It is a Sovietesque spectacle for an aging leader to deny his ill health, but also a sign that we’ve got some life left in us yet that a very ...
Is America today equivalent to the Soviet Union in its dying days? That is the provocative proposition that the always-interesting Niall Ferguson advanced in a column for the Free Press last month. Ferguson has long believed the current conflict between the U.S. and China is a second Cold War. But now he is entertaining the possibility that the U.S. is not, er, the U.S., in this analogy, but rather the late-stage Soviet Union.
We should take Ferguson’s argument seriously. But the fact that, for his analogy to take hold, he must downplay the various problems China faces undercuts it. When others have made a similar case, I have rejected it. America, for all its current problems, still retains immense advantages, largely stemming from the parts of our vast, decentralized society not yet despoiled by political and cultural elites.
But even in doing so, I have had more time for at least one similarity: the dominance of a gerontocracy. Ferguson writes that “gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.” These are the leaders whom Ronald Reagan said “kept dying on” him.
Here, it can be plausibly argued that America, in certain respects, outdoes — or, perhaps, underperforms — the Soviet Union. “By current American standards, the later Soviet leaders were not old men,” Ferguson writes. All are younger than the current major-party presidential nominees: Joe Biden (81) and Donald Trump (78).
Biden’s fortunes have been the subject of much attention since last week’s presidential debate, when, bereft of any obstructing intermediation, he was revealed to all the world as unfit for the office of president. There is a whiff of Sovietism in the way so many were complicit in covering this up until then, and are reversing now. There is another such whiff in the way that Biden, like those Soviet and other leaders in similar positions, clings stubbornly to power he is clearly no longer suited to wield (though democracies are not immune to this phenomenon).
The very fact that the discussion of Biden’s fate is happening in public view, however, goes against the Soviet–America thesis. It would be hard for a controversy of this nature to emerge and continue in a top-down political system. The fact that much of the most consequential deliberation about Biden’s fate, assuming it is happening at all, is likely happening privately doesn’t necessarily drag us back down to Soviet levels, either. Succession was always a far more complicated matter in the Soviet Union, achieved with difficulty both with and without help from, shall we say . . . “nature.”
What happens to Biden next remains unclear. But already, the spectacle of speculation over his health seems to be affecting polls. And, though it may at first blush seem a meager consolation to state, popular elections are another thing we have over the Soviets. There may be a vast apparatus assembled on Biden’s behalf; it may be attempting to occlude all inconvenient facts about him; and it may have tremendous resources at its disposal. But there remains a population capable of concluding in the privacy of the voting booth, pace Solzhenitsyn, “let the lie come into the world, let it even triumph, but not through me.” With enough of them, the lie might not triumph after all. And even elections are not the final measure of a people’s will and vitality. It is the American people, ultimately, who will prove Ferguson wrong — or vindicate him.