We Aren’t All Soviets Now ... Or Are We? | Jonah Goldberg vs. Niall Ferguson

The Remnant with Jonah Goldberg

The Dispatch

Politics, News

4.6 • 6.3K Ratings

🗓️ 11 July 2024

⏱️ 73 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, welcome to the octagon! The summer of 2024 has been one of epic feuds: Kendrick Lamar vs. Drake, Joe Biden vs. George Clooney, and, most notably, Jonah vs. Hoover Institute fellow and Free Press columnist Niall Ferguson. Jonah and Niall duke it out over the latter’s controversial claim: that America is the new Soviet Union. Jonah says nyet. Questions fly and accusations abound. Why is U.S. life expectancy declining? Is Jonah in denial? Is Niall just a provocateur? This match-up covers it all: the distinction between excess freedom and excess repression, why fentanyl is different than vodka, what causes deaths of despair, how illiberalism shapes both institutions and social outcomes, and what Cold War II could look like. As for the title-winner? We’ll let you be the judge, comrade. Show Notes: —Niall Ferguson: “We’re All Soviets Now” —Jonah Goldberg: “No, We Are Not Living in ‘Late Soviet America” —The Twitter Spat —“The Flight 93 Election” —“Why Socialism Failed in the United States” —Joseph Schumpeter: “Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy” Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Oh, Ladies and gentlemen, can I please have your attention?
0:17.0	Can I please have your attention?
0:19.0	Can you diggah? Goodyear listeners this is Jonah Goldberg host of the
0:29.6	Reminden Podcast brought to you by the dispatch and dispatch media so today we did something a little different as many of you Podcast. a debut column over at the free press in which he tried to make the case that we are like the
0:47.1	soviet the late Soviet Union across a whole slew of different ways I disagreed disagreed on some very specific points and we got
0:56.8	Mike Monaghan, an old friend of mine to be the moderator. I think he did a great job.
1:00.9	We've already recorded it. You're about to hear it it I also think it does a pretty good job of showing rather than telling where some of the
1:06.7	disagreements or fault lines between us and the free press lie and I can talk about that a little bit more afterwards. I'm going to have my little
1:14.8	sum up afterwards conversation so you can check that out and thanks to Neil Ferguson for being a good
1:20.6	support. Thanks to Mike Monaghan and let's get going.
1:25.0	A few weeks ago, fresh off of being knighted by King Charles, historian Sir Neil Ferguson
1:29.8	officially joined the free press as a columnist.
1:32.6	His first piece was rather provocatively called,
1:35.6	We're all Soviets now.
1:38.2	In it, he argued why he thinks today's United States
1:40.9	resembles the decaying Soviet Union of the 70s and 80s.
1:44.8	We're physically unwell, heavily indebted, run by an out-of-touch garantocracy and subjected
1:50.3	to a bogus ideology pushed by elites.
1:53.0	And this was published before the disastrous presidential debate between Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
1:58.0	Since then, Neel's only doubled down.
2:01.0	He argued in his most recent column for the free press that the reason our system is only offering up an embarrassing blowhard and a senile old man lies in contemporary America's similarities to the Soviet Union in the 1980s.
2:13.2	All of it is vintage Ferguson, a thorough audacious provocation.
	...

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