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By Ross Douthat
Opinion Columnist
Along with Donald Trump, a big winner in Thursday night’s presidential debate was the distinguished historian Niall Ferguson, who recently stirred up a lot of debate with a column for The Free Press comparing contemporary America with the later stages of the Soviet Union.
Part of that case was that our political system is governed by a gerontocracy that evokes the age of Leonid Brezhnev and Yuri Andropov. After watching Joe Biden’s performance on the debate stage, I think Ferguson can claim that point as proven.
His essay folded the gerontocracy argument into a larger case that exemplifies what you might call conservative doomerism. In general there is more doomerism on the American left today than on the right — both more personal pessimism and more anxiety about various apocalypses, from climate change to Trumpian authoritarianism. But Ferguson eloquently expressed a kind of general pessimism that I hear fairly often from friends on the right, a fear that America is not just a decadent society but also a deteriorating one, that like the late U.S.S.R., we are a hollow empire with an unsustainable economic model, a common life shadowed by addiction and despair, and a public square policed by a left-wing nomenklatura committed to ideological fantasies and hostile to dissent.
Like any good provocation, Ferguson’s column inspired various critiques (here’s Noah Smith, here’s James Pethokoukis, here’s Jonah Goldberg) and various defenses (here’s Ferguson responding to Goldberg, here’s Helen Andrews arguing that he doesn’t go far enough).
My view is that Ferguson’s analogy is useful if and only if you don’t go all the way with it. That is, I think that comparisons with the decay of the U.S.S.R. can help us see key ways in which American life has gotten worse — but the claim that America in 2024 is actually a lot like the Soviet Union circa 1983 is entirely unpersuasive.
But rather than critique that kind of claim directly, I thought I’d respond to Ferguson’s essay with a case for not being a right-of-center doomer, with an argument for why American conservatives, in particular, have some decent reasons for optimism about their preferred vision of the American future and certainly stronger reasons than “Soviet America” analogies would suggest.
I’ll work from the premise that American conservatism as a modern movement makes sense as a defense of specific forms of American exceptionalism against progressive criticism. So conservatives have sought to preserve America’s distinct religious character against secularization and social liberalism, America’s commercial dynamism against socialist alternatives, America’s decentralized sprawl and communitarian spirit against attempts to solve every problem from Washington D.C., a positive vision of........