network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the hill, to this, to that. There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented law fair, debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all that every single day right here on America on trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcast. It's America on trial with Josh Hammer.

Michael Moynihan
Neil Ferguson, Jonah Goldberg, thanks for joining us.

Jonah Goldberg
Happy to be here.

Neil Ferguson
Our pleasure.

Jonah Goldberg
Starting with the royal we already. I like it.

Michael Moynihan
Neil, your first piece for the Free Press. As a columnist, we are all Soviets. Now give us a kind of precis of what you mean by that and the kind of general argument that you're making.

Neil Ferguson
Well, I had a prophetic vision of the first presidential debate of 2024. And part of the inspiration for the piece was that if your system can only produce senile men as potential leaders, you might be going a bit soviet. So that was the starting point. And then another thing struck me, and that was that if you look at public health statistics, the deaths of despair phenomenon that Angus deatons written about, whereby theres been a deterioration in life expectancy in the US and mortality rates are rising for various different parts of the population, Deaton noticed that white, middle aged middle Americans had worsening mortality data. When you look at the most recent statistics, young american men actually have a higher mortality rate than young russian men. So I started asking myself a very serious question, which is, when anywhere has a relatively advanced economy experienced a decline in those indicators, a worsening of life expectancy and an increase in mortality rates. And there really is only one example, because no other advanced economy today has this trend. The United States is a complete outlier. And it hit me. The Soviet Union, the Soviet Union and post Soviet Russia had dramatic deterioration in life expectancy and a big surge, particularly in male mortality rates. And the problem there was people were drinking themselves to death. It was kind of vodka binge, as opposed to, say, fentanyl. But I just was very struck by the fact that thats the only other case I can think of. William and then the final point that kind of clinched it for me was when you ask, why were Russians drinking and smoking themselves to death in the eighties and nineties on such an amazing scale? The answer is they became completely demoralized by what was going on around them, and they became utterly cynical about the system within which they lived. And that was because the nomenclatura who ran the Soviet Union were the purveyors of an ideology. Nobody believed it. And I suddenly thought, you know what? That's kind of familiar, because I think the american equivalent of the nomenclature, the people who run the american establishment, the donorocrats, as I like to call them, they are also now the purveyors of an ideology nobody believes in. And ordinary Americans feel completely alienated. So that when you look at the gallup polling, there's been a collapse of confidence in pretty much every institution over the last 50 years, but especially in the last 20 years. And I connect these things so that I see a system that produces senile leaders, that produces declining quality of life and length of life, and produces an ideology everybody is kind of repelled by. That's why we're the Soviets now. It's sort of, are we the baddies? Are we the Soviets? I think we are to a greater extent than we want to face. A greater extent than Jonah wants to face, certainly.

Michael Moynihan
Jonah, you responded to Neil's piece over at the dispatch, and a very generous response, but a pretty serious disagreement. And you said, look, I agree with the numbers, these deaths, and the kind of hideous nature of american politics in so many ways, but I have one large disagreement. We are not soviet, and we're not becoming soviet. Explain your disagreement with Niels. Peace.

Jonah Goldberg
I guess I have two main objections. One is, if we're just going to use the word Soviet Union or Soviet as a stand in for bad or things going wrong, then fine. I mean, I think there are a lot of better words we could choose, but if we're supposed to take the analogy seriously, as Neil seems to want to, both here and in his piece, I just think it's pretty ahistorical. Look, you can have a lot of diseases have similar symptoms. That doesn't mean the diseases are the same. And the sources of our problems, which I'm happy to concede, the sources of our problems are just very different than the sources of the problems for the Soviet Union. And the phrasing are we the baddies? Feels very new left 1960s moral equivalent argument. To me, the idea that somehow we're bad because we have these problems misses the moral component entirely, which is to say that the Soviet Union was an evil empire. We are not. Our problems come from, in many respects, an excess of freedom rather than a totalitarian control of freedom. And the historical roots of how we got to where we are versus how the Soviet Union got to where it was in the late eighties are just night and day different. I don't think there's a historical equivalence, and I certainly don't think that there's a moral equivalence. And I will say, just as a point of personal privilege, because this came up, Neil just did it again, and he did it in his Twitter response. I mean, he sort of wants to have it both ways. He wants to offer a very provocative thesis, but then he says he's not doing it just to be provocative, that he actually means it. It's sort of a trumpy kind of take him literally and seriously. I can do one or the other, but they require different responses. But the idea that I am the target audience that needs to be woken up out of my cope, as he put it, the idea that I've been complacent about the actual problems that Neil is delineating, I just don't think there's any evidence for that. I wrote a book called suicide of the west, where I talked about many of the problems that the United States has. I've been complaining about debt and deficits for a very long time. And my problem, I guess my third problem with this is, 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. I thought the flight 93 essay was hot Garbage and did serious damage to political discourse and intellectual discourse in this country. And when you tell people that the sky is falling, Neil does not do this. I want to be clear. Neil is not saying that we're one election away from oblivion or anything like that, but the people who want to make those arguments look to things like this and say, see the whole system is corrupt. The post liberals on the left and on the right want to say that the american experiment, the american project, is inherently corrupt, that is, inherently flawed. Some on the intellectual right want to argue that it was wrong from the beginning. Start with the enlightenment or the american founding. That's the sort of Patrick Deneen Adrian Vermeule crowd and arguments that say we are the baddies because we've got these problems, takes the intentionality out of things, and I think misstates the source of the problems and gives permission structure to a set of solutions that would make everything worse.

Michael Moynihan
Neil, there's a lot to respond to there. I want to start with the kind of top level thing Jonah points out that, look, there are real problems here, and he wrote a book sort of delineating those problems, but we're very different from the Soviet Union. I mean, you can't possibly be serious. I mean, he says in his response, sure, there's some overlap, but come on, that's what Jonah actually says response. And it reminds me in some ways of the way people talk about Donald Trump and they say this is, we're trundling towards fascism. But, you know, I look at it and I say, good God, in the 1930s, late thirties, you had pitch street battles, people being killed by the SA and by the KPD's street battle. It's different. It's very, very different. Would you concede that point that, you know, we are very different from the Soviet Union and we're maybe suffering from, you know, an excess of freedom rather than an excess of government control?

Neil Ferguson
Well, 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's quite clear. I think what's missing in this discussion is that one can compare social and cultural pathologies while acknowledging that institutional differences are real. In the Soviet Union, they had one party. In the United States. The political system is a duopoly with two parties. But what I'm trying to get you to see, Jonah, is that if you allow for the fact that there are these structural differences, the outcomes for ordinary people, whether they're in Leningrad or San Francisco, are remarkably similar. Where you get this curious combination of a crisis of public health and a crisis of public morale. What I'm trying to get you to see is that it can't be just coincidence that these are the only two cases. If you could tell me about another advanced society where I living standards declined, where mortality rates rose, where 100,000 people a year die of overdoses, which is the United states today. There is no other society like that. What's going on here? That I can only think of one other example, and that's the Soviet Union. The answer is you're trapped in a kind of political, institutional determinism. But if you're dying of an overdose, it doesn't matter if it's vodka or fentanyl, you're dead. You died young. You're a young man, and you drank or drugged yourself to death. Why did you do that? One's living in the workers paradise, and one is living in the land of the free. The answer is that it's neither the workers paradise, nor is the United States the land of the free. The truth is there's a disillusionment, a profound disillusionment amongst ordinary people in both cases, and a sense that they've been sold a bill of goods, that it's all a sham. You see, although you don't feel constrained, you feel free. And you think, I'm in a much better position than my counterparts in the Soviet Union. The ordinary people suffering premature death from overdoses are in a remarkably similar predicament, where they think this system is completely a shamde. And I mean, it's simply not worth my living. So we've got to be able to say, it doesn't necessarily matter whether one system claims to be the land of the free and the others, the workers and peasants state. If both are organized hypocrisies in which an elite gets to go to its dashers stroke Hamptons villas, while everybody else is suffering serious declines in their length and quality of life. That's important. And we ought to be able to compare social and cultural crises and consider the possibility that they might arise in radically different systems that have one thing in common, the utter alienation of a large part of the population from the proclaimed purpose of the system. My ulterior motive in making this argument is to help Americans adjust to the reality of cold War two. And the problem we have here is that it's been very difficult to get Americans to realize that they're in Cold War two. I said this for the first time six years ago, and there are still quite high levels of denial going on. Things have improved, but it is still the official line of the Biden administration that we're not in a cold war. And the thing that's really important about this argument is that as 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 two because of the same inner collapse that robs ordinary Americans of the faith that they generally had in Cold War one.

Michael Moynihan
Jonah, I don't think there was many people who thought that the Soviet Union was a workers paradise, but most people tend to say, well, you know, it's imperfect, but this is the land of the free. Neil says, no, I mean, what do you make of that one line, that we are actually not the land of the free, and people have to understand that.

Jonah Goldberg
I just generally reject it. Soup to nuts. Free speech in this country has never been more free than it is today. There is a tendency, maybe it's in western culture generally, but definitely in America, to freak out about some of the things we have the least reason to freak out about. And I think free speech is one of those. This Supreme Court is the most pro free speech supreme court in american history. And look, are there encroachments to freedom from the regulatory state, from the administrative state, from all sorts of areas? Is Dei Gross and stupid? Sure. It's just not comparable to organized Bolshevism of the Soviet Union. I mean, this debate would not be allowed in the Soviet Union. I mean, that tells you something. And so the distance between the Soviet Union and a worker's paradise, between the reality and the ideal, and the distance between the United States today and the ideal enshrined in the concept of the land of the free, is not the same distance. We're short of our ideals. We're always going to be short of our ideals because that's why we call them ideals. There are things to strive for. There are the North Star. You can go towards them, you can get closer, but you're never going to reach them. But our proximity to our ideals, when it comes to things like personal liberty and freedom, is very close compared to the distance between the workers paradise ideal and the reality of it in the Soviet Union. But Neil kind of gives away the point here in a little bit, he conceded these are radically different systems. That's part of my point. And if you're going to talk about radically different systems, leaning so heavily into the analogy of us being like the Soviet Union, I think is going to confuse more than it's going to illuminate. I think deaths of despair are a real problem. I don't know if there have been other societies that had sudden drop offs of life expectancy of the sort we've seen recently. I do know that, like, say, well.

Neil Ferguson
I'm telling you that there's only one.

Jonah Goldberg
Okay, I'll take your word. I'll stipulate it. But I mean, I do know things like, you know, the ancient Rome and.

Neil Ferguson
I think that's quite a big deal. No, no, I said a relatively advanced.

Jonah Goldberg
I think it's a big deal. I just don't think it's proof that we're.

Neil Ferguson
So what are you telling me is happening here?

Jonah Goldberg
I agree.

Neil Ferguson
100,000 Americans die every year. That's just the overdoses. The mortality statistics for young american males are worse than for their russian counterparts. This is the land of the free. This is all going really well. Please, what's going on? If it's not a crisis of morale?

Jonah Goldberg
Again, I have not said everything's going really well, and I've conceded that the deaths of despair thing is a very significant thing to be concerned about. I am not here to defend the status quo, despite the strawman kind of Persona you want to impose upon me.

Neil Ferguson
But what's your explanation?

Jonah Goldberg
Part of the explanation is that fentanyl is a very different thing than soviet vodka. That fentanyl is in many ways a new and unprecedented threat, insofar as for the longest time, I couldn't figure out why fentanyl dealers didn't care about killing their own customers. And it turns out that it's a way to market your drug, because you tell the street that you have a fentanyl that can kill someone, it shows that it's pure and it's the good stuff. That was not the branding for tainted vodka. The shockingly inexpensive nature of the manufacture 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. You can do this in a basement, in some rundown business in Tijuana and get enough that you don't care if half your shipments are intercepted because it's so cheap to make. My point is that when you actually get close to the ground and look at the nature of these problems, they don't, for me, say, aha. This means we're like the Soviet Union. It means like, no, this is a real problem and we should deal with it. But contending that this somehow makes us like the Soviet Union as a moral matter or as a historical matter, I just think is a level of abstraction and literary flourish that I don't think can be sustained by the sort of explanations and also the solutions that are required to deal with the facts on the ground.

Michael Moynihan
We'll be right back with more. Neil Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg. Jonah, if you remove the soviet comparison, do you kind of generally agree with Neil's premise that we're in a unique time? I mean, this being, you know, I will also take his word for it. I can't think of any other example of declining mortality rates and 100,000 people dying every year of drug overdoses. I mean, this is a sort of uniquely horrible time in american history, isn't it?

Jonah Goldberg
Well, it depends what you mean by uniquely. There are a lot of really bad things going on. There were a lot of really bad things going on in the sixties and seventies. There were some really bad things going on in the 1860s in the United States. In a one way, I think, 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. I mean, I grew up in the neighborhood where death wish was filmed, right? I mean, like, crime is nowhere near the problem it was in my lifetime. And so there are always going to be things about contemporary society in a free society, and we are a free society, that one could point to and say it's all going to shit. So that doesn't mean that at any given point is a time for despair. I'm with Ronald Reagan on this. Every generation has got to fight to maintain freedom because we're not born with it in our blood. It's a generational torch that you pass on from one generation to another. But there is so much catastrophism and so much doom scrolling in the culture that wants to say that things have never been worse. And you can pick the data sets, like in this case, life expectancy, and say, see, things have never been worse. But there's a lot of economics in Neil's essay in which he now doesn't say his essay is primarily about economics, because I think in part, there's so many reasons to say that we are not economically like the Soviet Union. And just one last point. I am not the Davos guy here. I am not the Hamptons guy here. I don't live in some cocoon. But the idea that somehow they're just Morlocks and Eloys in this culture, and it's the people who are parasitically living off the wealth of this country in the nomenclature and then everyone else is dying from deaths of despair is just not true. In his piece, he concedes that a lot of this stuff is concentrated in certain areas, in certain demographics, and that means it's a discrete but very serious problem. It is not. I don't believe the case that once you get outside the DC New York sell a corridor, that it's mad Max territory out there. I just don't think there's data to prove that. I don't think there's data to prove that our standard of living is anything that conjures anything like comparison to the Soviet Union on the cold war. Two thing, I agree very much that we are entering a cold war, and I think Neil deserves credit for being one of the first to point it out. I dont think its necessarily a replay of the last cold war. Im not saying that he does. Its obviously its got differences and similarities because cold wars are going to have differences and similarities. But theres a lot of cosplay on the american right that just wants to say were just doing the whole thing over again, but were going to cast the Soviets as the Chinese. And I think that is going to misidentify the threats from China and it's going to misidentify the resources that the United States has.

Michael Moynihan
I'm recording this from the Hamptons. So I am very angry about these disparaging comments about where I am geographically right now. Neil, a lot to respond to in there.

Neil Ferguson
Well, I think what's amazing to me is the difficulty of persuading Jonah that you really need to take life expectancy and mortality rates seriously. You see the argument? Oh, well, things were really bad when I was growing up in New York would be compelling if there were any evidence in the aggregate national data that things were getting worse, but they weren't. Throughout american history until very recently, life expectancy just kept going up like it did everywhere else in the developed world. But what's amazing is that 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, so much so that it shows up in aggregate national data now. Nobody's dying prematurely in the Hamptons. In fact, for most Americans, this isn't palpable. But if you're in the bottom quintile of the income distribution, Jonah, 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 US, 41. Infant mortality for the bottom quintile particularly with single parents, is almost emerging market, developing country level, almost soviet level, actually. And so we have to stop pretending, oh, it's been bad in the past. No. American life expectancy, mortality rates all trended better for most of american history until recently. And what I struggle to convey to people is that if something is so bad that it shows up in the aggregate data and it's not happening anywhere else, and the only other example that you can find is the Soviet Union in the 1980s and Russia in the 1990s, there's something important here that we cannot sit by saying, oh, you're doom scrolling. No, people are dying way, way too young in America. That isn't doom scrolling. Angus Deaton wasn't doom scrolling. He was looking at the data. And the data are truly appalling. And only the Soviet Union has matched this in all of modernity. So I don't think you're taking this seriously enough, Jonah. You're not. You're not recognizing that it's an absolutely outrageous state of affairs, that the quality of life for the people in the bottom quintile of the distribution is so bad that it now resembles late Soviet Russia.

Jonah Goldberg
I understand, as sort of an Oxbridge debater type. I understand kind of what you're doing here. The idea that somehow I am first of all rejecting the importance of this problem when I keep saying I think it's a real problem is kind of weird. But I happy to stipulate this is a huge and important and legitimate problem that deserves our attention. Your essay wasn't 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 soviet justice system. Your essay was about a whole bunch of things. And as I pointed out in my response, I think you make a lot of good points, but you treat this thing like it's a Christmas tree and you hang a lot less persuasive points on it as well, side by side, and think people won't notice the difference. So I'm perfectly happy to say, again, as a matter of symptoms, we have a similarity with the Soviet Union in terms of deaths of despair. The causes of these things are just, 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 make the comparisons between us and them, I think, fairly spurious and look, I mean, again, if you're going to just say that things going bad makes us like the Soviets, well, look, the british empire failed and declined. That doesn't mean it was like the Soviet Union. The persian empire failed and declined. It doesn'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, intellectual concepts. I mean, go back to Werner Sombart. Why is there no socialism in America? Because we don't have a feudal past. I mean, american exceptionalism is a deep and rich subject, and I think it still applies to metaphorical comparisons to the Soviet Union. Even if I'm willing to concede all this stuff about the deaths of despair.

Neil Ferguson
The thing that strikes me in this conversation is that we're talking not about the time of Werner Sombarthe, but the time that we live in now. And when you try to explain the deaths of despair, the best you could come up with was that fentanyl was really cheap, vodka was really cheap in the Soviet Union. Thats not why there were deaths of despair in 1980s and 1990s Russia. And youve 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, youre right. The essay then said, what else do we have in common with the Soviet Union? And I went through a list. We have a fiscal problem, which is the equivalent of the soft budget constraint that characterized the way the soviet economy worked. And I think we have a problem in that theres a disconnect between the elite and the masses. And heres where I think you've missed something, because you haven't been involved in the academic world the way I have. You say there can never be socialism in America. Well, that might have been true once, but if you were to spend some time on the campus of a major university, you'd encounter something that wasn't quite socialism, but the identity politics and neoliberalism that now flourishes in all elite institutions in the name, the Orwellian name of diversity, equity and inclusion is an ideology that certainly has nothing whatsoever to do with your american ideals. In fact, 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. So I think one of the things that you miss in the essay, which is actually terribly important, is that the elites no longer believe a word you're saying about the american founding, the distinctiveness of the United States, they don't believe any of that. And that's part of my argument. The nomenclatura, 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. Those people are the nomenclatural. They are the elite, and 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's 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. So 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 itll all be fine, but its not doom scrolling or catastrophizing to say, no, theres a moral crisis. Theres a crisis of public morale and of public health, and the United States could conceivably lose cold war two. I certainly would hate to see how us society would cope with a hot war with China these days. How do you think wed, do you think wed winter?

Jonah Goldberg
I don't think we'd lose in the long run. In the short run, I think I'm more concerned about not having a sufficient deterrence to prevent the conflict in the first place.

Neil Ferguson
This country couldn't beat the Taliban. And you think we'll win against the pla.

Jonah Goldberg
I get it. Look, we can get to China. China's got a lot of problems too.

Neil Ferguson
But it's not a good look.

Jonah Goldberg
Yeah, look, again, I have no problem. Also, the idea that somehow I am wallowing in my crapulence of denial about the problems with the american left wing elite is just crazy talk. If you could go back and read what I've written for the last 25 years about all of this stuff, it's.

Neil Ferguson
Just, I do read it. I do read it. And I read your suicide of the west.

Jonah Goldberg
You know how many veins of ink I have emptied out criticizing people like Ibram, Kendi and the campus nonsense and all of that kind of thing? It doesn't.

Neil Ferguson
Don't you think they have anything to do with the Bolsheviks?

Jonah Goldberg
I think the perniciousness and the influence of marxist nonsense is profound. And serious. And I've been writing about it for.

Neil Ferguson
A very long time, but, oh, we're guessing somewhere. I think one of the things. The Marxism is in the system. The Marxism is in the system. System. Yeah, I think it is.

Jonah Goldberg
Yeah. It doesn't run the system. It doesn't. The state is not controlled by a really? Really? Yeah, really. You think the equivalent of the Bolsheviks run the entire system, right.

Neil Ferguson
I think the equivalent of the Bolsheviks control most of the key institutions in the country to an extent. That's quite alarming.

Jonah Goldberg
I think there's a new class that controls a vast amount of the commanding heights of the culture, and I've written that a gazillion times. Let me just back up for a second. The malaise stuff that you're talking about, again, is real. Part, one of the things that's generating death is a disparity. You poo poo. My point about fentanyl, Salome brought it out. Fentanyl is a new technology. Technology changes culture in ways that ideas don't in a very sudden and serious way. A lot of the problems that we have in this country come from things like an epidemic of loneliness. And that is a result of new technologies that have come online in the last 20 years. You know, Jonathan Hyde argument, which, you know, cite in your piece, those are very serious. They're very worrisome. There's also self correction that's going on as we speak. Schools, the La school district is just announced. They're going to ban phones in schools on college campuses. The nomenclature that we're talking about here is pernicious and sinister. And I think that it would be wonderful if they were all purged. We are also seeing a natural correcting response from a lot of institutions in this country. The stuff that Robert George and his imitators across this country have been doing, the stuff that Ben Sasse is doing at the University of Florida. My point is that if you think there's a pie eyed optimism unreflected in what I've written and said for the last 25 years, by the way, in my response to you, I would say there's a certain amount of fatalism and bleakness and determinism in your position. You're not willing to countenance the fact that a lot of the bad things which we agree on are bad are being pushed back. Ibram Kendi is now a joke, even according to the New York Times. These days, schools are banning these mandatory Dei statements. Schools have reinstated the SAT just in the last few years. Are we back to a healthy, wonderful, elite campus culture? Absolutely not. We're reaping the fruit of a long march to the institutions by the kind of people that you and I both deplore. But this idea that somehow I'm blase about all of these things, and the proof of my blaseyness is that I reject your framing of this as to say we're replaying the mistakes of the Soviet Union. I just find wholly unpersuasive.

Michael Moynihan
Neil, on that point, about the DEI stuff and the institutions, particularly the universities, where places that you inhabit. Are we on the other side of that, as Jonah suggests? I mean, the great awokening, I think really that wave sort of crested in about 2020, but you see a lot of pushback on it now. I mean, are we going on that? I mean, not in the fentanyl desk, but on that particular question, are we trending in a more positive direction now?

Neil Ferguson
I'd love to believe it. I've been told over and over again that there's a wonderful pendulum that's going to swing back, at least to the center. I've, of course, made my own efforts and moving it by creating a new university in Austin, where we've created a constitution that enshrines academic freedom and meritocracy. But you got to remember that the university landscape is still dominated by the Ivy League, by the colleges, and they change the presidents, but they don't really change much else. I haven't read about any diversity, equity and inclusion officers being fired from Yale, where they outnumber, or the bureaucrats outnumber the undergraduates. So I think 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 the elite universities, which, of course were where all the craziest protests in support of Hamas took place, but in the foundations, in the technology companies, in the publishing industry, and, of course, in Washington DC, in the federal bureaucracy. I'm much more concerned about that institutional capture because I think it's so hard to undo. And indeed, what's striking to me is that Jonah conceded a moment ago the illiberal ideology, the derivatives of Marxism, at least they really are a part of this story. I think if you try to come back to my original question, why is there this crisis of morale? Leave aside the public health question. Why do Americans have no faith in their own institutions, like public confidence in Congress? The elected representatives of the people is like single digits, 8% last time I looked. It's really quite remarkable that in a democracy, the elected representatives of the people in the federal government are rated about where the soviet population would have rated their counterparts in the soviet system. I struggled to find another way of capturing what's wrong, because I don't think it's that easy to fix. I really, really disagree, Jonah, that we're winning this fight. What's happening is that Harvard and Yale and Princeton and Stanford are pretending to change their ways, and they're pretending to get rid of discrimination in admissions, racial discrimination in admissions. They're pretending. They're faking it because they, people who run those institutions are deeply committed to an ideology that is as foreign to you and me as the ideology of Brezhnev, Andropov and Chernenko was back when we were young students. Maybe we just agree and we're just coming at it with different terminology, but for me, the problem I have with your counterargument is I'm not sure that I'm left with a plausible explanation of the problems that I see.

Jonah Goldberg
Okay, well, I'll try to offer one. I'm a Joseph Schumpeter guy, and he basically has this prediction in capitalism, socialism and democracy, essentially, that socialism is kind of inevitable because of the problem of wealth, not the problem of poverty, which is that the children or grandchildren of the big industrialists, they end up taking a sledgehammer to the very soapboxes that they stand on. They end up part of the adversarial class. So you end up getting these sort of asshole, trustafarian, socialist grandkids, and you can see that kind of thing all over the place, these radicals who end up biting the hand that feels them and disliking their own country because they are saturated in these academic environments that we both deplore with these adversarial, anti american ideologies. It wasn't the coal workers and the car plant factory workers who were picking up the paving stones in 1968 and hurling them through windows. It was the petite bourgeois, it was the college students. It was the chief beneficiaries of western wealth. And that's a real problem of figuring out a way to sort of curtail that sort of nietzschean resentment from manifesting itself in our culture. And we see it all over the place. The impulse to shock the bourgeoisie, I think, informs an enormous amount of the asinine ideological culture of elite institutions. These people won the march through the institutions, but they don't actually want to run the institutions. They want to stay transgressive rebels. And so they're constantly undermining the narrative of the american experience and the american project. That's the Howard Zinn project to a t, is to say that all the good stuff in America is either invisible or was really actually bad. But I will say I did not, as you suggested, declare victory. I said that basically there are signs of improvement. I think that whether we've actually passed peak woke or not remains to be seen. But my point would be that democracies have an enormous capacity for self correction. Your guy, Adam Smith, he said, there's a lot of ruin in a nation. A lot of things are always going bad, and America has this amazing capacity to deal with them. What I think is pernicious is the idea to say, oh, we're on this inexorable teleological descent of decline. Like the american empire. People said that in the 1970s we got a lot richer and stronger since the 1970s. We have the capacity to fix our problems, but it does take identifying our problems accurately. And just lastly, as bad as the DEI stuff and intersectionality stuff and all of that is, and I truly believe it's bad, it does not have the power to ruin people's lives the way the single party state apparatus of the communist party did. And so I think America has an enormous number of problems, but they are american problems, and they manifest themselves differently on left and right. I always rejected horseshoe theory for most of my life. I now believe it because I think the forces of illiberalism are very strong on the left, and now big chunks of the right have joined in on it. That's a big problem. It's not a soviet problem.

Neil Ferguson
As I said, in one system, one party, in the other, two parties. But in both cases, you're given choices between senile candidates for general secretary or president. The debate last week felt like the clinching exhibit in my case. It's a different system, but somehow the net result is the same. And we don't actually have a candidate who's offering solutions to the problems that we agree are profound. That's what I find most disconcerting. And there's just no sign of a serious political debate about the public finances, about public health. The political class is so completely irresponsible and indifferent to the fate of american people that they don't even attempt an inquiry into how pathetically badly they handled the COVID pandemic. At least their british counterparts attempted some kind of inquiry into why it was a fiasco. But the United States, which achieved the disruption of lockdowns without any discernible benefit in terms of excess mortality has simply walked away from any serious inquest into what went wrong. I said in the piece, when you look at Covid, think Chernobyl. And there were Chernobyl like features of the way that the United States handled the pandemic, in particular, the reluctance of the responsible officials ever to admit any responsibility for any of the things that went wrong. So, yes, I'm more pessimistic than you, Jonah, and that may just be a temperamental feature. I grew up in Scotland, which was where we pioneered hillbilly elegy. It's kind of like we did the pilot before JD Vance was even born. We decided, I don't know, let's just de industrialize and see what happens. And I saw deaths of despair in Glasgow in the 1970s, before I knew that that was what they were. And I saw the demoralization of the society in the west of Scotland in the seventies and eighties. And so when I went to Russia, I remember thinking, this does seem familiar. On the other hand, the piles of bodies seem larger here. And so when I went back and I kind of looked, I thought, well, is Scotland really the same story? And it's just. Doesn't come close. I mean, we just can't compete with Americans now when it comes to suicide. Now, we had a little digression earlier about fentanyl, but it's worth saying that fentanyl is only part of what's driving deaths of despair. When you break down the statistics, you've got about half a million suicides which aren't fentanyl related. You've got a ton of people who just shoot themselves. And of course, there's a massive alcoholism problem in the United States that's spread from males to females in recent years. So none of that is novel. I mean, let's not pretend deaths of despair are because fentanyl is new and cheap. Most of what's causing deaths of despair is actually just traditional ways of shortening your life. And I'm still struggling to understand why, in a country that has, to the eyes of the rest of the world, the most successful economy, we're supposed to be kind of amazed by the vitality of the US economy. Why are so many people killing themselves? I don't have a good answer to that question, except that there's some crisis of morale driving it. So here's the thing that maybe is wrong with podcasts like this one. We're finding ways to disagree when we actually agree about most things. If all we're disagreeing about is how we characterize the pathologies, how we characterize the Malaysian. And I'm just saying I can't think of anything like this except the Soviet Union. You're like, well, we're just not like the Soviet Union. That may be it, that may be all this boils down to. But what I'm struggling to hear from you is some better explanation of what's going wrong in the United States than that we are the Soviets now. And I want to frighten people, Jonah, because we are quite capable of losing cold war two in quite a short timeframe. That's what really drives me crazy, the sense that we do have agency, but we've just decided to park it and hope that the pendulum does the swinging for us. I think we've got a massive crisis very imminently, geopolitically, technologically. We haven't talked about that much, but just socially and culturally. And the way I'm approaching this problem is to use we are the Soviets to try and jolt people into realising just how bad it is while we still have time to self correct.

Michael Moynihan
Let me just finish on this. I think diagnosing the problem is pretty easy. But you said in your essay a line that really jumped out at me, and you wrote, little did anyone suspect that we would end up being as degenerate as the Soviets. This would be a rather large problem if America is suffering from a degeneracy problem. I mean, how does one address that? The war on drugs obviously was a pretty big failure, in my estimation, and go back to LBJ and the great society throwing money at problems hasn't really corrected it. And as Jonah points out, technology has changed things in a significant way. People are living on their phones. It's a different universe. How does one go forward here if the problem with the United States is one of a culture and a society that's become, in your words, degenerate?

Neil Ferguson
Yeah, that was the word I used when I wrote the great degeneration. I think it captures very well the kind of things we began by talking about severe declines in life expectancy, quality of life, public health, and the crisis of morale. This belief that the institutions are rotten. Jonah, I have a better solution, an easier solution for you. Just move to Switzerland. Because Switzerland is the only advanced democracy that has maintained decentralization, that has not succumbed to the french disease, that all power ends up in the capital. As Tocqueville described it. Turning the United States into Switzerland is an admirable project, but it's almost certain to fail, and it's certain to fail because of the problem. That all republics, nearly all republics run into eventually. And that problem is the one that Jonah brilliantly characterized, where the populists of the left and the populists of the right agree that the rule of law and the constitution and free trade are all actually a sham. And it would be much easier to have a king, really. On reflection, whats interesting about what happens after the soviet collapse is that theres this Weimar period in the 1990s. I remember it vividly, and then Putin appears. I wrote an essay in 2024 years ago with the title Weimar on the Volga, in which I and Brigitte Granville said, after Weimar, nothing is more predictable than the advent of a fascist regime. That's what's happened in Russia. And our great nightmare in the United States is that we end up in some version of that classic republican crisis. The classic thing that claimed every republic in history up until the foundation of the United States was that at some point there's an alliance between the demagogues, the plebs against the elites and the constitution. That's a much more common outcome than the unique example of Switzerland, which has retained the decentralization or subsidiarity principle in its governance. There's no other example but Switzerland. So I fear that we're closer to the Soviet Union than we are to Switzerland. That's the trouble with Jonah's vision. It would be wonderful if we could turn the United States into Switzerland, but we're not going to.

Jonah Goldberg
I mean, among the reasons why I think the soviet framing distorts more than it reveals is that the Soviet Union was never a republic. It never had a republican tradition, even never really had a lasting liberal tradition or democratic tradition that endured for maybe a year, two years, when we can talk about the erosion of american institutions, and that's a real problem, loss in faith and trust in institutions, loss in 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. The Soviet Union did not have institutions to decay. The Soviet Union had purged the society entirely of islands of separateness that had all been cleansed away. And so again, as a matter of historical analysis, to say that America is becoming like the Soviet Union when we didn't start out like the Soviet Union and Soviet Union didn't start out like us, I don't know if that's particularly helpful, I think.

Neil Ferguson
Well, from a monarchist perspective, Jonah, both of these revolutionary republics began with the same act of overthrowing monarchical government. And it's just that one republic went down one path using the Enlightenment 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. But it was a union of soviet socialist republics. They were republics.

Jonah Goldberg
No, they had the name republic in them. They weren't republics. North Korea is not a democratic republic just because it uses the name. Russia did not have any tradition of civil society of the likes that western Europe had. And the flowing of tsarism to bolshevism makes a lot of sense from the long sweep of history. I would argue you pooh poohed my point in my response on Twitter, but I stand by it 100%. That the way to understand why the soviet thing, I think just doesn't work is that if the Soviet Union in the 1980s went back to basics and redoubled on its founding principles, it would have died quicker. If the United States went back to its founding principles and restored them, it would fix a lot of the problems that we have. Those are just very different things. And it gets to the point that, look, do we have real problems? Yeah. Do they need addressing? Absolutely. But this is a good and decent country with immense resources that the Soviet Union never had. Immense resources that the Soviet Union never had. We can draw on the moral capital and the decency of the american character in ways and the benefits of a free market system for all of its limitations that are being imposed on it by statists in ways to respond to our problems that the Soviet Union could not. I share with you the desire to arouse, the desire in the american people to start that project. I don't know. Saying we are doomed to fail the way the Soviet Union did is the way to do it.

Neil Ferguson
I'm the last person to be accused of determinism. I wrote a book called doomed to make fun of determinism. I think that this is a debate not about origins. This is a debate about destinations. And the problem is that the destination seems to me much less likely to be Switzerland or some version of Tocqueville's America that you're imagining a kind of rebirth of the republic, then it seems to me to be a quintessential late soviet, late republic crisis in which the constitutional and liberal order simply doesn't hold. But it's not too late. And you and I, Jonah, we're going to make common cause from now on to fight for those principles that we both believe in. We have different rhetorical approaches, but we have the same shared vision of an America restored to founding principles in which individual liberty is at the core of the enterprise. So we don't disagree about that objective.

Jonah Goldberg
We're in violent agreement about that.

Neil Ferguson
We're in violent agreement about that. And I'm just a wee bit more pessimistic about our chances of success.

Michael Moynihan
Neil Ferguson, newly minted columnist over at the Free Press, read, we are all Soviets now@thefp.com. comma. In a number of columns to come, which will surely irritate Jonah Goldberg at the dispatch.

Neil Ferguson
Probably not once was enough.

Michael Moynihan
Yeah. And listen to Jonah at the remnant of podcast that I love. Thank you both for joining us.

Neil Ferguson
Thank you.

Jonah Goldberg
Thank you.

Michael Moynihan
Thanks for listening. If you liked this conversation, please share this episode with your friends and family. And if you want to support the work we do here, go to thefp.com and become a subscriber today. See you next time.