⭐ Soviet Amerika? Nyet!

My gods, the US is nothing like the old Soviet Union. Do better, conservative public intellectuals!

The Down Wing populists of the Left and Right share a hyperbolic gloom about America. The former folks were quick to call America a “failed state” during the pandemic — well, at least until Operation Warp Speed churned out and deployed powerful vaccines in record time — and continue to claim the US economy is suffering from “late-stage capitalism” where the rich continue to get richer (from exploiting our precious personal data) and everyone else poorer. (Not true.)

As for the latter on the right, conservative historian Niall Ferguson provides a handy summary of its doomer view in a new essay, “We’re All Soviets Now." Ferguson (playing the cheeky provocateur to shock us into action, I think, with an extreme analogy) draws parallels between the current state of the United States and the late Soviet Union. In the ongoing Cold War 2.0 with China, he suggests the US might end up resembling the Soviet Union more than we might imagine:

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. But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?” I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day—perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?

The crux of Ferguson’s thesis: Like Soviet Russia, the US …

… faces significant economic challenges, including chronic budget deficits. Government meddling in the private sector is increasing, while productivity growth remains stagnant for two decades. And we don’t seem to be getting enough bang for our Pentagon bucks.

… exhibits concerning political and social erosion, such as gerontocratic leadership exemplified by Joe Biden (81) and Donald Trump (78). (Mikhail Gorbachev was in his mid- 50s when he became Soviet leader, by the way.) Public confidence in major institutions has plummeted. The country is also grappling with a mental health crisis, "deaths of despair," and declining life expectancy. All that, despite massive healthcare spending

… suffers from a growing ideological disconnect between the elite "nomenklatura" and the general population. Policies like Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives benefit a new class of bureaucrats rather than helping marginalized groups. Polling shows stark differences in attitudes between Ivy League graduates and the general public on issues like climate change, education, and individual freedom.

… grapples with foreign policy dysfunction, including potential strategic incoherence in areas like climate change and proxy wars.  US policy encourages other countries to fight its adversaries without providing sufficient support, potentially leading to outcomes similar to past failures in Vietnam and Afghanistan.

I understand the temptation to be shocking in an opinion-crowded media environment. But I’m not sure this attempt at shock commentary is effective, given the absence of so many and obvious inconvenient facts. I’m not going to attempt a point-by-point analysis, but Ferguson leaves out a lot of things whose absence makes the essay seem, at best, incomplete — if not profoundly weird. Among them: