'Are We the Baddies?': Niall Ferguson on the Sovietization of America

The notion that America could actually be the baddies is one few Americans today take seriously. But should they?

Writing in the Free Press, Scottish scholar Niall Ferguson asks a provocative question: “Are we the baddies?”

The question is a reference to a comedy skit by British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, who play a pair of Waffen-SS officers who realize near the end of World War II that they are the bad guys.

Ferguson, who has a pair of degrees from Oxford where he taught (and has also hung his hat at Harvard, Cambridge, NYU, and the London School of Economics), has long argued that America is in the midst of a second Cold War.

But in this latest global showdown, he wonders: “Are we the Soviets?”

“Yes, I know what you are going to say. 

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 Soviet system squandered resources and all but guaranteed shortages of consumer goods. The Soviet healthcare system was crippled by dilapidated hospitals and chronic shortages of equipment. There was grinding poverty, hunger, and child labor. 

In America today, such conditions exist only in the bottom quintile of the economic distribution—though the extent to which they do exist is truly appalling. Infant mortality in the late Soviet Union was around 25 per 1,000. The figure for the U.S. in 2021 was 5.4, but for single mothers in the Mississippi Delta or Appalachia it is 13 per 1,000. 

The comparison to the Soviet Union, you might argue, is nevertheless risible.”

As crazy as the idea sounds, Ferguson says Americans should take a closer look; and he goes on to draw several gloomy parallels between the extinct Soviet Empire and modern America.

Ferguson is not the first to point out the similarities.

In 2020, Princeton University historian Harold James coined the phrase “late Soviet America” to describe the deteriorating American empire. James’s case is less convincing than Ferguson’s, in part because of his excessive focus on Donald Trump (Orange Man bad).

Nevertheless, he apparently takes quite seriously the idea that the American Empire could collapse, much like the Soviet Union did decades ago, due to leadership failures and socioeconomic tensions (oddly, he never mentions the massive federal debt, exhaustive money printing, or seemingly endless foreign military interventions).

Many readers are likely skeptical of the notion that the US could disintegrate like its Cold War rival did. But James points out that an immanent collapse of the Soviet Empire seemed unlikely to nearly all serious thinkers in the 1980s.

“Up until the moment the Soviet system collapsed, very few thought it could actually happen. In assessing the state of the American system, it is important to remember that economists are not very good at prediction. The entire discipline relies on extrapolating from contemporary conditions on the assumption that the underlying fundamentals of what is being analyzed will not change. Knowing full well that this is an unrealistic and absurd assumption, economists often emulate medieval theologians by dressing up their prognoses in arcane language and jargon. One doesn’t need to know Latin to invoke ceteris paribus (“other things being equal”) as the premise of one’s forecasts.”

James is right that economists are not very good at making predictions. (Though some are worse than others.) And whether the United States will actually collapse in the near or even distant future is impossible to predict. A more interesting question is whether it should collapse.

Many would consider this a sacrilegious question, but Ferguson points to some troubling data showing that people in the American Empire, much like those in the Soviet Empire a half-century ago, are not well.

It is now well known that younger Americans are suffering an epidemic of mental ill health—blamed by Jon Haidt and others on smartphones and social media—while older Americans are succumbing to “deaths of despair,” a phrase made famous by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. And while Case and Deaton focused on the surge in deaths of despair among white, middle-aged Americans—their work became the social-science complement to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy—more recent research shows that African Americans have caught up with their white contemporaries when it comes to overdose deaths. In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.

The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries. The main explanations, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, are a striking increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide, and a rise in various diseases associated with obesity. To be precise, between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths—again of working-age Americans—over the same period. Metabolic and cardiac causes of death such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease also surged in tandem with obesity. 

This reversal of life expectancy simply isn’t happening in other developed countries. 

I have no idea what the future will bring, but I share many of the concerns Ferguson cites. However, I’m less concerned about the collapse of the United States than him and many others. Why? Because America was never supposed to be an empire.

While it’s true that some empires are more benevolent and well-meaning than others, by their very nature empires erode liberty and eventually turn sour. Carol Roth made this point in her latest book, You Will Own Nothing.

“Empires, despite their privileges, fall victim to human nature…. The US has had every privilege and advantage, yet has fallen victim to the same fate at the hands of very stupid and sociopathic humans. Power and debt once again remain at odds with each other.”

For this and many other reasons, I’m not convinced, at least not entirely, that the American Empire should continue. (At least in its current form.) For decades, the United States waged a cold war against an evil empire built on coercion and violence. We won that war, but we forgot Nietzsche’s warning.

“Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster,” he wrote, “for when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.”

The notion that America could actually be the baddies is one few Americans can today take seriously. But they should—and I say this as someone who deeply loves America and the ideas on which it is based.

Yet America has strayed far from those principles; and Ferguson at least, in the conclusion of his article, offers an opinion on just how far the US has strayed from its founding ideals.

“Are we the Soviets?” he asks. “Look around you.”