If the West is now ruled by Chernenkos, is a Putin on the horizon?

Like Communism in the late 1980s, neoliberalism now appears to be collapsing. If the West’s ‘late Soviet’ phase ends, what comes next?

Image courtesy of DALL-E

All the more reason for progressive community and cultural leaders to use such time to think about how they will handle this global phenomenon — whether they will take a step back from their deep-rooted cosmopolitan value settings and assess the obvious situation: that strong progressive values, above all on immigration and the moral necessity of a cosmopolitan culture, will be held strongly only by about 25% or 30% of the population…

It’s up to thought leaders of these groups to start to force them to think about why they’re losing so badly — with potentially lethal consequences — and challenge them to start to come to some sort of middle ground. In Australia, where that sphere is self-contained and irrelevant — as the Voice vote showed — and rejoices in its irrelevance, there is almost no chance this will happen. 
Guy Rundle, Crikey, 23/1/24

Over the last week or so, the blogosphere has been abuzz about a Niall Ferguson – now Sir Niall Ferguson – think piece for Bari Weiss’s

The Free Press

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The piece is titled ‘We’re all Soviets now’. It’s about how Americans – and more broadly, citizens of Anglosphere and Western European societies – find themselves in an equivalent position to the Russians  – and, more broadly, Eastern Europeans – during the arse end of the Soviet era (and immediately after it).

I’d recommend reading Ferguson’s characteristically erudite and elegantly written article. But if you don’t have the time, here’s the tl;dr summary of Ferguson’s comparisons.

Soviet Russia: Inadequate health system, rampant deaths of despair 

2024 America: Inadequate health system, rampant deaths of despair 

Soviet Russia: Political show trials

2024 America: Political show trials

Soviet Russia: Gerontocratic leadership 

2024 America: Gerontocratic leadership 

Soviet Russia: A cosseted elite buffered from the rougher edges of Communism

2024 America: A cosseted elite buffered from the rougher edges of Capitalism

Soviet Russia: A widespread loss of faith in institutions among the 98.5% of the population not part of the nomenklatura

2024 America: A widespread loss of faith in institutions among the 70-80% of the population not part of the corporate or cultural elite

Soviet Russia: Unshakeable commitment to Communism in the belief this will ultimately bring about utopia 

Pre-2024 America: Unshakeable commitment to economic and social hyperliberalism in the belief this will ultimately bring about utopia   

Soviet Russia: Locked in a Cold War with a technologically, economically and militarily superior rival  

2024 America: Locked in a Cold War with a rival determined to achieve technological, economic and military superiority. China currently has 200X the shipbuilding capacity of the US and is determined to surpass it in “strategic technologies” ASAP. Xi has instructed the Chinese military to be ready to invade Taiwan by 2027  

Soviet Russia: A touching faith among the leadership class that self-interest could be easily overcome if the common people could just learn to think and behave appropriately

2024 America: A touching faith among the leadership class that tribalism can be easily overcome if only the common people can just learn to think and behave appropriately

Soviet Russia: A failing petrostate by the mid-1980s 

2024 America: Skyrocketing debt, no serious plan to provide for future retirees and now spending more on debt interest payments than defence

1980s Russia: A self-satisfied, insular elite fails to realise that the masses aren’t simply temporarily disenchanted with economic conditions but rather determined to replace the incumbent ruling class and go back to the drawing board

2020s America/the West: Ditto   

Here is Ferguson’s concluding money quote:

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? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid…

I still cling to the hope that we can avoid losing Cold War II—that the economic, demographic, and social pathologies that afflict all one-party communist regimes will ultimately doom Xi’s “China Dream.” But the higher the toll rises of deaths of despair — and the wider the gap grows between America’s nomenklatura and everyone else—the less confident I feel that our own homegrown pathologies will be slower-acting. 

Are we the Soviets? Look around you.

Please note that Ferguson is a capitalism-loving right-winger who is so keen on the US that he immigrated there a few years ago.

To be clear, the critique of neoliberalism (surely the ‘bogus ideology’ he’s referring to) outlined above comes from someone who is, or at least was, a neoliberal in good standing. Someone who regularly interacts with the highest-ranking members of the West’s nomenklatura. Someone who takes pride in being invited to lecture the assembled plutocratic worthies at Davos.

I’d put it to you, dear reader, that if even Sir Niall Ferguson is now slagging off the peculiar mix of free-market fundamentalism and DEI derangement that we’ve all spent decades bowing down to, then neoliberalism’s goose is well and truly cooked.   

If Biden is Chernenko, what does that make Trump?
Predictably enough, Ferguson’s essay set off a furious blogosphere debate about just how much contemporary America (and the West) resembles Soviet Russia.

I’m not going to weigh in, other than to declare I believe Ferguson’s analogy valid enough for widespread panic.

People who aren’t history, politics or Russia nerds often don’t realise that as bad as late Soviet Russia was, post-Soviet Russia was even worse. Under Communism, you were oppressed but at least had economic security. Of a kind, at least.

In post-Communist Russia, the oppression disappeared – for a while – but so did the economic security. As always, some people did well in post-Soviet Russia – frequently well-connected members of the erstwhile nomenklatura – but many more saw their standard of living collapse. An experience perhaps not entirely unfamiliar to many of those blue-collar workers in the West who’ve had their jobs shipped to lower-wage countries in recent decades.  

Spoiler alert
The traumatised, disenchanted and weary Russians eventually turned to a strongman who promised to keep the oligarchs, gangsters and gangster-oligarchs under control and redistribute some wealth from them to the little people.

Of course, that could never happen here.  

Nonetheless, I’ve found myself returning to the following passage from Ferguson’s jeremiad in the days since I first read it:

As 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 truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude…