Along with Donald Trump, a big winner in Thursday night’s presidential debate was the distinguished historian Niall Ferguson, who recently stirred up a lot of debate with a column for The Free Press comparing contemporary America with the later stages of the Soviet Union.
Part of that case was that our political system is governed by a gerontocracy that evokes the age of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov. After watching Joe Biden’s performance on the debate stage, I think Ferguson can claim that point as proven.
His essay folded the gerontocracy argument into a larger case that exemplifies what you might call conservative doomerism. In general there is more doomerism on the American left today than on the right — both more personal pessimism and more anxiety about various apocalypses, from climate change to Trumpian authoritarianism. But Ferguson eloquently expressed a kind of general pessimism that I hear fairly often from friends on the right, a fear that America is not just a decadent society but also a deteriorating one, that like the late U.S.S.R., we are a hollow empire with an unsustainable economic model, a common life shadowed by addiction and despair, and a public square policed by a left-wing nomenklatura committed to ideological fantasies and hostile to dissent.
Like any good provocation, Ferguson’s column inspired various critiques (here’s Noah Smith, here’s James Pethokoukis, here’s Jonah Goldberg) and various defenses (here’s Ferguson responding to Goldberg, here’s Helen Andrews arguing that he doesn’t go far enough).
My view is that Ferguson’s analogy is useful if and only if you don’t go all the way with it. That is, I think that comparisons with the decay of the U.S.S.R. can help us see key ways in which American life has gotten worse — but the claim that America in 2024 is actually a lot like the Soviet Union circa 1983 is entirely unpersuasive.
But rather than critique that kind of claim directly, I thought I’d respond to Ferguson’s essay with a case for not being a right-of-center doomer, with an argument for why American conservatives, in particular, have some decent reasons for optimism about their preferred vision of the American future and certainly stronger reasons than “Soviet America” analogies would suggest.
I’ll work from the premise that American conservatism as a modern movement makes sense as a defense of specific forms of American exceptionalism against progressive criticism. So conservatives have sought to preserve America’s distinct religious character against secularization and social liberalism, America’s commercial dynamism against socialist alternatives, America’s decentralized sprawl and communitarian spirit against attempts to solve every problem from Washington D.C., a positive vision of American history and the American role in the world against left-wing and revisionist criticism.
In this light, it makes sense that in recent years American conservatives, especially younger ones, have become less optimistic and more reactionary, because the features of American life they imagined themselves defending have entered into crisis. America has become less religious and less culturally conservative, more atomized and less communitarian, less dynamic and entrepreneurial and more dependent on ever-mounting deficit spending. Our foreign policy has become a shambolic mess that even a jingoist can’t reasonably defend. The engine of capitalism has seemingly slowed; certain hopes around technological progress have disappointed. And the commanding heights of American culture have been taken over by an ideology that often regards the American past exclusively through the lens of anti-settler-colonial critique.
So why be optimistic, rather than Fergusonian? Here are a few reasons:
The decline of institutional religion might be ending. Even as Christianity has weakened and the share of Americans with no religious affiliation has climbed, there’s been evidence for religion’s resilience as well. But now there’s evidence that the overall decline has tapered off. See, for instance, this analysis from the religion data maven Ryan Burge suggesting that in the past five years the growth of the nones (Americans with no religious affiliation) has hit a ceiling, especially among the younger generations.
The end of the recent wave of de-Christianization would leave America less religious and more post-Christian than most religious conservatives circa, say, 1990 would have imagined. But it would also leave the country with a much stronger foundation of practice and belief than exists in much of Western Europe after its own long process of secularization. (It should go without saying that American religion is more resilient and influential than any religious forces in Soviet Russia, the heroism of the Communist bloc’s persecuted Christians notwithstanding.) This resilience is not only an opportunity for conservative Christians; rival spiritual ideas are very much in the mix. But it is a landscape of religious possibility and potential revival, not one that requires conservative despair.
Roe v. Wade is gone, and the Republican Party is still here. Amid all the commentary about how ill prepared the pro-life movement and the G.O.P. were for the end of Roe, the reality two years after the Dobbs decision is that despite the unpopularity of the pro-life cause, strong restrictions on abortion are on the books in much of the South and parts of the West, and the Republican Party has a perfectly good chance of winning unified control of the federal government in the looming national elections. That’s not a landscape of defeat for social and cultural conservatives. It’s a landscape of a limited, partial and contingent but still real victory.
The victory might not last; the Democrats may succeed in codifying Roe, or the red-state restrictions may gradually dissolve if the pro-life movement cannot win the argument that it’s won the opportunity to have. But so far, it does not appear to be the case, as many cultural conservatives feared, that their side is simply not allowed to win policy victories in America — that any gains social conservatism makes will be immediately nullified by elite machinations or administrative power or some kind of strike by woke capital. That has important implications not just for the abortion debate but also for cultural conflict writ large.
Wokeness has tightened its grip, but a lot of American life is slipping through its fingers. In the debate about whether wokeness has peaked, whether progressive cultural power has solidified or receded since the revolutions of the summer of 2020, the answer depends on where you look. On the one hand, wokeness has clearly consolidated its influence within key institutions of American liberalism — academic and philanthropic, especially — and isn’t about to disappear.
But on the other hand, progressivism’s power of cancellation has clearly ebbed, its influence in corporate America and Silicon Valley and the American media has conspicuously weakened (thanks in part to start-ups like the one that Ferguson is writing for), the Gaza war has exposed deep internal contradictions in progressivism’s Ivy League strongholds, and wokeness failed to entrench its power nationally in the way that seemed possible a few short years ago.
More than that, in conservative states the anti-woke rollback has achieved some big and unexpected victories for the right. I don’t just mean showy battles like Ron DeSantis fighting with Disney and Elon Musk buying Twitter. I mean more structural changes — from the big expansion of school choice in right-leaning states to the attempts to build conservative beachheads in the public university systems in states like Florida and Texas. In a sense, the age of wokeness is midwifing a more self-conscious mode of red-state cultural governance than heretofore existed. We’ll see whether it lasts and how far it goes, but for now, it’s a way in which the ground of cultural conflict has arguably shifted in conservatism’s favor.
Blue America may have bigger problems than red America. Throughout the Obama years, there was a liberal narrative that cast America’s bluest bastions as future-oriented models and the reddest states as dysfunctional cautionary tales. But many of the emergent crises of the Trump and Biden years — the teen mental health crisis, the decline of American birthrates, the escalating cost of housing, the post-Covid squalor of certain major cities — can seem more like liberal problems than conservative ones, often more apparent in bluer areas and among left-leaning populations, even if they cut across regional and ideological lines.
The Fergusonian narrative on the right tends to emphasize these deteriorations as intimations of an ever-darkening future, in an “as goes San Francisco, so goes America” spirit. But conservatives especially should recognize that America is a lot bigger than the streets of San Francisco or Portland, Ore., or Washington, D.C. — and where blue-state governance seems to fail, red states can respond and benefit.
I don’t see much that’s late Soviet, for instance, in the sprawling boomtowns of the American Southwest or the rapidly expanding skylines of cities like Nashville and Austin or the population boom in DeSantis’s Florida. (When Musk’s rockets rise over Brownsville, Texas, or Waymo’s self-driving cars hit the Phoenix highways, what is the 1980s Soviet equivalent?) Nor is migration from other states and climes turning the Sun Belt socialist: Trump is currently polling better in Georgia, Florida, Nevada and Arizona than in Rust Belt states like Michigan, suggesting that dynamism and (a kind of) conservatism can still go hand in hand.
And that dynamism is the deepest reason, independent of the specific ambitions of American conservatives, for everyone to be skeptical of too much Fergusonian gloom. I made this case before, so I won’t belabor it, but it’s important not to let the challenge America faces from our great-power rivals right now — on which subject I tend to agree with Ferguson and other alarmists — blind us to the likely competitive advantage we enjoy over the next 50 years.
From population growth to productivity, institutional stability (yes, even with the debate we watched last night) to immigrant assimilation, techno-optimism to religious hope, America today is both not what it should be and still a better long-term bet than any other civilization on the map. That was just not the case for the U.S.S.R.: There were scenarios that might have turned out better for the Soviet Union than the perestroika-to-collapse arc it followed, but there’s no world, looking back, where if the Soviets could have just survived through the 1990s, they would have been a greater power than America or China in 2020 or 2030.
Whereas for America, it’s pretty easy to imagine our power enduring or increasing in the second half of this century. Such a future isn’t certain, and there are Soviet aspects to our situation — but not enough to license full doomerism, as opposed to very cautious hope.
Breviary
Matthew Yglesias on elite misinformation
Christopher Caldwell on the new European politics
Miles Smith reads the “ex-vangelicals”
Steven D. Hollon on what we’re getting wrong about depression
A symposium on the pro-life movement after Dobbs
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