America's Future May be Russia's Past

No one believes in the story anymore but can't see any way out.

Every Friday I post a little tidbit about the story I will write for Monday. I call it “Terrifying/Inspiring Thought of the Week.” Sometimes it is an inspiring fact, sometimes a terrifying one. Sometimes it is a bit ambivalent. This past week I attached a poll to the question and here are the results:

The average empire lasts 250 years.

The United States will turn 250 on July 4th, 2026.

Is this fact Terrifying or Inspiring?

You are all a bunch of America hating communists!

Speaking of communists.

I’ve come across an interesting thought in a few places over the past couple months. I didn’t seek it out, but I kept coming across it.

The idea is that America in particular, but the West in general is in a similar place culturally and as a society, as the old Soviet Union was in the late 70s and early 80s.

I first came across this in a video I stumbled upon while political doom scrolling on YouTube in the days before the US election in November. The video was Niall Ferguson Stuns World Leaders at ARC Australia - "Are We The Soviets Now?" I don’t know if Niall really stunned world leaders, but Niall is a smart guy and although I don’t agree with him on everything, I usually learn something when I read something he has written or her him speak, so I watched the video. You can also read the article the talk was based on here: Niall Ferguson: We’re All Soviets Now - by Niall Ferguson.

Ferguson posits that there is a big problem in America currently, but it is masked by fiscal and monetary policy on steroids. Ferguson observes that like the Soviets of 40 years ago America today is gerontocratic. We are ruled by 80 year olds. Trump will be 82 when his term ends.

Ferguson points out that when a great power is spending more on debt payments than it is on defense, it usually won’t be great much longer. In the US, we just passed this threshold. The history of this law (he modestly calls it Ferguson’s law) isn’t great for the countries that mess with it. This law hobbled the Dutch Republic, Hapsburg Spain, Bourbon France, Ottomans in the 19th Century and the British in the 20th century.

Like the late Soviet Union, we live in a country in America today where no one believes in the system anymore. The WSJ ran a poll in March 2023 in which most Americans were pessimistic about the future. Less than 40% said that patriotism, religion, having children or community involvement was very important to them. All of those numbers were at or above 60% twenty-five years ago. Public confidence in American institutions are at historic lows. Trust in Congress is in single digits.

Another telling sign of American decline is the physical health of its citizens. As many Americans have died of suicide or drug overdose in the United States in the past decade as have died of Covid 19 , about 1.2 million. These are deaths of despair. This deaths of despair trend is not seen over the past 10 years in any other developed country. Life expectancy in the United States has taken a nasty turn, and it isn’t because of Covid. This is happening only in the United States, and it isn’t happening in countries that aren’t doing as well as the United States economically.

The only other advanced economy with a similar profile was the Soviet Union of the late 70s and 80s. In the Soviet Union, the deaths of despair came from alcoholism, but the result was the same. In the Soviet Union of the time the people had lost their faith in the system and regarded the party as a massive scam.

Now, Ferguson is a good conservative so he compares the Democratic party in the US to that of the Communists in the late Soviet Union, showing that they are extremely out of touch with the average American. He’s not wrong. But an example he gives is that Democrats favor rationing gas, meat and electricity. That’s a bit of a dirty trick. If you ask me should we use less gas, meat and electricity, I would say of course. The question I answered was not about rationing. If you ask me if those things should be rationed, I would say no. I would argue that education and policy should be how this happens. Policy can include simply a removal of subsidies for oil and gas, beef and dairy, and coal. That is not rationing at all, but will have the desired effect to some extent. So Ferguson takes a cheap shot at liberals. Boo hoo. Let’s move on.

Ferguson is right in my opinion that the Democrats seem to be out of touch with your average American, so I will give him credit for that.

Ferguson also bemoans how liberals in the US control the media because most journalists are more liberal or progressive. This argument always annoys me because the owners of media in the United States are all billionaires or corporations whose motive is profit, not truth. If there is an argument between the liberal news chief and the conservative billionaire owner of the paper, guess who wins that argument? Ask the former staff of the LA Times and the Washington Post if the liberal staff or the conservative owner gets the last word. But that is an essay for another day.

I agree with Ferguson in that we have to organize our civil society better if we are to avoid the catastrophe that happened to the Soviet Union. Ferguson says “economic growth is not enough”. He is not a degrowther to my knowledge, but I think we would agree that we need to stop messing around and address these problems. He urges us to rebuild our civil society. He blames this mostly on the Democrats, but I would argue the long term blame has little to do with culture wars, but again, essay for another day.

Then I saw the comparison again.

I saw Ferguson’s speech in November, days before the US election. But it was soon followed in December by an excellent essay by the Substacker, The Honest Sorcerer in his essay Before Societal Implosion Comes... - The Honest Sorcerer. He talks about the book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More The Last Soviet Generation (2006) by Alexei Yurchak.

Humanity is suffering through a crisis of imagination.

According to Yurchak everyone in the Soviet Union in the late 70s and 80s knew the system was falling apart, was corrupt and not good for the country, but everyone went along with the current system because they couldn’t imagine an alternative. Soviet society went along to get along propping up this failing system in their minds as normal and just fine because nothing had collapsed yet. Yurchak called this phenomenon hypernormalisation.

That hypernormalisation is alive and well in Western Countries in general and the United States in particular. Most of our planetary boundaries have been breached, extreme weather gets worse each year and brings more economic devastation, but for most of us catastrophe has not visited our doorstep, so we employ hypernormalisation to “normalize” in our minds the collapse that is starting around us.

We need to snap out of this torpor, or we face the same fate as the Soviet Union - collapse. But with one difference. There will be no rich abundance of resources and a stable political or environmental climate waiting for us to start over on the other side. (Russia subsequently squandered both these chances, but that’s not what we are here to talk about). When collapse comes for the West the environment will continue to get worse each year, and national politics will only get worse. The things that collapse in a collapse scenario include national governments. It will inevitably be up to local groups to pull everything together.

And then it came up again.

In early January, a friend told me I should read Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), author Alexei Yurchak, because they thought it described our situation. I laughed, and thought who would compare our current despair and hypernormalisation to the Soviet Union in February. Oh, I guess that’s me with this essay. So pass this along to someone you think might be interested in this analogy, or impress your friends at your next dinner party.

Back to that poll.

America is now 248 years old, and the average age of empires is 250 years. Thanks to Substacker “Here’s what I’m thinking” for pointing out that America was not an "empire" until the late 19th/early 20th centuries. True, but that doesn’t make my thought of the week as terrifying or inspiring.

Apparently, most people think America’s demise is inspiring.

I didn’t vote in the poll, but I would have answered terrifying. I know many people think things are too far gone and we should just let it all burn and start over, but that gets messy, and lots of people die. I’m trying to find a way for that to not happen. The best thing I have found thus far is degrowth. A planned downshifting of our economies and our cultures that puts human well-being above our current “growth at all costs” mindset is the best I have found so far.

That is a story that people can start believing in who right now see no way out of our current story. The alternative isn’t very appealing.

A unique way to start implementing that is what I want to talk about next. I’ll see you then.