Governor Mitch Daniels and renowned historian and author Sir Niall Ferguson discuss pressing current events including political polarization, the disturbing rise of violent antisemitic incidents, and the societal impact of aging populations. They also delve into the United States spending more on debt interest than on national security for the first time in history, the geopolitical threats and China's internal struggles, and a renewal of the U.S. national spirit with the emergence of new forms of American innovation and entrepreneurship.
Governor Mitch Daniels and renowned historian and author Sir Niall Ferguson discuss pressing current events including political polarization, the disturbing rise of violent antisemitic incidents, and the societal impact of aging populations. They also delve into the United States spending more on debt interest than on national security for the first time in history, the geopolitical threats and China's internal struggles, and a renewal of the U.S. national spirit with the emergence of new forms of American innovation and entrepreneurship.
Intro (00:02):
Welcome to The Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund, hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels (00:18):
Greetings, everyone, and welcome to the Future of Liberty Podcast, a series of conversations about the prospects that the freedoms we cherish as Americans and in the Western world can be protected or even in some cases restored. Today's guest, I'm going to skip any introduction because I doubt that very many viewers of this podcast are not thoroughly familiar with him. And if you're not, then shame on you and you can repair any number of references. Niall Ferguson, Sir Niall, I will dub you a prince for taking time to be with us today. Thank you very much for joining us. Will you accept it as the compliment it's intended if I say that, to me, you are this era's Paul Johnson?
Niall Ferguson (01:10):
Thank you, Mitch. I do take that as a compliment. I knew Paul Johnson and he was one of the great popular historians. And I use that not as a derogatory term, because I think history should be popular. To be successful, it has to reach a large audience. Paul did that with his books. Not only that, but he was a conservative historian at a time when that was deeply unfashionable. I remember coming across his historical writing. I knew his journalism when I was a student, but when I found Paul Johnson had written books, it was like getting the antidote to Marxist history. And it was just a revelation. I still remember that sense that I'd been reading Eric Hobsbawn, who was an outright communist. And then Paul Johnson came and it was like the vaccine-
Mitch Daniels (02:03):
Straighten you out.
Niall Ferguson (02:03):
Yeah.
Mitch Daniels (02:04):
Yeah. Modern Times, I thought, was one of the most formative and informative books I ever read, and I've given it to dozens of young people. Someone said of him, in addition to all the absolute parallels you just mentioned to your own tremendous career, someone said, "I can comprehend how he writes so much, but where does he find the time to read?" And when one reads your books, as I have for years, I'm struck by the same thing, that the voluminous knowledge that you assemble and then present to the rest of us. What is your MO? How in the world have you been so prolific and so profound at the same time?
Niall Ferguson (02:53):
Well, that's a flattering question to be asked. I think of history as requiring a particular ratio to be high, and that ratio is the ratio of pages read to pages written or words read to words written. And you can't write history unless you've done a lot of reading beforehand. I came to realize that as a schoolboy, I was writing an essay on the 30 Years War in the mid 17th century for my wonderful teacher, Ronnie Woods. And he knew I was keen. So he sent me to the Mitchell Library, one of the great libraries of Glasgow. And I remember I must have been 16 going to the section on the 30 Years War, and there was an entire shelf load of books. It just stretched from one end of the room to the other. And I remember realizing, "Ah, the thing about history is you can't write the essay till you've read all of that."
(03:53):
And at some level, I found that exciting and challenging. I've always felt that reading is at some level of a kind of mental fitness. And if you push yourself, you can read a lot. You can read a book in three hours. By and large, I find three hours is enough if you really want to get through it. And you've got to want to know what the book says and feel a kind of urgency as you approach it. And then you need to have an efficient way of remembering what's important in it that you can then use. Oxford and Cambridge were places where I learned those skills and I think I've continued to try to get better at those things. And more importantly, Mitch, and I hope you'll appreciate this, I've tried to convey to students how important that is and encourage them to pursue reading fitness as a critical part of what it is to be a good scholar.
Mitch Daniels (04:55):
Harder for them these days in a Twitter world when attention spans have shrunk.
Niall Ferguson (05:01):
Absolutely.
Mitch Daniels (05:02):
Less reading is being assigned before students actually get their hands on the texts. Let’s talk for a minute about that. I want to get, after a while, to trivialities like the collapse of Western civilization, but I can’t resist asking something first. We’re talking just a couple of days after a presidential election, a rather pivotal event. You’re at Stanford University, surrounded by intellectuals, many of whom will not have welcomed the results. Talk a little bit about the social and cognitive distance of today’s intellectual class, and how far it has drifted from the rest of American society, a distance that was pretty graphically illustrated by those results. In one of your essays, you quoted a recent Rasmussen poll which, issue by issue, depicted a huge disconnect. How did we get here? And is there any prospect for some self examination by your colleagues?
Niall Ferguson (06:17):
It's a fascinating phenomenon. The polarization that people talk about in the United States isn't a feature of campus life because practically everybody is on one side of the partisan divide. Practically everybody at Stanford is a Democrat, if not a Democratic socialist. And there are a few beleaguered conservatives at the Hoover Institution of whom only a minority are in fact sympathetic to President Trump. So you could probably count the number of Trump supporters and the fingers of at most two hands. So the universities are all on one side of the great divide. They're entirely liberal institutions with tiny exceptions. The same is true at Harvard. Now, full disclosure, I'm speaking to you from much closer to Oxford than Stanford today. I'm in fact spending quite a bit of time in England at the moment. And so I can't give you a live update on the mood on the Stanford campus, though I did take a look at the Stanford Daily to see just how upset the academic community was.
(07:28):
My impression is somewhat less traumatized than eight years ago, interestingly. Harvard seems similar to eight years ago judging by the Harvard Crimson, but I would say Stanford is in less of a state of shock. Eight years ago, I'd just arrived there from Harvard and they literally sent an email offering counseling to every member of the university when Trump won. I think this time around, maybe because he's been president once before, maybe because they saw it coming, remember even California has moved towards Trump. Only two states out of 50 didn't see a vote share shift towards the Republican side at this election. California's non-coastal areas have really moved to the red side of the divide. So I think Stanford couldn't entirely miss the vibe shift that was happening nationally. And that's probably why there's a little less hysteria than there was eight years ago.
Mitch Daniels (08:37):
They're not passing out cookies and offering comfort animals and so forth.
Niall Ferguson (08:42):
Not as far as I'm aware, though maybe I'm speaking too soon. The university that has been conspicuously offering therapy is Princeton where they sent out guidelines to professors telling them how to manage their doubtless traumatized students, but there's not been much of that at Stanford.
Mitch Daniels (09:07):
I hope they'll recover. Some have speculated even in advance of this conversation and election that perhaps what has come to be called wokeism has peaked. There's some, I think, pretty fragmentary evidence that it may have peaked. If that's the case, is it resting or is this a latent virus waiting for a chance to erupt again?
Niall Ferguson (09:35):
That's a great question. It's peaked nationally, no question. I think one of the reasons that Trump won such an emphatic victory was that he was running against a pretty progressive Democrat whose positions on a whole range of issues, defund the police, legalize drugs, all of that, were liberal. When she was a senator, she was about the most liberal person in the Senate. And although the Harris campaign tried to either contradict what she'd previously said or just stop taking questions, I think the public got the message. And when Trump's campaign said, she's kind of the pronouns candidate and we're the candidate for you, that struck a narrative, especially with a lot of male voters. I think it's remarkable how much he has gained support from Hispanic males and the majority now of Hispanic males voted for Trump, and he's doubled his support amongst African-American males.
(10:39):
In the sense that wokeism was partly a kind of radical feminist enterprise in which the patriarchy, i.e. guys, were the enemy, it was sooner or later going to elicit a backlash. And I think that's part of what we saw. Joe Rogan, Elon Musk, these are the leading figures of a new generation of more assertive young men who are just fed up with wokeism. So it's definitely peaked nationally, and that is a good thing. The problem, Mitch, is that I don't think it has peaked in academia because if you ask some questions of younger academics, as my friend Eric Kaufman has, what he observes is that if you think the older academics are progressives, let me introduce you to their younger colleagues. And then if you think they're out there ideologically, come meet the grad students. And Eric's argument is that the pipeline of professors is in no way pointing to a peak in wokeness. In fact, it points in the opposite direction that the faculty are going to get more radical rather than less radical over time.
Mitch Daniels (12:01):
I can't resist asking you one last question about intellectuals in particular. One of Paul Johnson's books that I enjoyed and has stuck with me was called Intellectuals. He described in there the character of some of the leading lights of intellectual history. Was he cherry-picking when he pointed out that Marx and Russo and Lillian Hellman and all the rest in that book were, whatever their intellectual gifts were, sort of monstrous in their personal lives. I think this is where he quotes, it was when Sartre said, "History was an arduous path that led to me." Something like that. Was he being unfair or is there something in the character of people at our leading universities that leads them to arrogance and to the behavior we wouldn't admire?
Niall Ferguson (13:05):
Well, I think there are undoubtedly reasons why intellectuals, especially those with tenured chairs, have a tendency to become insufferable as well as detached from reality. They are, from the minute they're tenured, disconnected from any market force, they can't be fired. That's supposed to protect their academic freedom. In my experience, it doesn't have that effect at all. They seem even more wedded to the conventional wisdom after they have tenure and rarely challenge it. I see so few examples of people exercising their academic freedom that I wonder what tenure really does. And I think in fact, part of what it does is to create a culture of conformism. And once you are long-established in a department, you become the upholder of the orthodoxy.
(13:59):
But I think Paul was a bit unfair because there are plenty of intellectuals I can think of who had exemplary characters, were humble, were good people, had great intellectual independence and integrity. My heroes of the Scottish Enlightenment, Adam Smith, Adam Ferguson, David Hume are quite different from the characters that Paul portrays. So there was a certain amount of careful selection going on there.
Mitch Daniels (14:32):
One last point here, I'll say a word. I hope most viewers already are familiar with this bold experiment that you're helping lead in Austin, Texas that addresses some of these concerns and some that we'll talk about the balance of the time. But you're off to, I think, an encouraging start at the University of Austin?
Niall Ferguson (14:54):
Well, the fact that we're off to a start at all is remarkable since this was an idea that Joe Lonsdale, Bari Weiss, Pano Kanelos, and I had about three and a half years ago. And we only announced that we were creating a new university three years ago. And when we did, everybody jeered at us and said it would be impossible and we couldn't possibly. And here we are. The first class, the freshman class, is nearing the end of the first semester and we've done it. It's real. It's a university. So of course it has the classic problems that universities have, but that's a sign of success too. If professors are arguing about the curriculum, then we're doing it right. If the president is at odds with at least two deans, it's a real university. And of course, there have to be some psychodramas within the student body.
(15:53):
So the university is doing exactly what I hoped, and that is reinventing the university experience itself. I can assure you there is no freshman program in America that can come close in terms of the quality of content to what we're doing. And Jake Howland, our wonderful provost, has just done a tremendous job in building intellectual foundations as kind of the antidote to what freshmen programs at the Ivy League have become, a sort of smorgasbord of highly selective readings. I'm really excited about two things, the content, the kind of structure of the university as we've built it so far, and the students, they're amazing.
(16:43):
Can you imagine what it takes to bet your undergraduate career, your degree, your first degree on an entirely new institution? They are the right stuff in that great phrase. They are true Americans because they're willing to help us build the new university. They're really terrific. You will love them when you get to spend time with them. Everybody does.
Mitch Daniels (17:08):
I've been reading about them and they're clearly everything you say. They've self-selected in the way that immigrants typically do in this country and they brought with them that pioneer mentality. I can't wait to see what you all achieve there. On our way to a geopolitical discussion, let me ask you to enlighten us a little bit about another latent virus, at least I thought it was latent, that has really burst forth lately, and that's antisemitism, which some of us naively thought was a thing of the past finally. It clearly is not. To what do you attribute this sudden eruption? Is it purely a historical confusion about Israel and the state of Israel and who's really the oppressor and who's fleeing oppression, or is it something even more sinister than that?
Niall Ferguson (18:13):
It's a very timely question. We're conversing the day after a pogrom that happened in the city of Amsterdam after a soccer game yesterday night, November 7th. And this event was just the latest reminder that antisemitism is back. Who thought just a few years ago that one would see such scenes in a European city, in the city of Baruch Spinoza and Anne Frank? And so we have to ask ourselves what's going on here. And I think the answer's not a straightforward one because three different things are flowing together in this revival of antisemitism. One is the old familiar far right antisemitism that has long been embedded in European politics, and it must be said in some recesses of American politics. The Neo-Nazis are back in business. There are right-wing parties. One good example is the Alternativa for Deutschland, the Alternative for Germany, which clearly has some Neo-Nazi elements, but I think that's the least important of the three.
(19:35):
The next one is the old Marxist Anti-Zionism that the Soviets did a great deal to sponsor and encourage during the Cold War. And that is still very much in business. There was a labor leader in this country, Jeremy Corbyn, who was a classic product of that whole mindset. They had been making the same arguments against Israel, against Zionism, and quite clearly against Jews since the 1960s. But the new element, at least new in the West, is the Islamist antisemitism that has come out of Muslim majority countries, and that did not used to be part of our world. Because of large-scale migration from Muslim majority countries to the Netherlands, to Europe as a whole, and to the United States, we are now grappling with some of the most virulent forms of antisemitism, specifically the antisemitism of Islamic extremism.
(20:41):
And that's, of course, what produced the events in Amsterdam last night. It was Muslims who were carrying out the Pogrom, attacking Israeli football fans and chanting pro-Palestinian slogans as they were doing it. And those pro-Palestinian slogans were being chanted by undergraduates and graduates and others on American campuses after the events of just over a year ago, October the 7th of 2023. I think that’s the story as best I can understand it, the confluence of these three forms of antisemitism are producing a really quite unpleasant global outbreak, which for my Jewish friends, wherever they are, is deeply shocking and frightening and enraging.
Mitch Daniels (21:30):
Yeah, rightly so. I better switch topics while there is still time, because there is a subject in which I think you have been far and away our most helpful tutor, and that is the status of what we have known as the West and its future prospects. There are obvious reasons for grave concern, and I would like you to walk us through some of them. First, however, a question out of curiosity. You make a very interesting point in more than one place that most of history has been made by younger people, largely because people did not live to be old. Now we live in an age in which, everywhere I look, there seems to be a gerontocracy in charge in so many places. Is that simply an accident and a consequence of medical science and related advances, or do older people make a different kind of history than younger people do?
Niall Ferguson (22:38):
That's a great question. We've never been such an elderly species as we are today. It's partly that medical science is allowing life expectancy to give up through the 70s into the 80s. It's partly that we have reduced family size. In most countries now, the fertility rate is below 2.1. So we're actually producing the most elderly population in human history. And that's bound to have certain consequences because with the best wind in the world, no matter how healthy your lifestyle, your brain is not as good at 60, I'm 60 as it was when I was 20, and I'm having to compensate.
Mitch Daniels (23:26):
Yours probably is, but as a general rule, you're accurate.
Niall Ferguson (23:29):
I wish I could believe that, but the truth is that as you get older, you invent lots of tricks to compensate for the fact that you're intellectually less nimble. The best thing about being a historian is that you can just keep accumulating knowledge and as long as your memory doesn't go, you'll always have more knowledge than you had when you were 20, even if you're a bit slower off the mark. So in a world in which we're collectively older, that has, I think, two consequences. One is that people are around in positions of power for too long. If you look at American politics, we've just had an object lesson in this, despite the fact that the Democrats switched to a younger candidate, it's still a striking fact that Donald Trump will be the oldest president ever when he's sworn in on January 20th. More interestingly, American legislators are on average much older than their counterparts in other countries. So the US has a lot of people in positions of power who by historical standards are really quite elderly.
(24:41):
The other thing, and I think it's a consequence of this, is that the young are held back. Not only are they less numerous relative to the elderly and the share of the population that is in its teens or early 20s, is really low historically right now, but they also are putting up with all of this deadwood that just refuses to clear out the way. And that I think explains some of the frustrations as well as some of the mental health issues that characterize young people today. So it would be odd if our era were as fantastically creative as the renaissance or the enlightenment or the industrial revolution, except that despite all that I've just said, somehow or other brilliant young people are still able to produce paradigm shifts in technology such as artificial intelligence.
(25:40):
The people at the AI companies are all quite a lot younger than us. I can think of at least one CEO of an AI company who is in his mid 20s. So the great thing about the United States is, although we clutter up Washington with gerontocracy, Silicon Valley is still the career open to talent for the college dropout who's got a brilliant vision.
Mitch Daniels (26:08):
Some of us have come, reluctantly, to the conclusion that the young in this country, the younger generations, are about to get their opportunity as a consequence of something cataclysmic. This has happened before in history. There are some people, and you have written about this, who see cycles and view this as an unsurprising event that occurs every few generations. I do not like coming to this conclusion. Maybe you will talk me out of it, but let us talk about some of the reasons this might happen. You have coined something that people are calling Ferguson’s law, which suggests that when a nation crosses a threshold and starts spending more money servicing the debt it has already borrowed than it spends on protecting its citizens and ensuring national security, it does not come to a happy ending. Is there a counterexample to that anywhere? I have not found one. You have certainly given us several from back over the centuries.
Niall Ferguson (27:21):
Well, I am working on the paper that sets out, with all the necessary chapter and verse and data, what I call Ferguson’s law. I called it Ferguson’s law semi seriously, but it is the only law of history I have really come across for which it is hard to find an exception. If you go back to the fifteenth, sixteenth, and seventeenth centuries, the empires of that time all succumbed, at one point or another, to Ferguson’s law. The Dutch Republic did. Habsburg Spain did as well. In the eighteenth century, it befell the French Bourbon monarchy. In the nineteenth century, it befell the Ottoman Empire. In the twentieth century, it ultimately caught up with Britain. The remarkable thing is that the United States is now at that point. This very year is the year the United States will, for the first time, spend more on debt service than on defense. This is a serious problem because once you are in that situation, there is a fiscal constraint that limits your ability to rearm if you are suddenly confronted with an adversary.
(28:27):
And the United States is confronted with a formidable adversary in the year 2024, an axis that unites China with Russia and Iran and North Korea that didn't exist four years ago. But what happened, and I think it was in part a consequence of the foreign policy of the Biden-Harris administration was that these authoritarian powers made common cause, and now they're cooperating quite openly together, not only with respect to Ukraine, but also in the Middle East. So that's the problem. We ought to be increasing our defense spending to prepare a new generation of weapons to deal with these powers, to deter them so we don't have to have another big war, but we're not going to do it because the nasty fiscal arithmetic just doesn't let you.
Mitch Daniels (29:15):
You are often ahead of me and anticipate my questions, and you usually put your finger on what I think is the central dilemma we are facing right now. For some of us who have been preoccupied for a long time with the national debts we are accumulating, the unkeepable promises we have made to people, and the sense of betrayal that likely awaits us when we cannot deliver, this dilemma is especially stark. One can say that the two central purposes for which governments come into being are the physical protection and safety of those who form the government, and the proper stewardship of the money that is taken from them, allegedly for common purposes. Now we find ourselves between Scylla and Charybdis, unsure which way to turn, because both needs are urgent, and as you have just illustrated, they are in direct collision.
Niall Ferguson (30:15):
We talked a minute ago about the aging population. What's really driving the United States deeper and deeper into debt is that the rising costs of entitlement programs like social security and Medicare keep widening the gap between expenditures and revenues. And nobody in office wants to propose a new tax or even raise the existing taxes significantly, but nor do they want to cut the entitlements, which are mandatory, which Congress has bound itself not to reduce. And so we are in a fundamental structural fiscal crisis that could only be solved if we magically were able to raise the growth rate significantly above the real rate, the inflation adjusted rate that we pay on the debt. Now, you can pin your hopes on AI, and I know people who do, who say, "Don't worry, there's going to be such a dramatic increase in productivity growth that all these problems will go away."
(31:14):
I remain to be persuaded that that is the case, but you can pin your hopes on AI or you can pin your hopes on Elon Musk because after all, one of the more exciting developments in the final phase of this election campaign was that Elon Musk said he would set up a Department of Government Efficiency and start drastically reducing federal spending. Good luck. Good luck with it because we need something like that. And maybe given that he can perform all kinds of miracles in other domains, maybe he can do it to the US government. But other than those options, you either raise the growth rate or you cut the spending. If you don't do those things, you end up doing what kills growth and that is raising taxes.
Mitch Daniels (31:56):
Regrettably, I think, and we can all hope otherwise, that a more probable outcome is, once again, some sort of crash. I know he is probably not a favorite historian among historians, but Toynbee’s attempt to impose patterns on history always struck me as making a good deal of sense. He argued that sooner or later, a crisis comes to a nation or a civilization, and what matters is how the elites of the day respond, or fail to respond. I do not see much in the recent performance of our elites to suggest that we would handle a debt crisis of some kind, a retreat from the dollar, or even a military setback such as the conquest of Taiwan.
Niall Ferguson (32:49):
I think the military setback is more likely actually because the US can run up quite a large public debt if it remains the number one global superpower with the number one reserve of currency. Remember, British debt to GDP ratios got up well above 200%, not only in the 20th century, but at the end of the Napoleonic War. So I think the US has got fiscal room for maneuver, it can carry on like this probably for quite a bit longer, as long as it doesn't suffer a major strategic reverse. The problem about a Taiwan crisis, let's just consider the likely contingency that at some point in the next four years, Xi Jinping decides to go for it. He blocks Taiwan, then the president has to make a decision. Am I sending the Navy and the attack submarines to take on the Chinese and break this blockade?
Mitch Daniels (33:52):
Sending what remains of the Navy.
Niall Ferguson (33:54):
Sending our much reduced Navy. Do I tell the Indo-Pacific command to unleash the drones at these blockading Chinese vessels? Do I call the Japanese up and tell them to hit the Chinese missile bases? The president's going to have a very tough call there because that's kind of World War III and we know that presidents are rather reversed to World War III. So I think the Chinese gamble is we just won't do it when the chips are down because the costs will be too high and the public won't be sufficiently convinced that it's worth it. And the easier thing will be just to kind of shrug our shoulders the way we have done over Hong Kong and say, "It was nice knowing you, Taiwan, but we did say from 1972 that you were part of China and sorry." So I mean, I think that’s the Chinese hope is that we would just not go there.
(34:50):
We won't ultimately have the nerve to fight a conflict over Taiwan. Now, there your troubles begin because if the US folds in a Taiwan crisis, then everybody else in Asia realizes that it's no longer number one. China's number one. The dollar, at that point, the 10-year treasury is no longer your preferred asset, your preferred currency if you're an international investor. And that's when things can get really nasty. It's like the Suez crisis and the British Empire. It's the game over moment where suddenly you're no longer number one and you no longer have the privileges of being number one.
Mitch Daniels (35:31):
I want to come back to the term sudden before we finish. I also want to point out that, like so many other things, you correctly noted in 2011 that even while recognizing the explosive growth of China and its prospects for further expansion, you also identified the very problems they are facing now, including demographic pressures and possible bubbles in real estate and banking. All of this could be a reason, or an additional reason, why Xi decides to make his move.
Niall Ferguson (36:04):
Right.
Mitch Daniels (36:05):
Dictators have typically looked to distract unhappy publics with an international adventure.
Niall Ferguson (36:13):
It would certainly not be unusual for a regime like the Chinese Communist Parties to resort to conflict if its domestic power base starts to crumble. And with growth in the Chinese economy, certainly declining to low single digits in the coming years because of demographic reasons, the population of China will half between now and the end of the century and probably more than that. The debt dynamics in the real estate sector seem just unsolvable. All of these things point to a crisis of the legitimacy of the regime and the obvious solution to that problem is to tap into the really quite profound nationalism of the Chinese people.
(36:58):
And on that issue of Taiwan, in my experience, there's almost total unanimity on the mainland that Taiwan is part of China and a challenge to that is a ground for war. So I do worry that the weaker Xi Jinping feels domestically, the more the incentive grows to take strategic risk. And when I was in Beijing in May, I got the nasty impression that quite a significant part of people in the government there are essentially preparing for war. Not all of them, but there certainly is an element within the CCP that sees China on an inevitable collision course with the United States.
Mitch Daniels (37:39):
You pointed out a few moments ago that China's not the only problem now, that there's an axis that has at least informally assembled. I wanted to ask you about that because years ago you challenged Samuel Huntington's hypothesis that this century would be dominated by a clash of civilizations and he named four. Ours, the Chinese, or Sinic, I guess he called it, and the Islamic. He also speculated that a recovered Russian Orthodox culture might play into it. Do you feel differently years later when in fact those three seem to at least be cooperating, if not hoping to assemble themselves together and unseat us?
Niall Ferguson (38:41):
Well, I had the greatest admiration for Sam Huntington and had the great fortune of meeting him before his death when he was still active at Harvard and I had just turned up there. And my disagreement with him was always a respectful one that many of the conflicts that we saw after the end of the Cold War were within civilizations, not between them and relatively few were between civilizations. And in the book Civilization, I try to make the argument that civilization is quite a porous thing. It's not like an empire or a nation state. And so it's quite hard for a civilization to clash.
(39:18):
His hypothesis in the great essay that you just referenced was that more conflicts in the post-Cold War era would take place on these civilizational frontiers. I don't think he ever foresaw that these other civilizations would make common cause against Western civilization, but that's what's happened. So you've got the people of the Republic of China, which is a Marxist-Leninist derivation. You've got Putin's Russia, which is a kind of neo-imperial or Tsarist empire. You've got the Iranian theocracy, and then you've got this strange regime in North Korea, all joining forces against the United States. And it does seem a little of a stretch to say this is a civilizational clash because they all seem so different from one another.
(40:10):
The only thing that they have in common is they would like us to stop being number one. And if they can figure out a way to bring American primacy to an end, then I imagine their access will be over the next day since there's not really that much love lost between the Russians, the Iranians and the Chinese, or indeed the North Koreans. So I think this is a temporary formation designed to end American primacy. And in that sense, it's reminiscent of the axis of the late 1930s and early 1940s because that was a curious coalition of thieves, which didn't trust one another. But well, they were united in their desire to overthrow the Western empires.
Mitch Daniels (40:52):
I have always loved Paul Johnson’s characterization of the Nazi Soviet pact, which he described as gangster fraternization. It remains a reasonable description of what we see today. As we move toward the end, Paul, let me ask you this. We may end up beating our adversaries to it when it comes to undermining our own country and our position as number one. You, and others as well, have suggested that the founders worried about this very possibility, and that many people since have shared that concern. The loss of faith in our institutions, and the loss of understanding among young people, could undo the American experiment before our international enemies ever get the chance. In your book Doom, you said you hoped the back end of the twenties would be boring. You added that they would be bored if we are lucky. So how lucky do you feel, as Dirty Harry used to say?
Niall Ferguson (41:56):
I was always a big fan of Clint Eastwood's character, Dirty Harry. I don't think you're allowed to watch those movies anymore. They're not very politically correct. Look, I wrote Doom in 2020 during the pandemic, and one thing that that book got very right was how quickly we went back to normal and put the COVID-19 pandemic behind us to the extent that we now look back on that year with incredulity that we were made to live the way we were. So the book spotted that we would get over a pandemic and get back to normal quite quickly. It also spotted that after the plague would come the war and that disasters tend to come in this odd sequence that you don't quite know what you're going to get next, but if you had a pandemic, you're probably going to war next. And we ended up with two of those.
(42:52):
So the '20s are not as boring as I was hoping for, not with Russia invading Ukraine and Hamas attacking Israel and then Iran attacking Israel, and who knows what comes next. But the one thing that I'm more optimistic about than I was when I wrote that book is that many Americans feel dissatisfied with that mood of cynicism towards our institutions that developed in recent years, and they do want some kind of a regeneration. Building that sort of quintessentially American word is an exciting one. It's what mobilizes young people to go to a new university or people to start a company in Texas rather than California. I'm picking up a new mood amongst young Americans and maybe the election expressed at least some of that mood, a mood to revitalize the country and get back to its original promises. And I was very struck as I listened to President Trump's victory speech as he meandered and weaved his way through it in his now inimitable style.
(44:10):
But what he was really saying was quite an optimistic upbeat message, a message of national renewal. We'll see how far he gets with that because of course the naysayers will carry on it saying nay. And I'm currently collecting the predictions that we're descending into the fascist abyss. I want to collect those predictions from the Trump derangement syndrome camp. I think they'll continue to make those prophecies of doom and be wrong. So I'm hoping that the '20s, while they won't be boring, might just be roaring and maybe roaring in a really good way.
Mitch Daniels (44:57):
Yeah. Do keep those predictions around. You wrote elsewhere quite accurately that political prognostication is a very inefficient market.
Niall Ferguson (45:07):
Correct.
Mitch Daniels (45:07):
Meaning that those who do it poorly don't seem to pay a price, but maybe next time it'll be different.
Niall Ferguson (45:16):
I think we should all be forced to play the prediction markets. I think if every pundit had to actually bet on a prediction market that their prediction was right, we would soon see some efficiency in that market, wouldn't we?
Mitch Daniels (45:31):
Yeah. I hope that your observation proof's correct about young people. Young people in all times have been rebellious and some of us have been waiting for them to rebel. I mean, what are they being fed today in many cases? What is there to rebel against? It is some of these anti-freedom and culturally aggressive policies that other societies clearly had enough of.
Niall Ferguson (46:09):
Well, the good news, Mitch, is that in Silicon Valley, they went through a phase of being very cowed by wokeism and the big technology companies, if anything, were captured by the mind virus that was emanating from the campuses, but there really has been a revolt against the HR departments, utterances, and the censorship mandates. And that revolt is spread much further in the tech sector than people realize. Of course, some people are open about it. Elon Musk has been open. Joe Lonsdale has been very open. Peter Thiel, of course, was early to dissent, but the dissent is now much more widespread. I would say what's interesting about the tech sector in the United States right now is the extent to which it has politically shifted away from the democratic progressive consensus towards a libertarian rather than conservative state of mind, but personified by Musk.
(47:11):
This is a pretty radical vision of national renewal that is going to take us to Mars and beyond. That to me is exciting and it certainly wasn't detectable four years ago. So this is new and potentially completely transformative.
Mitch Daniels (47:30):
I think you're possibly right. And it's not limited to Silicon Valley, the whole mentality, which I think you accurately reordered as DIE, I believe that was you.
Niall Ferguson (47:44):
Yes.
Mitch Daniels (47:46):
Much more appropriate acronym.
Niall Ferguson (47:48):
That's what it's all about.
Mitch Daniels (47:50):
It's collided with reality in the world of investing and in the world of leading corporations and so forth. It's even come into question on certain campuses when people go look.
Niall Ferguson (48:02):
Although I think the campuses will be the last holdout.
Mitch Daniels (48:06):
They will.
Niall Ferguson (48:07):
Corporate America has seen that this is go woke, go broke. That message has got through. I think generally speaking, in that sense, we've seen peak woke, but it'll retreat into the universities where it's most secure and well-defended and it'll be a real fight to root it out there.
Mitch Daniels (48:26):
When the New York Times goes to the University of Michigan and comes out and writes an expose essentially that says it backfires, it doesn't work, something's changing.
Niall Ferguson (48:37):
Absolutely.
Mitch Daniels (48:40):
One last question then. You've taught us in more than one of your works that the failure or the collapse and displacement of a leading country or civilization can happen very suddenly. In fact, it's more likely to happen suddenly. You gave us one scenario when you talked about a blockade of Taiwan, what that might lead to. So I like to end these with a question on which that might bear, which is, do you believe in 2050, the United States of America will be more or less free than it is today? I guess to get to be more free, you have to presuppose nothing quite that sudden and cataclysmic has happened, but tell me, where are we more likely to be by then?
Niall Ferguson (49:40):
Well, I think the short run is dangerous. The longer run is pretty benign because I think the trends are mostly our friends, who believe in liberty. Technologically, the trends are our friends, technology is biased and in favor of liberty. It's extremely hard to maintain totalitarian systems that are essentially mid 20th century designed in the 21st century. I think our foes have profound problems. We've talked about the demographics. They don't have succession plans except maybe North Korea. It's pretty hard to manage the succession in a dictatorship and these guys aren't immortal. Remember, by 2050, no Putin, no Xi, definitely no Khamenei. Even Kim Jong Un doesn't look so healthy these days unless they get some Ozempic through to Pyongyang. So these guys are gone and they don't have a succession plan. We have a succession plan. It's called elections and term limits. So one way or another, whoever is president in that distant future is going to be a democratically elected, relatively young person by comparison with the people on the other side.
(51:04):
Finally, the thing that gives me the most optimism over that 25 year timeframe is that the United States is proving that it is clearly superior when it comes to attracting talent from the rest of the world, equipping it with capital and letting innovation rip. Nowhere else comes close. And I don't see how anywhere else would come close in that kind of timeframe. So over a three-year timeframe, I bite my fingernails and I fret because we're in a position of such vulnerability. We're over-committed, but we don't have the resources. We've lost deterrence. We're highly vulnerable. I really worry about the next three or four years, though I have to say I worry less than I'd be worrying if Kamala Harris had become president. I think we have more deterrence, if nothing else, with Donald Trump in the White House.
(52:00):
But if you're asking me about 2050, I'm bullish, the United States. I would be super worried if I was running China and I was asked the question that you just asked me. If I'm sitting in Tehran and you say, "How are we going to be doing in 2050?" I'll be like, "Well, I think we'll be gone, to be honest." Each of these regimes is, I think, much less likely to make it to 2050 than the countries that are based on liberty, because liberty is the superpower. It's with liberty that we can innovate, solve the problems that we confront, have open debates, disagree, and arrive at the best solution. These are just things that the most talented people in the world crave. And as long as we let them come here, how can we possibly fail?
Mitch Daniels (52:48):
Given your record of prescience I'm uplifted and encouraged, and I buy it. And when, I'll say when, not if, freedom still prevails in a country that has embodied it for so long, people are going to say that this guy Ferguson was one major reason why. Sir Niall Ferguson, thank you for your current body of work and all the great achievements that I know lie ahead. You've been very, very gracious to join us today. And I know that everybody who is privileged to view this broadcast is going to feel the same. Thank you very much.
Niall Ferguson (53:32):
Well, Mitch Daniels, thank you for all you have done and do for liberty.
Mitch Daniels (53:38):
Thanks to each of you for joining us today. You can find this and the previous programs in the Future of Liberty series at LibertyFund.org/podcast, The Future of Liberty. Thank you once again. See you at the next show.
Outro (53:52):
The Future of Liberty has been brought to you by Liberty Fund, a private educational foundation dedicated to encouraging discussions of the ideal of a society of free and responsible individuals.