Are We in ‘Soviet America’? Not Even Close.
What Niall Ferguson gets wrong, leaves out, and distorts.
ONLY TWO WEEKS AFTER Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s long essay in the Free Press blaming America’s (and, more generally, the West’s) cultural woes on vaguely conspiratorial “subversion” out of the Soviet KGB playbook, here comes a different twist on the “Soviet America” concept: Maybe we are the Soviets of our time. British historian Niall Ferguson—Ali’s husband—makes that case in yet another Free Press article; he is enthusiastically seconded by Helen Andrews at the American Conservative, who thinks Ferguson’s only error is that he underestimates just how Soviet we’ve become.
Ferguson’s comparison is specifically between the United States today and the latter-day USSR of the 1970s and 1980s, slouching toward collapse: everything from stagnant productivity and “gerontocratic leadership” to rising death to out-of-touch elites. Of course, you could point out, as some people have, that the USSR kept its borders sealed to keep people from getting out while the United States is beefing up border security to keep people from getting in. Pure cope, says Ferguson, suggesting that the more salient point is that “neither the late Soviet Union nor the late-Soviet USA were capable of even the rudimentary state function of policing their borders,” because a German teenage aviator was able to land a small plane on Red Square in 1987. (By that logic, one could conclude that East Germany was a functional society up to the very end because people were still getting shot dead at the Berlin Wall in 1989.) You could also say that the Soviet photos illustrating Ferguson’s piece—grubby food shops with no food, long lines at the liquor store—are a potent rebuttal to his putative point. But hey, he tweeted out a thread with side-by-side photos of Leonid Brezhnev and Joe Biden in sunglasses, and who can argue with that?
As someone who emigrated from the Soviet Union as a 16-year-old in early 1980 and got to experience “late Soviet life” firsthand, my first response to the notion that we’re living through a similar moment in modern-day America is . . . well, I’ll just quote the great Soviet and post-Soviet satirist and comedian Mikhail Zhvanetsky: “No words. All that’s left is epithets.” But Ferguson’s attempt at analysis does deserve a more detailed examination—which isn’t easy because, like Ali’s “subversion” theory, it’s all over the place, and trying to analyze it is another exercise in nailing Jell-O to the wall.
Still, let’s give it a go. Buckle up, tovarisch.
LET’S START WITH FERGUSON’S ASSERTION that the decline in life expectancy, the growth in addiction, and the rise in suicide rates illustrate a similar self-destructive trend for Homo sovieticus and Homo americanus. Aside from the fact that he sloppily conflates the late Soviet period and the early post-Soviet period—his suicide statistics for Russia are from the mid-1990s—he himself acknowledges that the scope of self-destruction is very different: “Suicides among [Russian] men aged 50 to 54 reached 140 per 100,000 population in 1994—compared with 39.2 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic American men aged 45 to 54 in 2015.” Should we be alarmed that between 2000 and 2019, suicide rates in the United States rose by 45 percent (to 14.5 per 100,000) while falling in most other countries, resulting in a suicide rate 61 percent above the world average where it had been 29 percent lower? Of course. But to see this somehow analogous to the late Soviet period, when the suicide rate in the Russian Federation in 1990–91 was over 39 per 100,000 even by almost certainly undercounted official Soviet data, is a stretch.1
Not all U.S.-Russian or U.S.-Soviet comparisons are off-base. Accounts of addiction and hopelessness in depressed rural and semirural regions of the United States can, indeed evoke a sense of déjà vu for those familiar with the bleak hellscapes of Soviet and post-Soviet life in the Russian provinces (even if the living standards of the American poor would no doubt look like luxury to the late-stage Soviet citizen). One difference: In the USSR, these hellscapes blanketed much of the country. In the United States, they are limited, if disturbing, pockets of squalor.
Also worth disentangling is Ferguson’s claim that a decline in American life expectancy “in the past decade” is comparable to a similar decline in the Soviet Union’s final years. In the USSR, life expectancy dropped by a full year (from 68.48 to 67.47) between 1970 and 1985, due to alcoholism as well as deteriorating health care. The United States saw a small dip in life expectancy due mainly to “deaths of despair” between 2014 and 2017 (from 78.9 to 78.6 years), followed by an uptick in 2018–19. The really shocking drop, by 2.4 years, came in 2020–21—that is, during the COVID-19 pandemic, which had a much smaller impact on life expectancy in Europe. Yet Ferguson’s list of the causes of life expectancy decline—drug and alcohol abuse, suicide, and obesity-related health conditions—doesn’t even mention COVID-19. Nor does he mention that in 2022, American life expectancy rose by a year, though still falling short of pre-COVID levels.
In defending his article, Ferguson tweeted out a lot of graphs meant to validate his points. One such graph (with no source cited) shows that mortality rates for American men ages 40 to 69, while declining or remaining steady, have since 2015 been a fraction higher than for Russian men in that age cohort. I’m not sure what that’s meant to tell us as far as comparisons to the USSR in the 1970s and 1980s. I’m also not sure the numbers are accurate. According to United Nations data, annual death rates for American men at ages 45 and 65 did rise slightly after 2015 even pre-COVID, but still remain markedly lower than in Russia.
One could pick apart a lot of other claims in Ferguson’s article. Economist Noah Smith, for example, points out that while Ferguson “cites slow productivity growth as a sign of American dysfunction,” the fact is that it’s “even slower in other countries”—probably including China, which Ferguson depicts as America’s fearsome rival and, quite possibly, the counterpart of the United States to our Soviet America in our supposed Cold War redux. But let’s stick to the cultural resemblances Ferguson sees between late-Soviet communism and modern America.
Take the gerontocracy. The late Soviet period was, as Ferguson notes, “personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko”—a subject of endless Soviet jokes that culminated in one in which a man, asked if he has a pass to a leader’s funeral, replies that he has a subscription. Ronald Reagan laughed that he “hadn’t had much chance to meet with” Soviet leaders before Gorbachev because “they kept dying on me.”
It’s true that, as Ferguson notes, this year’s presidential race has 81-year-old Joe Biden squaring off against 78-year-old Donald Trump. Ferguson needn’t have stopped there; he could also have pointed to the Senate leaders, Chuck Schumer and Mitch McConnell (73 and 82), or to the long list of very senior House Democrats. But the analogy still falls flat. Soviet gerontocracy was a symptom of an ossified system in which all power was concentrated in the hands of a tiny clique of old men. In the United States, it’s something like the opposite—social and political upheaval—that has given us this year’s presidential nominees. There is no shortage of younger politicians in both parties ready to step up to the plate. And while the American political system is often dysfunctional, that is at least as often the fault of younger politicians (like those Republicans responsible for the excruciating search for a new House speaker last year) as of older politicians (who, like Biden, McConnell, and Nancy Pelosi, are often highly effective deal-makers).
Of course you can make a solid argument that this year’s presidential rematch is symptomatic of something very wrong in our body politic. But to make it, you would have to focus pretty heavily on one candidate—the one whose recent conviction of 34 felony counts over payoffs to conceal extramarital sex with a porn star Ferguson sees as “Soviet justice” aimed to take down “the leader of the political opposition.”
MAKE NO MISTAKE: Ferguson’s purported critique of “Soviet America” is aimed more or less exclusively at blue America. (When he makes observations that reflect progressive critiques of American society—for instance, citing a paper that blames the rise in mortality on the paucity of “communal assistance” in the United States compared to Western Europe—he attaches no political valence to them.) This is one of his key points about the alleged cultural resemblance between the Soviet Union in decline and the United States today:
[A]s in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.
In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants. . . . The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”
Take a close look at Ferguson’s list of “Soviet America’s” supposed falsehoods and you’ll see the ‘nailing Jell-O to the wall’ problem. Who believes all these things? Liberals? Progressives? Do many progressives believe that “most of the big corporations” have an agenda of championing oppressed groups?
Later on, Ferguson discusses a 2023 Rasmussen poll supposedly showing “the gulf that now separates the American nomenklatura from the workers and peasants.” The “American nomenklatura” here is defined as “those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile,” and with a degree from “Ivy League schools or other elite private schools.” It’s a weirdly specific group in which nearly 90 percent “favor ‘rationing of gas, meat, and electricity’ to fight climate change.” I don’t doubt that high-income Ivy Leaguers have attitudes different from those of the average American. To what extent this gap has widened since, say, the 1980s is a question that deserves a serious examination. But Ferguson, much like the Rasmussen pollsters, isn’t interested in a serious examination; he’s interested in an ideological broadside. For what it’s worth, right-of-center economist Arnold Kling believes that the “buzzy poll” is a bad way to measure “elite” attitudes because of its focus of a small, “ultra-citified” slice of the One Percent.
Ferguson’s comparison of this group to the latter-day Soviet nomenklatura—officials in the Communist Party and state bureaucracies—is achieved partly by the sleight of hand of referring to the nomenklatura as a “political and cultural elite” (italics added). But here again his analysis breaks down. The actual cultural elite in the Soviet Union in the 1970s and 1980s—writers, artists, people in the entertainment industry, and simply college-educated people who regarded themselves as the intelligentsia—was heavily skewed toward anti-Soviet dissent, which is why it eagerly embraced Mikhail Gorbachev’s reforms.
Later in his article Ferguson cites “a bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables” as a point of resemblance between the Soviet Union then and America today. The “bogus ideology” is presumably “woke” progressivism. But it’s a specious point in more than one way.
First, while pretty much no one in the Soviet Union in the Brezhnev and post-Brezhnev era passionately believed in communism (the few people who did, like the elderly Stalinist teacher who was in charge of civic guidance for my class in middle school, were such dinosaurs that everyone snickered at them behind their backs), a lot of American leftists actually are passionate about their vision of social justice, even if some people pay lip service to “diversity, equity, and inclusion” for social or career reasons.
Second, yes, “woke” groupthink is bad and can create pernicious social pressures, and the pressure to parrot progressive tenets in mainstream institutions has some similarities to the mandatory political-loyalty sessions at Soviet workplaces or the pro forma nods to Soviet-style “political correctness” in many Brezhnev-era works of literature, art and entertainment. (While the American left has no gulags, getting people fired or books canceled for wrongthink is still authoritarian.)
But America remains a pluralistic society; remarkably, Ferguson doesn’t say one word about the existence of alternative institutions, even as he is writing for one. And, in a pluralistic society, there is room for pushback and correction to toxic trends: the kind of openness that Gorbachev campaigned to bring to Soviet society as glasnost is already baked into the American system. At the high point of “woke” zealotry in the summer of 2020, the Harper’s “Letter on Justice and Open Debate” warning about the dangers of an “intolerant climate” got extensive mainstream coverage. While it got pushback of its own, I don’t believe a single one of the 153 signatories—of whom, for the record, I was one—suffered any career repercussions. Subsequently, there were such strong mainstream critiques of progressive intolerance as Anne Applebaum’s cover story on “The New Puritans” in the Atlantic, and one of the most vocal critics of orthodox antiracism, linguist and author John McWhorter, got hired by the New York Times. Today, there’s a growing consensus even in “heterodox” circles that we have passed “peak woke.”
Third, if you’re criticizing Soviet-flavored left-wing groupthink and intolerance but have nothing to say about aspects of right-wing Trumpian populism that mirror both the Soviet legacy and toxic trends in post-Soviet Russia—authoritarianism, the strongman cult, paranoid conspiracy theories, pervasive grievance over lost “greatness”—chances are you’re being a political hack. Ditto if you discuss the danger of pervasive cynicism about various institutions in America without acknowledging that it comes not only from the failures of those institutions but from partisan polarization and, in part, from mostly far-right disinformation that deliberately seeks, like the propaganda machine in modern Russia, to make it impossible to distinguish truth from falsehood.
HELEN ANDREWS’S CONTRIBUTION to the discussion throws a few more arguments into the kitchen sink. In her American Conservative article, Andrews faults Ferguson for not mentioning fertility decline, not only in the United States but “everywhere liberalism touches”: she believes it “represents a deep nihilism and desire for oblivion no less than alcoholism or suicide.” But first of all, if we’re talking Soviet analogies, fertility in Russia only fell off the cliff after the collapse of the USSR in 1991 (climbing back up somewhat in the 2000s). Secondly, relatively low fertility exists even in places that aren’t especially liberal (e.g., Iran, Poland, Hungary, Japan) and seems to be primarily a phenomenon of affluence and access to birth control. While it’s a problem that affluent societies need to address, treating lower reproduction rates as suicidal commie nihilism is not a great way to do that.
Andrews also thinks that we’re likely to mirror Soviet collapse because in fifty years, thanks to DEI—that is, thanks to pressures to include more blacks and Hispanics in various professions—“the average American will no longer be able to count on his doctor being able to perform basic medical procedures or his plane not falling out of the sky.” What’s more, she says, just like in the Soviet Union, no one is allowed to talk about such problems.
Andrews backs up this assertion with a link to a recent Washington Free Beacon report about a spike in failing grades on some “shelf exams” (evaluations in preparation of medical licensing exams) at UCLA Medical School. But in fact, the story did receive attention in mainstream venues—and it’s unclear that it had any real substance. The poor test results may have been related primarily to a curriculum change; the students ultimately did fine in follow-up tests; and finally, no doctor can practice medicine without passing the licensing exams. Notably, even a health expert who believes the Free Beacon findings may point to real failings, oncologist (and “wokeness” critic) Vinay Prasad, cautions that there is no evidence that any of this is related to admissions standards being lowered because of DEI. As for “planes falling out of the sky” . . . yeah, that’s even more evidence-free.
Speaking of “evidence-free,” Andrews also suggests that the real evidence of America going down the Soviet drain is, quite simply, a vibe: “the average citizen looks around and thinks, This can’t possibly continue forever. The whole system is fake and insane” (italics in original). And if we don’t see it yet, well, Soviet citizens didn’t see it either in 1959 when the American National Exhibition in Moscow showcased American labor-saving household devices and consumer goods: Instead of being “dazzled,” says Andrews, they mocked the lack of grandiose technology like Sputnik satellites. Her source for this highly dubious claim? One Soviet citizen wrote a snarky comment in the visitors’ book; another made a snarky comment in Izvestia, the government daily; oh, and then-Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev was also snarkily dismissive of the “gadgets.” (You don’t say!) Never mind that 70,000 people visited the exhibition on its first day and a total of 2.7 million saw it over six weeks. Many, like my parents, came more than once.
It is also worth noting that while Andrews latches on to Soviet analogies as a way to indict modern-day America, just last year she argued in Compact that nostalgia for actual Soviet and Soviet-bloc societies is on to something: Those societies had more “sense of purpose” and less “disorder and degeneracy,” consumer luxuries aren’t everything (who cares about bananas when the Soviet bloc offered an alternative to liberalism?), and the lack of freedom and human rights was “an annoyance at most for the average person.” Andrews’s overriding point, always, seems to be ‘liberalism bad.’ Either it’s too Soviet, or it’s not Soviet enough.
YES, OF COURSE THERE ARE VERY REAL and serious problems in American society in 2024. Some of those problems come from the left. A lot come from the right—including, most pressingly, a presidential candidate who openly declares his contempt for American democratic institutions and norms, and who demonstrated this contempt in action a little over three years ago.
The recent articles by Ali and Ferguson in the Free Press, and Andrews’s postscript in the American Conservative, add up to the same argument: The left is plunging America into a catastrophe that either reflects Soviet-style subversion (perhaps unintentional, as Ali stresses in a reply to me denying that she is a conspiracy theorist) or presages Soviet-style collapse. This isn’t quite up there with the 2016 “Flight 93 Election” essay as a clarion call to vote for Trump or lose America. But the gist is the same: Stopping the left is the essential imperative.
This isn’t a diagnosis of real problems, even if some valid points are made along the way. It is—to use a quintessentially Soviet word—agitprop.