A government with a permanent deficit and a bloated military. A bogus ideology pushed by elites. Poor health among ordinary people. Senescent leaders. Sound familiar?

An amusing title from an article by historian Niall Ferguson, playing on the famous Newsweek cover from 2009 celebrating the ascension of Barack Obama to the US Presidency. Rubbish of course; a better title would have been, We’re All Corporate Welfare Agents Now.

A few years ago Ferguson horrified his contemporaries by saying that the West was now in Cold War II, with China replacing the Soviet Union, a view that has become much more commonplace since then, as he points out. But this article is about an aspect to that which he had not considered until now. That it’s the USA playing the part of the late USSR, a comparison he argues is not at all risible despite the obvious differences, because the similarities are frighteningly close (read the article for the supporting examples)

  • Increasingly unsupportable government budgets with endlessly growing deficits, debt and interest payments on the latter.
  • An economy that’s not delivering for the people, even when it is growing.
  • A military that is expensive yet with growing problems, referring to Senator Roger Wicker’s report.
  • Gerontocratic leadership.
  • Public disillusionment with almost all public institutions.
  • Poor mortality, life expectancy and mental health stats, all of which are growing worse: Deaths of Despair. All assisted by a healthcare system rather like the US military.
  • Ideologies that are failing: DEI, Climate Change, Gender Theory, Identity Politics, but which are pushed hard by an American nomenklatura that does not suffer from the consequences.

As he sums up:

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. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.

And although Biden is merely one symptom of all this the article caused me to recall another one, a rather prescient piece from 2020 that echoes what Ferguson is on about, Biden’s Brezhnev vibes. Here’s a couple of choice quotes from the female author who lived under such a regime, including the typical Soviet jokes:

‘Brezhnev’s voice on the radio: “Comrades! Imperialist enemies are spreading false rumors that my speeches are played on a record…a record…a record…”’

As with Ferguson’s comparisons: That sounds familiar!

At least nobody in the Soviet Union voted for Brezhnev — the elections were a sham with Communist party candidates running unopposed. Everything was a sham, actually. In his mumbling, robotic tones, the general secretary delivered long-winded, heavy on Marxist cliches and utterly incomprehensible televised speeches. The economy flattered, dissidents were subjected to psychiatric torture, corruption proliferated, and the rate of substance abuse skyrocketed. That period of Soviet history is known as zastoi, or stagnation. It only made sense that the man on top was some sort of sclerotic.