Niall Ferguson-Jonah Goldberg Feud Previews a Presidential Election

“We are a nation in decline,” Trump says

A presidential election ballot drop box in Boston.

The hottest and most significant intellectual fight this week is the one between Niall Ferguson and Jonah Goldberg.

Ferguson, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, started it with a June 18 article in the Free Press, “We’re All Soviets Now,” about what he described as “the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR.” America, Ferguson writes in a provocative and clever piece that identifies many of America’s real problems, is “as degenerate as the Soviets.”

Goldberg, a fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, responded with a June 19 piece for The Dispatch: “No, We Are Not Living in Late Soviet America.” He wrote, “There was no moral equivalence between the United States and the Soviet Union then, and there isn’t any now, either.” It also noted, “people want to come here, not leave.” On social media, Goldberg accused Ferguson of “hyperbole for shock value” and pointed out that “even many of the problems and pathologies plaguing America are the result of an abundance of freedom, not an abundance of tyranny. That’s a distinction one can’t wave – or eyeroll -- away.”

Also on social media, the president of the American Institute for Economic Research, William Ruger, said of Ferguson’s claim, “Biggest problem with this analysis, which is admittedly interesting, is that China is hardly like the United States was in the 1980s. Xi is no Reagan. And China has a lot of problems today that will keep it from being as much of a challenge to us as we were to the Soviets.”

The reason this is a significant fight is that it goes far beyond the confines of think tanks and subscription websites to the heart of contemporary politics and President Trump’s case against President Biden. Trump doesn’t compare America to the evil empire but he does offer, on the campaign trail, a description of contemporary America that rivals Ferguson’s in its dark grimness. “Nobody can buy a house anymore. The American dream is dead,” Trump said this week at a campaign rally on June 18 in Racine, Wisconsin. “We are a nation in decline. We are a failing nation.”

The wisest and most useful analysis I saw for making sense of the declinism came not from any professional news or opinion website but from an asset manager, mutual fund company, and retirement plan provider, Fidelity Investments. An un-bylined piece from Fidelity Wealth Management tries to make sense of the gap between generally strong economic data and generally sour public perceptions. The Fidelity article observed: “It's common for the media and news organizations (not to mention social media) to prominently feature negative stories while downplaying or ignoring positive outcomes or resolutions. This is partly due to the fact that readers and viewers appear to engage more with negative news, a psychological phenomenon known as ‘negativity bias.’” It recommended spending less time following financial news. “Consuming more information does not necessarily make you more informed—it may actually increase the likelihood that you become misinformed or get caught up ‘doomscrolling,’ endlessly consuming negative stories in a way that affects your mood, judgment, and decision-making,” the article says.

This came up recently at my college reunion in a panel discussion about the state of democracy. The moderator replayed a clip from a similar panel five years ago, amid the “resistance” to the Trump administration, in which I advised “don’t panic,” and noted that America had been through previous eras of division and unrest, such as the Civil War and the Vietnam War period, and eventually recovered.

I said this time around that “don’t panic” is probably still good advice, though I could be wrong. I said, self-deprecatingly, that it might explain why I never made a vast fortune in the news business, because a headline that says “panic!” gets people to click more than one that says “don’t panic!” 

I didn’t say it at the panel discussion, but, after reading the Fidelity piece, I realized that, perhaps ironically, if it’s been bad for journalistic money-making my own baseline optimism has probably helped grow my retirement account. The Fidelity article concludes, “If you're making investment decisions based on an understanding of the economy that's not aligned to the underlying data, you may miss out on an important opportunity for growth potential. ‘If you feel that the economy and the market aren't doing well, even as things are actually OK, you may decide to invest more conservatively,’ says [Naveen Malwal, institutional portfolio manager with Strategic Advisers, LLC]. ‘In that case, it may take longer to reach your financial goals. Or if you stay away from the markets for too long, it can potentially put certain goals practically out of reach.’”

The Goldberg-Ferguson rift might be explained partly by personal biography. Ferguson is from the United Kingdom, which has been in a long-term decline in relative power and influence. Goldberg, who is from New York, saw New York City’s recovery under Giuliani and America’s recovery under Reagan and the Jewish people’s post-Holocaust restoration to Israel.

Neither Goldberg nor I are dismissive of America’s real problems, which are not to be minimized. And, again, I could be wrong. But America in 2024 also has so many strengths—economic, technological, religious, prospering regional economies, constitutional—that the Soviet comparison, no matter how well developed, seems fundamentally inapt. Ferguson’s bleak alarmism will almost certainly attract more clicks than my “don’t panic” message. But in his own lack of confidence about America’s exceptionalism, Ferguson may be exemplifying personally the trend he’s decrying. 

Nate Silver, who is smart, has identified what he calls “a secular trend toward pessimism.” Social science research funded by the Templeton Foundation and the National Institute of Aging suggests that, while it depends on how you measure, as a general matter, people get more pessimistic, and less optimistic, when they hit old age, as the large and influential Baby Boom generation is now. 

Anyway, as a heuristic, it can be useful to sort arguments into the “panic!” or “don’t panic!” buckets. Ferguson and Trump are warning that America is failing, degenerate, in decline. Goldberg says Ferguson is overstating it. I marvel at what seems like an almost supernatural American capacity for self-righting and long-term growth. The challenge is discounting for underlying optimism or pessimism and trying to see and understand, accurately, what is happening. 

Ferguson’s Hoover colleague Victor Davis Hanson, in his book The End of Everything, warns that defeated civilizations throughout history have deluded themselves by overestimating their own strengths, and that such hazards apply “even to the United States, which often believes it is exempt from the misfortunes of other nations, past and present.” 

Trump’s dark description of reality is balanced by the hope that it is reversible: “Make America Great Again.” Dispositionally, I’m with Goldberg and with Fidelity Wealth Management, but one point in support of the “decline” narrative is that, absent some unexpected landslide, whichever presidential candidate prevails in 2024, roughly half the country will view it as evidence of American degeneracy. 

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