Niall Ferguson — historian, biographer, venture capitalist, educator and whirlwind producer of smart commentary — has moved his column from Bloomberg.com to The Free Press. His inaugural column explored the pathologies of what he called ‘Soviet America’.
Excerpt:
The question that haunts me is: What if China has learned the lessons of Cold War I better than we have? I fear that Xi Jinping has not only understood that, at all costs, he must avoid the fate of his Soviet counterparts. He has also, more profoundly, understood that we can be maneuvered into being the Soviets ourselves. And what better way to achieve that than to “quarantine” an island not too far from his coastline and then defy us to send a naval expedition to run the blockade, with the obvious risk of starting World War III? The worst thing about the approaching Taiwan Semiconductor Crisis is that, compared with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the roles will be reversed. Biden or Trump gets to be Khrushchev; XJP gets to be JFK. (Just watch him prepping the narrative, telling European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that Washington is trying to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan.)
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.
I still cling to the hope that we can avoid losing Cold War II—that the economic, demographic, and social pathologies that afflict all one-party communist regimes will ultimately doom Xi’s “China Dream.” But the higher the toll rises of deaths of despair—and the wider the gap grows between America’s nomenklatura and everyone else—the less confident I feel that our own homegrown pathologies will be slower-acting.
Are we the Soviets? Look around you.
(Italics mine. You can read the rest here. No paywall.)
Everyone agrees that President Biden’s performance at the first presidential debate of the 2024 general election campaign was a disaster. It was so bad that the Trump campaign’s post-debate advertisement is comprised of Biden sound-bites from the debate. Trump doesn’t say a word in the ad because he doesn’t have to. Biden makes the case for his own defeat.
After the debate, Biden allies in the press and the political community went into full melt-down mode (“Defcon 1” said one Obama-era political operative) with numerous columnists and old friends insisting that Biden end his re-election bid to make way for “the next generation”.
The Biden campaign’s response was defiant. The debate was just a “bad night.” They remained resolute and committed to the task at hand. Biden, they said, was the only Democrat capable of defeating Trump. Casting him aside would invite chaos and, consequently, a Trump victory.
Within 24 hours, former presidents Obama and Clinton and former Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton endorsed the Biden campaign’s rationale and without saying it, asked Democrats everywhere to recite The Serenity Prayer.
God grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change,
Courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference.
In the vernacular: We’re stuck with him. Get over it. Get to work.
The problem with the debate wasn’t, or wasn’t just, the president’s dismal performance. The larger problem was its context. To wit:
If you read American public opinion surveys, as we do throughout the week, one thing that jumps off the page is the electorate’s widely shared belief that the United States is in decline. To borrow Mr. Ferguson’s phrase, the public believes we are becoming ‘Soviet America’; a nation that doesn’t work, can’t get it done, is going broke, is no longer respected, is unrecognizable as ‘our America’, couldn’t care less about people who have no money, whose trusted institutions are no longer trustworthy, on and on (and on).
A president in undeniable decline seeking re-election from an electorate unnerved by America’s evident decline is a formula for defeat. It’s not that Biden had a bad night. It’s that Biden is a metaphor for what’s wrong. That was what made the debate so devastating. It added to the electorate’s concerns about a declining America,
It’s by no means certain that the public’s dis-ease with what (grandiosely) might be called The American Condition necessarily leads to the president’s defeat this fall. Trump can defeat himself and often seems hell-bent on doing so.
What bolsters his chances, however, is the perception that he understands the urgency of The American Condition and is willing to do anything to disrupt it. He says, out loud: Make America Great Again. The subtext is: Make America Mine Again. That’s a much more powerful message than anything the Biden camp is offering.
Yes, Trump might be ‘crazy’, but ‘not crazy’ has become the road to perdition. So why not go with crazy? How much worse can it be? Can it be worse than Biden, who declared in the debate that he “beat Medicare”? Can it be worse than the people who work for Biden, who knew how bad his mental condition was but lied about it anyway?
Just because something isn’t fair doesn’t mean it isn’t true. It’s probably not fair to say that Biden is a metaphor for America’s decline. But it's true, because it's perceived to be true. The data don’t lie:
An overwhelming majority of Americans think President Joe Biden is too old to serve another term, according to a new ABC News/Ipsos poll.
According to the poll, conducted using Ipsos' Knowledge Panel, 86% of Americans think Biden, 81, is too old to serve another term as president. That figure includes 59% of Americans who think both he and former President Donald Trump, the Republican front-runner, are too old and 27% who think only Biden is too old. (Sources: abcnews.go.com, ipsos.com)