Here is a very interesting panel discussion not least because all the leading thinkers in it are conservatives and yet there is a willingness on the part of at least one of them, to resist drinking the Kool-Aide (and, as we’ll see, another got to experience the truism, “be careful what you wish for”!). Here are some excerpts concentrating on the observations of the historian Stephen Kotkin, biographer of Stalin, student of Russian history, and a shrewd observer of China:
>> Stephen Kotkin: You ever seen World Wrestling Entertainment? World Wrestling Entertainment is known as WWE and it's this amazing show that has a tremendous following in the United States. They have these fantastic characters. They wear these great costumes, they have a lot of face paint, they have great nicknames, and they run around the stage pretending to throw each other on the floor or kick each other in the head and the audience is mesmerized.
So, yeah, that's what kind of policy we have now. We have this fantastic ability to mesmerize people's attention with this incredible show by a guy who's just non-paral in his ability to attract people's attention. And so we got these characters, that's what they are, who are now sent over to institutions to be the nominal head of them.
But somebody's got to run the government. We need a budget. When was the last time the United States actually had a budget?
>> John H. Cochrane: Sometime in the 1970s, I would guess
>> Stephen Kotkin: it's been a really long time. We don't have one this year and the next year budget is coming.
I believe the cliff is in March, potentially for the government running out of money. So first of all, we need a government. That means we need a functioning Congress. We need a budgetary process. I understand the show, the WWE and it's remarkable how amazing it has been in terms of ratings, in terms of knocking everybody else out of the people's attention span.
And I know some of the characters are fabulous in terms of their face paint and costumes. But I'm looking for competence. I'm looking for follow through. I'm looking for the ability to actually get things done. I know that you can break a lot of stuff. I've studied revolution for too long.
What happens when you break things is when you try to rebuild. You're rebuilding with the shards of what you broke. And often unwittingly, you rebuild what you think is something new, but is actually the old system. We all have read Tocqueville on the old regime and the French Revolution.
So I get it that you can hate hard leftist cultural politics. You can see USAID as a practitioner of that self defeating hard left cultural politics which undermines American power in the world rather than enhances it. I get that. I get that they don't care about the fiscal health of the United States.
Niall cares, John cares, Bill, myself, we all care. The voting public cares at a certain level. I'm not sure the people who are attacking the political hard left policies of government units care that much about this. The experience of Twitter is quite sobering in terms of value creation as opposed to transformation of the political spectrum there.
I'd love for them to care about the stuff that John Cochrane and Niall write about. We'll see. The rubber is going to hit the road with the budget. We're going to see what happens with stock markets. We get a 20% plus correction in the stock market. Correction is a euphemism.
We get some inflation, we get some world events and we'll see how much of this WWE can continue in the same vein going forward. Sure, let's knock off USAID. Let's knock off the Department of Education if they go after that. Next, let's knock off all the things that conservatives have had a bee in their bonnet about for a while.
But I need not just a smaller government, I need a better performing government. I need a government that not only does less, but what it actually does, it does well and so rooting out certain political tendencies, as John eloquently put it. I see that as understandable, desirable, necessary.
But I need a lot more than that. I need Niall's vision of a full correction of the fiscal insanity. But who is going to do that? And how are they going to do that? And how are they going to do that when they've gone after things and spent their political capital on USAID?
Once you run through a bunch of political capital and your approval ratings never hit 50% and begin to decline because some things you target are popular with some people, even if the overall targeting makes sense. I'm concerned that you blow your wad on little things that make you feel good.
And the big stuff, that's really hard. When does that happen?…
…I'm listening, I'd love to see a strategy. I'm gonna hope that there is a strategy behind this. I see interest groups. Why disparities in their aims? I see a lot of opportunism, I see a lot of cross purposes.
I see a lot of people who don't really know what they're doing and then a whole bunch of smart people below the radar, without nicknames, not wearing costumes and face paint who are adults who've entered the administration, whether it's in treasury, the National Security Council, and we could go on.
And I want to know who's going to empower them to do what needs to be done. So my view on this is American power is very hard to wreck because we try all the time and it's still there. American power is very hard to take on because I got to tell you, you can ask Hitler, you can ask the Japanese, you can ask the Soviet Union, there are some constituencies you can ask about how that works versus using American power in tandem, being allied to American power, partnered American power.
You can ask a whole lot of people about that, including post Hitler Germany, post Hirohito's Japan, of course, Hirohito continues. But the version of it that we had in the war, and so that's the cause for optimism. It's hard to ruin, it's hard to take on from the outside.
There are elements of dynamism there that people can't explain that are astonishing. And then we have the current pickle that we got ourselves into, which is depressing and which needs to be fixed. And John's view of this is you break everything first because it's so wrecked. All the attempts to fix it never worked.
So you might as well just break it and see what happens. Maybe you can fix it then. If that turns out to be true, fabulous. If that turns out to be false, then what? In other words, if you break and break and break and then, for example, I don't know, bird flu is in your egg supply, or, I don't know, your airplanes begin to crash, not just once or twice, but often.
And one could go on. There are all these things that we need government competence for. Again, the size of the government is too big. I'm interested in the performance of government. I'm interested in good government. You're supposed to get that from elections. What we get from elections is 50, 50 senates or close thereby and then attempted revolutions, where you're gonna impose an agenda that's out of step with the American people, and you think that you have a mandate for that.
Again, Trump is not popular. 47% does not constitute popularity. Some of the measures he's taken have been popular with his base, but his base is a smaller number than 47%. You know, Reagan got 59% of the vote with no conservative media. Is anything like that on the horizon where you bring people together rather than divide or rather than act on a non mandate to institute revolutionary or in this case, counter revolutionary change?
Again, I know what the Democrats did. I get why they were punished by the American people in the election. That punishment was merited and it was delivered. And that's why our system is good. But they didn't necessarily deliver a mandate for a counter revolution in the opposite direction.
And so you don't have a lot of political capital here. And so if you break and everything turns out to be fixable and you fix it, John's view, wonderful. If you break and it turns out that you get bird flu in your egg supply and your kids in Trump country are dying from a disease that the government can't seem to fix because the government, one of the great things about conservatives, I don't know for how long now they've been talking about how government is broken and it turns out they're not.
They now have to break it, if John is right. So it was somehow broken. So I need better government and how do I get that? And I'd love it to happen, by the way. I'm willing to allow time to see what's going on here. Like Niall, I don't know.
I see the wrestling and I'm looking for what's underneath the wrestling.
>> Niall Ferguson: So my question for you, Steve, as a historian's question, is are we seeing signs of a familiar pathology that certainly the thinkers of the enlightened would have recognized? Even although American power is still intact, is it going to stay a republic with all this power?
>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes. So I agree.
That's the question. I agree that the governing institutions. That's the question. That's the key variable. We can talk about human capital and its importance. We can talk about infrastructure and its importance. We could go on about energy, its importance. But ultimately it's governance that makes possible successful performance across the board for the longer term, even if it cannot affect anything as deeply in the shorter term as we sometimes think when we're in the time period.
Government is the one thing that doesn't get reinvented. There's no productivity curve in government the way there is in other spheres. Government is more like education, it's more like health care, where innovation is really hard and productivity is kind of low. But government is the worst performing of those areas.
Again, elections are supposed to give you better governance. It's supposed to give you responsiveness to the electorate, accountability. And we've seen insufficient evidence of that. You know, on the question of republic versus empire, I've been hearing lately about how the executive has all of this power. And that's correct from our friends on the Republican side.
Now that the shoe's on the other foot, they're not so worried about executive power. They're enamored of executive power. Students of history will tell you that limits on executive power are really important. And breaking limits on executive power don't end well because you can have an enlightened despot in one epoch and then you can have an unenlightened despot that can succeed that person.
You can have your party or constituency or tribe in power and you can increase the power of the executive. And then again the shoes on the other foot. I think our problem is the Congress. I think the Congress's failure to be what the Constitution says it should be.
Article one. I think the malperformance of the Congress, non-performance, underperformance, over a long period of time has opened up space for the kind of degradation that John is worried about in terms of the fiscal stuff and others and that Niall is talking about in this slide from republic to empire.
And so that does concern me a lot. Now, again, American history is full of really bad stuff that's happened. It's full of insanity. What Philip Roth called the indigenous American berserk, which now we have social media to show to ourselves and before was less visible. America has had epochs of tremendous violence, not just the Civil War, but in general, tremendous.
So America is an imperfect place, and yet somehow 25% of global GDP since 1880. So my question for the both of you is, if the Trump administration achieves something of what it intends, or what you think it intends, but not everything, how does that compare with previous attempts to achieve or not achieve?
After all, we had the Great Depression. After all we had, and then you can name whichever president you detest the most in that administration. We came through three terms of the Obama administration. The voters rejected the fourth term of the Obama administration. Right. And so I'm of the mind that there's something going on that's bigger than the political stuff, and yet the good governance is the key variable.
So that's what Niall pointed out earlier in my conversation.
Speaking about Niall Ferguson, he’s the one who (sort of, kind of) got his comeuppance when he recently got blasted by Vice President Vance, and tried to give a spirited reply: but the sting is there, because after his fulsome praise of Vance himself, to be rejected in this manner means he has been deprived of the intellctual’s coin of the realm —his ideas being part of the mental furniture of the side he has staked his reputation on endorsing.
(By the way, Niall Ferguson scandalized and bristling at a blast from Vance reminds me of Filipino academics who'd contorted themselves trying to "understand" & ended up dignifying Rodrigo Duterte as some sort of avatar of change because they were shocked/isolated by public support for liquidations, and som, shocked at not being in the vanguard of public opinion, scooted back to try to wallow in it: they ended up legitimizing the liquidations regime).
Recently, Bari Weiss who is the moving spirit behind the increasingly widely-read and influential Free Press, gave a talk in London, the recording of which, alas, I saw but now can’t find; but someone posted the relevant part of her remarks:
A few years ago, nearly every millennial in nearly every influential seat in America decided that police departments descended from slave patrols. So we were told we had to abolish the police. We had to abolish prisons.
They said the existence of America was a crime. That we had to do “land acknowledgments” before every meeting and declare our gender in our email signatures. They said that degrowth and socialism was the only way to go and that too many kids would kill the planet. They said that Marx, who none of these people actually bothered reading, must be revered, and that our founders, whom they had no interest in outside of a Broadway show, must be reviled.
There were riots. They tore down statues. What didn’t get renamed got transformed entirely from within.
Eventually, people got tired of this insanity. Normal people—the people who decide elections—have their limits.
In a line: What happened was that the far left destroyed the center-left in America.
And so, a few months ago, Americans chose Donald Trump—who had just years earlier lost an election by some eight million votes—to be their president again. The left lost its mind. . . and Trump was the obvious reaction.
Looking back, it all seems so clear—the reaction entirely inevitable. But as it was happening—and even now some people still cling to this idea—the smart set claimed that it was just the fringe. Just some bizarre voices, probably many of them bots, online. That it would never manage to build true political power.
We know now how wrong they were.
So what can we learn from this recent history? Well, one big takeaway is that if a political movement does not police its ranks, does not draw lines, if it neglects to protect its borders, if it does not defend its sacred values, it cannot long endure.
What are those values? They include the rule of the law. The belief in the inalienable rights of each individual. That we are all created in the image of God and it is that—and not our ethnicity or our IQ score—that gives us our worth and that makes us all equal. It is a rejection of mob violence. It is the view that the West is good and that America is good, and that we deserve our heroes along with our whole complex history.
These values are not left or right. They are foundational. They are civilizational. And they have always required constant vigilance to preserve.
But that’s not the sense you get online these days—and some places offline, too—where power is celebrated instead of principle. Where power is quickly becoming the only principle.
If that continues without being challenged, we may wind up spending the next few years watching the same story we just lived through on the other side, as the far right devours what remains of the center-right.
If you aren’t aware of the dangers that come with apparent victory, if you think, That’s impossible, I believe you are as naive as the professors at Harvard who still email me to say, “Can you believe what’s happening?!”
What does this group, which differs from the rest of the right in its open embrace of illiberalism, sound like? An awful lot like the far left.
This group says that we are in a war—a war here at home—and that because it’s war, because the stakes are life and death, the normal rules of the game must be suspended.
They say those who don’t go along are squishes or traitors or were secret leftists all along. Or they accuse them of being conservative or Republican in name only, which is a version of the “false consciousness” Marxists were so fond of telling people they suffer from.
They say that it’s not enough to return to normal—that returning to normal isn’t an option—and instead it’s time to give the other side a taste of their own medicine.
They say we were treated cruelly. And so cruelty is the necessary response.
They say that the thing we are trying to conserve has already been destroyed—and perhaps never even existed at all.
They say that reform is a losers’ strategy, and that the whole thing needs to be burned down.
Like the far left, they have no use for history, but judge people living and dead in the ideological light of presentism, or simply reimagine them from scratch. As the left defaced and desecrated statues of Churchill, the vandals on the right desecrate his name and his memory.
Again, it’s a question of borders. In this case, they actively erase the line between good and evil, and between past and present—looking backward to a place where “things went wrong,” as if it’s possible to turn back the clock.
While the left, long sympathetic with Stalin, today sympathizes with modern-day Nazis in the form of Hamas—this new right eulogizes the original ones. And in rehabilitating Hitler they are not merely demonizing Jews, but demonizing America, Britain, and the millions who fought and died to preserve our freedoms.
All of this seems as obvious to me as the notion that a girl cannot become a boy. But a lot of people seem to have a hard time saying these things out loud right now.
Partly it’s because of the bile that comes back at you. Partly it’s because so much that’s happening right now seems so good—the opportunity so huge—that no one wants to be the wet blanket. Partly because so many of the people disgusted with the illiberal excesses of the past administration, loving freedom as we do, are in the old liberal dilemma that hollowed out the middle back in the ’60s. Who are we to tell those kids taking over the library that nobody can learn if they do that? Or that the pseudo-history they are discovering, a “people’s history,” isn’t history at all, just a flattering extension of their present-day politics extended into the past.
Partly—and perhaps most of all—it is because we are humans. And human beings seek the warmth of being in the in-crowd.
For all those reasons, there’s a strong temptation to pretend this away or, as many now do, greet all this with a shrug. We get the feeling that it’s just too gross to engage with—and that the lies being told are so big and so obvious it will be self-evident.
And then suddenly your 16-year-old cousin is telling you that women like getting slapped around and that the Nazis were just misunderstood and eugenics got a bad rap.
I know it never seems like a good time to fight these people. No one wants to be bullied online. Every time these boys get criticized they call you a sellout, a traitor, a double agent. Because they’ve adopted the paranoia of Boomer hippies, they’ll always insinuate that you’re on the CIA’s payroll. Or the Mossad’s.
But time is like luck. You run out of it faster than you think you will.
What I want to say is that this is a rare and precious moment. The freaks aren’t going to stay in their circus tent. They’re going to come after all of us, everyone in this room. And they’ll do it by lying to people. They’ll do this to your kids, your grandkids, your readers, your constituents. And they are doing it for a reason: By demoralizing us, by saying things are probably past saving, they become the only source of truth, even though they are the ones telling the lies.
Conservatives know two things above all else: that evil is real and that our precious civilization is human and therefore fragile.
If we have learned anything over this past tumultuous decade, it is that determined human beings are the only thing standing in the way of unraveling. People are the only ones guarding the border between civilization and its enemies from without and from within.
Francis Fukuyama, too, is alarmed, saying there is a New American Imperialism, and he had a guest who shares his concern. A dry but interesting discussion:
My arguments in this essay are as follows. First, the crisis of American democracy is now squarely upon us. Multiple illegal and unconstitutional acts are happening, and the guardrails that check and restrain authoritarian abuse are rapidly falling away.
Second, it is going to get a lot worse. Trump is following an authoritarian playbook for destroying constitutional government that has been widely deployed over the last two decades and that in some respects dates back not only to the political calamities of the 1920s and ‘30s but all the way to Machiavelli, as Jeff Bleich has recently explained in this publication. The pathway to authoritarianism in America lies in subverting our constitutional checks and balances. Trump has moved rapidly on that front and there will be much more to come.
Third, democratic backsliding is moving quickly now in part because of the lack of resistance. Part of this void owes to confusion and division within the opposition (the Democrats), part to opportunism and submission among Congressional Republicans, and part to the tactical decisions of key actors in business, the media, and the bureaucracy to comply in advance, again partly out of opportunism but also heavily out of fear. Fear is the common denominator in all of this—palpable, paralyzing, and quite justifiable fear. Fear now stalks the land. This is the most visceral indication that America has entered an existential era for the future of democracy.
The threats to American democracy in the United States are now immediate, serious, and mounting by the day. However, it is possible to contain them. Doing so will require a national, multifront bipartisan strategy. That will be the subject of my next column, but I stress here: Time is of the essence. Such a strategy must be assembled and activated expeditiously, because the longer and further Trump and his acolytes proceed with their authoritarian ambitions, the harder it will be to resist, and the greater will be the risk not just to our democratic process but to our basic liberties. The key is to unite in defense of our democratic checks and balances, rather than to argue that every one of Trump’s policy initiatives is illegitimate. The markets will take care of stupid and self-harming tariff policies. They will not on their own save American democracy.
“They’re scared shitless about death threats and Gestapo-like stuff,” a former member of Trump’s first administration tells me.
Low’s famous cartoon of the Hitler-Stalin Pact
A hommage by The Independent
Postscript: “Lindbergh-ism”
Lindbergh gets a gift from Goering
Apropos of last week’s readings, Everything Old Is New Again, here is Niall Ferguson pointing to an extract from a piece by Noah Smith, saying, “This is a smart rumination on the possible explanations for the recent twists of the Trump 2.0 foreign policy--the trade war v. neighbors and allies, the sell-out of Ukraine, and the emollient tone towards China.” Here’s the extract, from an article titled America is being sold out by its leaders:
Trump, Musk, & co. may have looked at that lopsided manufacturing equation and decided that there’s just no way that America, even in concert with its allies and potential partners like India, can match Chinese power over the next few decades. The daunting prospect of retooling American society to keep up with the Chinese may have caused the MAGA people to balk, and to start looking around for ways to come to an accommodation with the new reality of overwhelming Chinese power.
Lindbergh-ism — a voluntary retreat to the Western hemisphere — might seem like a way of appeasing the Chinese, at the same time that it allows America’s new rightist leaders to focus all of their energies on Metternichian internal struggles. Part of that idea is to divide the world into three spheres of influence, controlled by three authoritarian conservative powers — China as the ruler of Asia, Russia as the ruler of Europe, and America as the ruler of the Western Hemisphere.3 That certainly fits with Trump’s suddenly bellicose statements toward Canada and other nearby countries.
That’s what I call the Metternich-Lindbergh theory of Trump’s sudden rush to accommodate America’s foreign rivals. It’s basically an early surrender in Cold War 2, but Trump, Musk, & co. may see it as their only option for preserving their vision of Western civilization.
I disagree with Bari Weiss about what the Conservatives know. Post Reagan, what the conservatives know and care about, is power and the need to return to their old way of life, and will do anything to go back there, including committing acts of evil to do so.
I disagree with Bari Weiss about what the Conservatives know. Post Reagan, what the conservatives know and care about, is power and the need to return to their old way of life, and will do anything to go back there, including committing acts of evil to do so.