I admit it – I was never much impressed with Nial Ferguson. He reminded me too much of the smooth operators who clamber up the greasy pole in large businesses, saying the (perceived) right things at the right time to the right people. His upward jumps in academia and his BBC programs all screamed “pseud”.
But maybe people can grow and change. Or maybe an individual who is exquisitely tuned to the zeitgeist can recognize early that the wind is changing direction, and maybe it is time to jump to a different greasy pole. Here he is casting doubts on the wonders of the US’s UniParty “democracy”:
Niall Ferguson: We’re All Soviets Now | The Free Press (thefp.com)
"… There is a world of difference between the dysfunctional planned economy that Stalin built and bequeathed his heirs, which collapsed as soon as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform it, and the dynamic market economy that we Americans take pride in. …
… The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”
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.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.” …
Ferguson runs through the list of all the areas where the US (or maybe the Party?) is failing – budgets, military spending, health care, education, gerontocracy, public cynicism, distrust of authority, deaths of despair. But, true to his elite form, he fails to mention the elephant in the room – the regulatory-driven de-industrialization which has destroyed jobs and sacrificed potential tax revenues, and is the driver of many of the all-too-real problems he describes.
