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.
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Intro
Welcome to the Future of Liberty, a project of Liberty Fund hosted by Mitch Daniels.
Mitch Daniels
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 and 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 now you can repair to any of a 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 (1:10)
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, and Paul did that with his books. Not only that, but he was a conservative historian at a time when that was deeply unfashionable. And I do 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 Hobsbawm, who was an outright communist and then Paul Johnson came and it was like the vaccine straightened you out.
Mitch Daniels (2:02)
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. Yeah, someone said of him, in addition to all the parallels, the absolute parallels you just mentioned to your own tremendous career, someone said, I understand how 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 M.O.? How in the world have you been so prolific and so profound at the same time?
Niall Ferguson (2:53)
Well, that's a flattering question to be asked. I think of history 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've 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, oh, the thing about history is you can't write the essay till you've read all of that.
(3:53)
And at some level I found that exciting and challenging. I've always felt that reading is at some level 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. And 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 (4:54)
Harder for them these days in a Twitter world when attention spans have shrunk and…
Niall Ferguson (5:01)
Absolutely.
Mitch Daniels (5:02)
And less reading is being assigned before you get your hands on 'em. Let's talk just 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. We happen to be talking just a couple days after a presidential election and rather pivotal event. You're at Stanford University, surrounded by intellectuals, many of whom will not have welcomed the results. Talk just a little bit about the social and cognitive distance that today's intellectual class, by and large, to which they have drifted away from the rest of American society, was pretty graphically illustrated in those results. Results. In one of your essays you quoted this recent Rasmussen poll, which issue by issue by issue depicted a huge disconnect. How'd we get here and is there any prospect for some self-examination by your colleagues out there?
Niall Ferguson (6:17)
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 on 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.
(7:28)
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 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, and 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 is a little less hysteria than there was eight years ago.
Mitch Daniels (8:37)
They're not passing out cookies and offering comfort animals and so forth…
Niall Ferguson (8:41)
Not so far as I'm aware though maybe I'm speaking too soon, that the universities that have been more conspicuously offering therapy are I think Princeton where they sent out guidelines to professors telling them how to manage their doubtless traumatized students, but not so much of that at Stanford.
Mitch Daniels (9:01)
I hope they'll recover. Some have speculated even in advance of this conversation and election that perhaps what has come to be called woke has peaked. There's some, I think, pretty fragmentary evidence that it may have peaked. Do you believe that, if that's the case, is it resting or is this a latent virus waiting for a chance to erupt again?
Niall Ferguson (9:35)
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 are the candidate for you, that struck a nerve, especially with a lot of male voters, I think it's remarkable how much he has gained support from Hispanic males. A majority now of Hispanic males voted Trump and he's doubled his support amongst African-American males in the sense that woke was partly a kind of radical feminist enterprise in which the patriarchy, i.e., guys, were the enemy.
(10:49)
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 woke. 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 this is about intellectuals in particular. One of Paul Johnson's books that I enjoyed and stuck with me was called Intellectuals. He described in there the character of some of the leading lights of intellectual history. Was he cherrypicking when he pointed out that [Karl] Marx and [Jean-Jacques] Rousseau and Lillian Hellman and so many of these 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 it 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 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. 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 to 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 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 and I and Panos 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 geared 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 have, 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 Halland, 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 smorgasboard 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. And 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 in the way that immigrants have typically to this country and 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 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 Barraza and Frank. And so we have to ask ourselves what's going on here? And I think the answer is not a straightforward one because three different things of 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 alternative for Deutsche Land, the alternative for Germany, which clearly have 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 back in the days of the Cold War and that's still in business. There was a labor leader in this country, Jeremy Corbin, who was a kind of classic product of that whole mindset. And they had been making the same arguments against Israel against Zionism and pretty clearly against Jews since the 1960s. But the new elements, at least new in the west is the Islamist antisemitism that has come out of Muslim majority countries. And that didn't used to be part of our world, but because of large scale migration from Muslim majority countries to the Netherlands, to the entirety of Europe, to the United States, we are now grappling with the most virulent of these forms of antisemitism, which is the anti antisemitism of Islamic extremism. 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 in October the seventh of 2023. So that's I think that the story, as best I can understand it, the confluence of these three forms of antisemitism is 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. A better switch while there's time to a subject in which I think you have been far and away our most helpful tutor and that is the status of what we've known as the West and its future prospects. And there are reasons obviously for grave concern. I'd like to have you to walk us through some of these first, however, a curiosity question, you make a very interesting point in more than one place that most of history has been made by younger people because people didn't live to be old. Now we live in an age in which everywhere I look there's a gerontocracy in charge or it seems in so many places. Is that just an accident of a consequence of medical science and so forth? Or do older people make a different kind of history than young people make?
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 seventies into the eighties. It's partly that we have reduced family size in most countries. Now the total 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 will 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)
Well, yours probably is, but as a general rule, you're accurate.
Niall Ferguson (23:30)
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 are 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 are 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 is sworn in on January 20th. More interestingly, American legislators are on average much older than their counterparts in other countries.
(24:32)
So the US has a lot of people in positions of power who by historical standards are really quite elderly. 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 twenties is really low historically right now, but they also are putting up with all of this dead wood 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 rather brilliant young people are still able to produce paradigm shifts in technology such as artificial intelligence. 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 twenties. So the great thing about the United States is although we clutter up Washington with a 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 in history. There are some people you've written about this who see cycles and see this as an unsurprising event when it happens every few generations. And there, I don't like coming to this conclusion, maybe you'll talk me out of it, but let's just talk about some of the reasons this might happen. You have coined something called people are calling “Ferguson's Law,” which suggests that when a nation crosses a threshold, it starts spending more money servicing debts for the money it's already borrowed, then it spends on protecting its citizens and national security that this doesn't come to a happy ending. Is there a counter example to that anywhere? I haven't found one. You have certainly given us several from back over the centuries.
Niall Ferguson (27:21)
Well, I'm working on the paper that sets out with all the necessary chapter and verse and data. Ferguson's Law, I called it Ferguson's Law semi-seriously. But it's the only law of history that I've really come across that is hard to find an exception to. You go back to the 15th, 16th, 17th century, the empires at that time all succumbed one time or another to Ferguson's Law. The Dutch Republic did. Habsburg, Spain did. Then the 18th century it be fell. The French Bourbon monarchy in the 19th century, it fell. The Ottoman Empire and the 20th century ultimately caught up with Britain. And the amazing thing is that the United States is now at that point, this very year is the year that the US will spend for the first time more on debt service than on defense. And it's a big problem because once you're in that situation, there is this fiscal constraint that limits your ability to re-arm if you are suddenly confronted with an adversary.
(28:26)
And the United States is confronted with a formidable adversary in the year 2024, the axis that unites China with Russia in 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 typically are ahead of me and anticipate some of my questions and you put your finger typically on. I think the central dilemma facing this right now for some of us who have been preoccupied for a very long time about the national debt, we’re accumulating the uncapable promises we've made to people in the sense of betrayal that is probably awaits us when we can't deliver. One can say that the two central purposes for which governments come into being are the physical protection, the safety of those forming the government and the proper stewardship of the money that is confiscated them allegedly for common purposes. And now I don't know which between SIL and CDAs here, I don't know which way to jump because both needs are urgent and you just illustrated are in head-to-head collision.
Niall Ferguson (30:15)
We talked some minutes 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 say, don't worry, there's going to be such a dramatic increase in productivity growth, but 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 was 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 raise taxes.
Mitch Daniels (31:56)
Yeah, regrettably, I think we can all hope, but regrettably, I think a more probable outcome is once again some sort of a crash. I know probably not the great historians favorite historian, but Toynbee attempting to sort of impose some patterns on history I thought made a lot of sense when he said 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 don't. I don't think we see much in the recent performance of our elites here to suggest that we will handle, let's say a debt crisis of some kind, a retreat from the dollar, let alone a military setback, the conquest of Taiwan or something. I think
Niall Ferguson (32:50)
The military setback is the more likely actually because the US can run really quite a large public debt if it remains the number one global superpower with the number one reserve 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 blockades 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 (33:53)
Sending what remains of the Navy?
Niall Ferguson (33:54)
Sending our much reduced Navy? Do I tell 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 averse 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 always say, well, 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. 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. And at that point, the 10 year treasury are no longer your preferred asset, your preferred currency if you are an international investor. And that's when things can get really nasty.
Mitch Daniels (35.23)
It’s like the Suez crisis and the British Empire. It's the game over moment where suddenly you are no longer number one and you no longer have the privileges of being number one. I want to come back to the term sudden. Right. Before we finish, I just want to point out like so many other things you correctly in 2011, even while recognizing the explosive growth of China and its prospects for further growth, you pointed out the very problems they're facing now, demographic bubbles possibly in real estate and banking and so forth. Now this could all be a reason, an additional reason that Xi decides to make his play. 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. And 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. And on that issue of Taiwan, in my experience, there's almost total unanimity on the mainland that Taiwan is part of China and any 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 as 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 hours, the Chinese were cynic, 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 these years later when in fact those three seem to at least be cooperating if not hoping to assemble themselves together and unsee 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 in the book civilization. I try and make the argument a 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. His hypothesis in the great essay that you just referenced was that more conflicts in the post called 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.
(39:40)
So you've got the People's Republic of China, which is a Marxist Leninist derivation. You've got Putin's Russia, which is kind of neo-imperial or statist 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. 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 of bringing 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 always loved Paul Johnson's characterization of the Nazi Soviet Pact, I think specifically gangster fraternization, which is not, it was a reasonable description of what we see today. Well, as we move toward the end, Paul, let me ask you, we may beat them to it in terms of undermining the country and our nation as number one. You certainly have, and others have suggested that the founders, that a lot of people since have worried about it that the loss of faith in our institution, the loss of understanding by our young people, could undo the American experiment before our enemies, international enemies have a chance. In your book, Doom, you said you hope the back end of the twenties would be boring. You said they'll be boring if we're lucky health. How lucky do you feel, As Dirty Harry used to say.
Niall Ferguson (41:58)
I was always a big fan of Clint Eastwood's character Dirty Harry, though I don't think you were 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 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 warn Nix. And we ended up with two of those.
(42:25)
So the twenties 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. 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. Nick's saying, nay, and I am collecting currently the predictions that we're 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 twenties, 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 the political prognostication is a very inefficient market, meaning that those who do it poorly don't seem to pay a price, but maybe next time we'll be,
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 proves 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? And it is some of these anti freedom and culturally aggressive policies that some of the rest of society has 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 workers. 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. And I would say what's interesting about the tech sector in the United States right now is the extent to which it has politically really shifted away from the democratic progressive consensus towards, it's a libertarian rather than conservative state of mind, but personified by Musk. This is a pretty radical vision of national renewal that is going to take us to Mars and beyond. And 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 apt acronym.
Niall Ferguson (47:48)
Yeah, that's what it's all about.
Mitch Daniels (47:49)
All about. 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)
Yeah, although I think the campuses will be the last holdout,
They will, but corporate America has seen that this is go woke, go broke. That message has got through, and 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)
But 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 (48:38)
Well, one last question then. You've taught us in more than one of your works that the failure or the collapse or the 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? And I guess to get to 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, we who believe in liberty technologically the trends are our friends, that technology is biased 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, she definitely no Chani. Even Kim Jong-UN doesn't look so healthy these days unless they get some Ozempic through to Pyong Yang. 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 present 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 the 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've got into a position of such vulnerability where over committee, 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 would be worrying if Kamala Harris had become president. I think we have more deterrence if nothing else, with Donald Trump and the White House. But if you are 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.
(52:11)
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, 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 am uplifted and encouraged and I buy it, and when I'll say, when not if the freedom is still prevails in a country that is embodied for so long, people are going to say that this guy Ferguson was one major reason why Ceril 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 every body privileged to view this broadcast is going to feel the same. Thank you very much.
Niall Ferguson (53:31)
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@libertyfund.org slash podcast, the Future of Liberty. Thank you once again. See you at the next show.
Outro
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