From The Free Press: A few weeks ago, fresh from being knighted by King Charles, historian Sir Niall Ferguson officially joined The Free Press as a columnist. His first piece was a banger, provocatively titled “We’re All Soviets Now.” His argument: America today resembles the decaying Soviet Union of the ’70s and ’80s. We’re physically unwell—life expectancies are shockingly in decline—we’re drowning in debt, governed by an out-of-touch gerontocracy, and subjected to bogus ideologies pushed by elites.
This was published before the disastrous presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Since then, Ferguson has doubled down. He argued in his most recent column that the reason we face a campaign between a blowhard and a senile old man lies in America’s similarities to the late-stage Soviet Union.
The piece soon went viral. It even became an Instagram meme.
Unsurprisingly, Niall’s arguments drove some people crazy. And the rebuttals came pouring in. None was quite as passionate and thorough as the one written by Dispatch editor-in-chief Jonah Goldberg. In his column “No, We Are Not Living in ‘Late Soviet America,’ ” Goldberg conceded some basic facts presented by Ferguson, but he aggressively pushed back against the comparison. Look at the wealth of American consumers, he wrote, or the migrants desperate to cross the border and live in this country. While the Communist regime stifled free expression and jailed dissidents, speech flows without restraint in America. At the end of the day, Goldberg argued, “America is simply not like the Soviet Union.”
Ferguson fought back on Twitter in an 18-part thread, in which he accused Goldberg of “pure cope.” And back and forth they went for days.
We’re happy to announce that they agreed to hash it all out on our latest episode of Honestly. (The loser will not be sent to the gulag!)
More here.
