Read the full transcript of Scottish-American historian Niall Ferguson’s interview on TRIGGERnometry podcast titled “How Civilizations Collapse” premiered November 20, 2025.
Listen to the audio version here:
TRANSCRIPT:
On Cyclical Theories of History
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Niall, it’s such a pleasure to have you back on the show at a time when few things are a pleasure. I feel it’s been a difficult time these last few weeks. We’re recording this at Ark. There are people who say that we are in the last days of Western civilization. There are people like Ray Dalio who talk about how there are six stages of the collapse of empire. We’re in five and a half or whatever. As a historian, what do you make of this and everything that has been happening recently?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Well, I agree that it’s not a particularly cheerful moment in world history. But in my most recent book, “Doom, the Politics of Catastrophe,” I tried to argue that cyclical theories of history should be regarded with a great deal of skepticism because history isn’t cyclical. We would love it to be because, of course, that would make it so much easier to understand and indeed to predict.
We would like it to be cyclical because we as individuals have a life cycle. But history doesn’t have a life cycle. Empires, civilizations, great powers, they don’t. And it’s obvious when you actually look at them seriously rather than massaging the data to find a cycle.
If you look at historical, long-run historical data, the characteristic feature is a lot of randomness. And that is because disasters, upheavals are not normally distributed. They’re actually often either completely random, like the incidence of major wars, or they are parallel driven, pandemics, earthquakes, that kind of thing. So I’m a big skeptic about cyclical theories of history.
Empires rise and fall.
It’s fun and it sells books. And there’s always a market in the United States, especially for the impending end of the republic. But it just doesn’t seem to me that history is like that.
Comparing Today’s Challenges to the Past
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] Okay, well, interesting. Let me try from a different angle then, because I think a lot of people might say, look at where we are. The West has accumulated huge debts. The West’s authority around the world is being challenged very robustly now, to put it mildly. And we seem to have lost a moral will here in the West. There are many other indicators that we may be trending in the wrong direction. Would you agree with that? Or are you more optimistic about the future?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] A lot of what you just said is true. But you could also have said that in 1973, so 50 years ago. Didn’t look great, did it? Because the United States seemed to be losing the Cold War, basically had bailed on South Vietnam, which two years later was gone, poof. And it wasn’t exactly going swimmingly in the Middle East in October 1973.
The Soviet Union, we know, was going to decline and fall with great speed in the 1980s. That wasn’t obvious in 1973. The inflation problem of ’73 was going to get a lot worse, plausibly. Not going to be as bad this decade. And I could go on.
In 1973, America was already in the early phases of the Watergate disaster, which would bring Richard Nixon to resignation to avoid impeachment. If you had asked people 50 years ago, how is it going, there would have been a lot who’d have agreed with the declinists who really thought the game was up. There was a huge amount of division in the United States.
And not only in the United States, I’m old enough to remember the ’70s. It wasn’t a particularly good time in the United Kingdom either. In fact, the UK was the sort of poster child of stagflation at that time.
So what am I telling you? Yeah, it’s not a great moment, 2023, but I’m not convinced that there’s some great cycle at work here. It was pretty bad 50 years ago, too. And seven years later, Ronald Reagan’s elected. Nine years later, the Berlin Wall comes down. And two years after that, the Soviet Union is gone. So the lesson I would like to draw from history is there’s a lot of non-linearity.
And you have to be, I think, making a more precise argument than you just did to get me properly worried.
Real Concerns for the West Today
So let me try. What is worrying today is not that we feel terribly divided or so polarized. It’s not particularly, I think, that there’s a major economic problem, actually. The United States economy is shockingly strong under the circumstances.
I think the things that are concerning to me are, number one, China, Russia, Iran, North Korea are working with increasing cooperation and coordination in ways that are threatening to a number of democracies that the United States and its allies have been backing. Ukraine is one, Israel is another, Taiwan is probably next.
And secondly, China’s really much bigger economically. It has much greater resources technologically, too, than any previous rival that the United States and its allies faced. Soviet Union economically was never more than about 42% of GDP relative to the US. Well, China’s a lot bigger than that, certainly in the 80% range. It’s above 100% if you do a purchasing power parity calculation.
The third thing that is, I think, concerning is that the United States feels less able to cope with these geopolitical challenges than it was, say, 50 years ago. And I’ll give you one specific example of that. It cannot be right that with the economy more or less at full employment, there’s a deficit of 7% of gross domestic product. And that is going to lead very quickly into some nasty fiscal arithmetic. And to be specific, debt service costs are about to overtake defense spending.
And that trend line is really not pretty with interest rates rising and the deficit in excess of 5% of GDP as far as the eye can see. So I think the fiscal situation of the US is a lot worse than it was in 1973. And that means that the US isn’t actually able to cope with three military crises at once.
Lastly, the military industrial complex ain’t what it was. God, I miss it. I mean, there was a time when the US really was the arsenal of democracy. I made this point some time ago in a Bloomberg column. It’s quite a bit behind China, which is now the arsenal of autocracy with manufacturing value added roughly 2x that of the United States. You don’t have to go back very far for it to be the other way around.
Back in, I think, around 2002, 2004, the US was a manufacturing power much greater than China. So in the space of two decades, there’s been a real role reversal. In the event of a hot war with China, the US would run out of precision missiles in about five days, more or less.
That’s a much worse situation than anything 50 years ago. So there are reasons to be worried. You have to be quite precise about what you’re worried about, and that’s what I’m worried about.
How Civilizations Fall
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Niall, let’s broaden this topic out a little bit. How do civilizations actually fall?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Well, that’s a good question. I think most people imagine, in a Toynbee-esque way, some kind of inner crisis of will, of morale, of self-belief. They think of it as perhaps a sort of aging process, or maybe it’s just entropy at work.
If one looks at the decline and fall of the Roman Empire, in Gibbon’s telling, it’s really a very protracted process, so protracted as to have been imperceptible, I think, for most contemporaries. But in more recent tellings, Brian Ward Perkins, for example, actually, the Roman Empire fell apart quite fast, especially the Roman Empire in the West. And I think it was perceptible that civilization had sort of come unstuck.
And I think we can understand similar processes if one looks, for example, in Chinese history. The Ming fell apart in the mid-17th century in a way that was very perceptible with very meaningful impact on quality of life.
So we know what it’s like when a civilization falls apart, the infrastructure stops working, public health gets much worse. It can be caused by war, it can be caused by plague, it can be caused by other forces that are perhaps less discernible. For example, a civilization can fail fiscally, it can fail because its monetary system doesn’t work, and it stops being able to deliver surpluses to the population.
So I think we understand a little bit how that process works. And when you look at the work of someone like Peter Turchin, there is an attempt through his cloud dynamics to construct models of civilizational breakdown and then look for a contemporary analogy. And in his most recent book, Peter argues that the United States is in this kind of a cycle.
He emphasizes the overproduction of elites, too many people with university degrees, not enough for them to do. He, I think, quite brilliantly forecast a sort of peak in organized violence in 2020, which I guess he got lucky with the pandemic and George Floyd and the subsequent mayhem, but it kind of looks quite good as a prediction right now.
I guess when you look at all his variables, however, you could make a similar argument about China. In fact, one of the variables, demographics, looks worse for China. Another of the variables, overproduction of educated people looks worse for China. So in my review of his book, which I like, I mean, I respect his work very much, I said might be true, but it might turn out to be true of China more.
A bit like Paul Kennedy’s book, you might remember “The Rise and Fall of the Great Powers,” which came out in 1987 and said there is a kind of law of decline where if you’re spending too much on one thing and not enough on defense, then your industrial capacity declines. And all of that was supposed to apply to the United States, but it turned out to be more true of the Soviet Union.
So we can look for these signs of unraveling, but I think we have to be quite careful not to be so sure that it’s a U.S. problem that we miss other worse problems elsewhere.
I think the U.S. also has a kind of interesting track record of worrying about its own decline. I think it’s the feature, not a bug of the United States to worry about decline or to worry that the republic is somehow going to enter a terminal crisis or that American power is going to wane. Americans love worrying about that. It’s one of the things that sells books and gets op-eds printed. And then it happens to the other guy and America’s like, “Gee, we won.” And then there’s the kind of euphoric decade before it’s time to start worrying about decline again.
The American Project and Belief in Shared Values
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] Do you not think as well, Niall, that one of the signs that a civilization is in collapse is they no longer believe in the shared myth of the empire? And do you not worry about that with America, where it seems that there doesn’t seem to be as many people, particularly in the elites, who believe in the project anymore?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Well, it depends what you mean by the project. Americans have never been comfortable with the idea of empire for the fairly obvious reason that their project is an anti-imperial one to begin with. So when the United States exercises power, it’s an empire in denial.
This was the theme of a book I did 20 years ago, “Colossus.” And I think that book was right about American power. It’s not something that can be exercised in the way that, say, British power was or, in fact, the way that most empires have exercised power because Americans are in denial about having that kind of power. When they go into Mesopotamia or into Afghanistan, somehow it’s not empire. But when anybody else does it, it is. So this is a strange thing.
It means that the American project doesn’t have as clear a mandate for global policing as other past empires. The American project’s really about being a shining city on a hill, building a kind of republic, which is just the best one, and everybody should be filled with admiration and want to copy it. And I think that project is definitely a project that is losing the confidence, especially of young Americans, fast.
And they’ve been aided and abetted in losing confidence by the education system, which is absolutely full of people from the elite of Harvard down to the lowliest kindergarten saying that the American project was bad. It was founded on white supremacy. And generally speaking, most of American history is a tale of woe.
That kind of argument is really quite widely believed by young people. So I think if the project is the shining city on a hill, the model for all democracies, that project has lost a lot of belief, particularly amongst young people. Whether they continue to feel that way as they get older is an interesting question.
By and large, people are quite inclined to stick with the views they form in their student years. It’s surprising how untrue it is that people are kind of lefties when they’re young, and then they’re sort of mugged by reality and become conservatives. It actually tends not to be true.
There’s quite a lot of continuity in the way people think about the world, and your views are often formed by some major event that occurred when you were in university. I worry a little bit about Generation Z, as Americans say. Their views are, on a whole range of issues, very, very different from the views of older Americans.
The Generational Divide in American Politics
[NIALL FERGUSON:] And I suspect they won’t radically change their worldview as they become more influential, turn up and vote more regularly, become a larger share of the population as the 65s and older die off. I think that could be a big issue, this fundamental skepticism about the American project that’s been inculcated in this young generation.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Can you flesh that out for us? What do Gen Zers believe that we don’t?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Well, let’s just take an example that I’ve been looking at recently. If you ask Americans about the crisis in Israel, about the attacks from Gaza and the Israeli response, the general public is pro-Israel. Older Americans are very pro-Israel. But if you ask Generation Z, they’re strongly pro-Palestinian.
Like 11% of them are with Israel, and I don’t know, 37% are actually with the Palestinians. That’s a huge shift. There are other shifts, too.
If you ask Generation Z, what’s your preference, socialism or capitalism? Close to 51%, 52% will say, actually, we prefer socialism.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Fuck me, sorry. Somebody who has experienced socialism.
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] We both have.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Yeah. I mean, I grew up in the west of Scotland, which is the nearest thing to socialism that was on offer in the UK, but then spent time in the 1980s in the Soviet Union and in East Germany.
The Illiberalism of Youth
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Yeah, I mean, I share your expletive deleted response, but that’s what’s going on. And I could go on. It’s interesting that on issues of the environment, young Americans and young Europeans are willing to contemplate quite authoritarian solutions because they feel that the planet is dying and we’ve only got 10 more years to save it, and therefore drastic measures are warranted.
So Yascha Mounk has been making the argument for some time that there’s a lot of illiberalism amongst the young, and that, I think, is concerning. It’s not surprising, though, because if one actually looks at the ways in which they’re educated, there’s a real predominance of content that is more indoctrination than education. People underestimate the extent to which even quite young children are being taught to believe that the United States was founded on white supremacy or that the planet is being killed and the only way to stop it dying is zero growth.
I mean, these ideas are quite widespread. And so one can’t sort of say there’s something terribly wrong with generations. I think we’ve just allowed the educational system to move much further to the left than most people realize.
I had lunch today with an old friend who is a little older than me and went to Princeton. I suppose he must have been there in the 1970s. And I found it quite hard to persuade him that his son won’t have the same experience that he has.
There’s a lot of denial about how far Princeton or Yale or Harvard have swung to the left amongst people who haven’t had that much to do with university life since they graduated. So I think there’s something going on here which is pretty worrying. If you tell young Americans, or for that matter, young British kids as happens, you know, your history, your country’s history is actually quite bad.
I mean, the United States founded on white supremacy. Britain, basically slavery. Industrial Revolution, slavery.
If you tell those stories, unsurprisingly, impressionable school children think, Blimey, that’s history. And we should really feel quite bad about that. That’s happening.
Education and Indoctrination
And it happens with parents not quite noticing. A lot of people noticed during the pandemic because they were kind of overhearing the Zoom classes and thinking, wait a minute, what did he just say?
I’ll give you an illustration of what goes on. This is, of course, something that I pay a lot of attention to, and I’m sure a few parents do, but at the school that my sons were attending in California, there was a proposal to have a module on slavery kind of part of civics or whatever, social studies.
And I said, good, I think it’s important that you should teach this part of American and indeed world history. But I’d be curious to know what teaching materials you will use. And a teacher very obligingly sent me them, and I did a little bit of research and looked at these teaching materials and tried to trace their provenance.
And it turned out that they, in fact, originated with the Southern Poverty Law Center, which is one of the most crooked, despicable rackets that ever emanated from the civil rights movement. And it has made a business for itself in recent years by compiling lists of Islamophobes and white supremacists, and they really set themselves up as witch finders general for the dreaded right. And one of their lists actually included my wife, Ayaan Hirsi Ali.
She was on the list of Islamophobes. There wasn’t a comparable list of Islamic extremists, mind you. They didn’t have a list.
Anyway, so I looked a little more closely at the materials, thinking this is a strange source for teaching materials for children. And sure enough, when I got to the takeaways, because you always have takeaways in the teaching plan, the takeaways included the United States was founded on white supremacy, and the situation of African Americans today is little different from their situation under Jim Crow.
Now, I wrote to the teacher and I said, I don’t think these are appropriate teaching materials at all. This is not history. This is political activism. And to her credit, she saw my points and they didn’t use them.
But unless I had bothered to do that, I might not have noticed. And I think most parents actually aren’t aware of what kind of thing gets done as history now. They just assume it’s pretty much what it was like when they were at school and history was boring.
And for Britain, you did kings and queens. If you’re in the United States, you did Lincoln or George Washington. It’s not like that anymore.
That’s all been changed in the same way that history at the major universities has greatly changed in the nature of its content. So we have a generation that I don’t think has the same relationship to history as even you. I mean, you’re much younger than me.
Even you did. Because this is all of relatively recent provenance. Things have moved quite fast in the last 10 years.
The Problem with Modern Historical Interpretation
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] It’s a really profound point because I went to an exhibition at the British Museum about divinity and the female in divinity. And they were describing this one, I think it was a Hindu goddess from 3,000 years ago, as being gender fluid.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Yeah. I was going… Or being transphobic. And I just couldn’t believe it because this is the British Museum.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Well, I didn’t go to that exhibition.
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] You missed out.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] I suppose it’s conceivable that that’s true. I’m not going to get drawn into a bitter argument about gender fluidity in Hindu iconography. What I think goes on a lot is anachronistic labeling, by which I mean our approach to the past has shifted from what I believe it should be, which is that we should understand the past in its own terms, try to understand how people thought in the past, to understand it, to a judgmental mode in which we go to the past in order to look down on previous generations for their racism or for their sexism or whatever it is.
And this desire to use terminology from the 21st century in framing historic objects or historical narratives, I think is extremely negative and it’s actually contrary to the spirit of true historical scholarship.
The mission of the historian R.G. Collingwood made this argument many years ago in the 1930s is to try to reconstitute past thoughts, the mental experience of past generations as best we can from what they’ve left behind by a kind of process of imagination as well as careful reconstruction, and then to juxtapose that past experience with our own. Not to say how much worse that past experience was, not to say how wicked 18th century people were for their notions of race or their willingness to use unfree labor, but to understand it, to try to see the way the world was seen by those now long dead people. It might also help us to realize that there is a great deal of unfree labor in the world today, but very little of it in, say, the British Isles of North America.
So this process where we regard the role of the history teacher as being essentially to pass judgment on the values of the past, I think, is completely misconceived. And it’s the condescension towards posterity that I thought we were trying to get away from as historians.
Economic Factors and Youth Radicalism
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Niall, you talk about Gen Z and their education. I grew up in a crumbling empire in the Soviet Union, which also attempted to indoctrinate its children. But I don’t remember, I remember my parents warning me, you know, you’re going to go to school and you’re going to be taught all this crazy stuff, so get ready, they’re going to tell you about Pavlik Morozov and they’re going to tell you about this and that and whatever. And by the time I arrived at school, I was rather inoculated and many young people were.
And as comedians, we know that I think ideas are like jokes, in that in order for them to really land with the listener, there has to be something about their experience that matches what they’re being told. And I wonder if you think that the economic circumstances facing young people, the extraordinary price of housing, for example, the inability therefore to pair up and have families, the sense that many people now have that they’re almost certainly not going to benefit from the sort of liberal democratic capitalistic promise, which is that we will live better than our parents. Is that why these ideas are as persuasive as they are to young people today?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] It’s possible, though I think one has to be a bit careful about inferring that young people are protesting in support of Hamas because they can’t get onto the housing ladder in London. I mean, it’s possible.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Well, you’ve made my argument sound ridiculous, which I think is slightly unfair.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] No, I didn’t mean to do that. What I meant to say was that the radicalism of the young extends along quite a broad front. What’s interesting is that it doesn’t really focus terribly much on the economic issue that you mentioned. If young people really were concerned about the cost of housing in, say, the southeast of England, then you’d have thought that they’d spend a lot of time researching housing policy and campaigning for reductions in the Green Belt and the construction of more housing.
But they do the exact opposite. They oppose that because the radical support for environmental movements, Extinction Rebellion, etc., actually points them in the opposite direction. And you’ll find young people tying themselves to to stop further development in the Green Belt.
So I don’t think, if these economic issues are what’s at work, that young people are pursuing their own interests very competently.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] No, they’re not. But let me make the connection that I was trying to make. And perhaps you can address where the nihilism is therefore coming from. Because the argument I would make is, if you don’t have a bright future, as you perceive it, it is quite natural to retreat into some kind of cope, as people now say on the internet. And the cope might be that we care about things that we can’t control because we can’t control the things that we care about, i.e. housing.
I mean, I can tell you, even for our generation, the housing issue is massive. And no amount of researching Green Belt policy is going to get someone my age on the housing ladder if they’re not already at this point. And we know, obviously, as you do and I do, that becoming a parent, for example, massively changes how you see the world.
So does actually getting on a property ladder. Young people to whom that’s not available are quite likely to tend towards nihilism, I would argue. You disagree, perhaps. So where is the nihilism coming from, if not from there?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Well, I think there is a couple of points that are worth making. First is, if young people are suffering from the consequences of policies that have essentially rigged the property market or the economy more broadly in favor of older generations, then they ought to be attracted to the more radical proposals, not just to reform the housing situation, but also to reform the welfare state. Because the main problem that young people face is that the intergenerational balance is simply not being maintained.
The liabilities of welfare states in most Western countries are hugely skewed in favor of the elderly. It’s the young who will pick up the tab for the very generous forms of welfare that the baby boomers essentially voted for themselves. And so if it were about economics, you’d have thought that more young people would be, as Hayek wrongly predicted, arguing for radical reform of entitlements.
The Welfare State and Generational Divide
[NIALL FERGUSON:] I mean, Hayek even says in the Constitution of Liberty that the young will finally get so impatient with the elderly that they’ll kind of herd them into camps. None of that has happened. The young defer unwittingly, I think, but they defer to the logic of the welfare state.
Young are overwhelmingly on the left. Support Labor over the Conservatives, Democrats over Republicans massively. But that’s bizarre because actually Labor and the Democrats are the people most committed to preserving the welfare state with its current transfers from the relatively young to the elderly.
So I don’t think young people understand their economic interests at all well. Now, you may be right that faced with this problem, they retreat into nihilism because they can’t bring themselves to do what would be rational, which would be to support the Center for Policy Studies position on housing or the position of Republicans or older position of Republicans for entitlement reform. They may just retreat into nihilism because embracing those conservative solutions is just too odious to them.
There is another possibility, though, which is that they are, as I was trying to argue, drawn into a series of ideological positions through their education. And these ideological positions lead to what used to be called on the left false consciousness. They think the problem is big oil. They think the problem is capitalism. They think the problem is settler colonialism because they get given these phrases from school and in university. And the net effect is that they don’t pursue their own interests as a generation at all rationally.
And I made this point in The Great Degeneration back in 2012, that if the young really understood their self-interest in the U.S., they would all have been in favor of Paul Ryan’s program of entitlement reform. But almost no young people voted for Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan.
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] Niall, do you think part of the problem is as well is that these narratives that they’re fed, particularly when it comes to history, are so incredibly powerful and they’re so simplistic that they’re far easier to ingest, then actually what is a very unpleasant truth is, as my dad always likes to tell me, “there’s no black and white, lad, there’s only a murky shade of grey.”
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Well, I do think… I can see why you came out the way you did, mate. It’s a good point. My soul is from Wigan.
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] Yeah, I mean, I think having grown up in Glasgow, I was receptive to that kind of argument too. But when the entire city is grey, it seems quite plausible. And there aren’t that many moments in history when you can say unequivocally, good guys, bad guys.
The Complexity of Historical Narratives
[NIALL FERGUSON:] I made this point in The War of the World that we end up winning World War II with Stalin doing a huge amount of the fighting. And I hardly need to tell you this, but the Soviet Union is as brutal as a totalitarian regime, as Nazi Germany. And so even that’s a tainted victory.
And that’s one of the things that an older generation have long clung to as the one thing we did that was absolutely right, except from the vantage point of people in Eastern Europe, it was anything but that. So I think it’s partly that the stories are attractive. The story of the imminent end of the world is one of the most attractive there is.
That’s been a part of the great monotheistic religions. People are drawn to disastrous outcomes. It’s why science fiction is a popular genre.
And so if you tell people that there is this imminent extinction event, and the day after tomorrow, everything’s just going to be on fire, and everybody dying from climate change, people are very receptive to that kind of argument. And it’s quite hard to argue against it, because it’s approached in a quasi-religious spirit. So if you offer any kind of criticism, you’re a denier, heretic, blasphemer.
So people are drawn into what is, in fact, a kind of secular religion, the impending end of days, and we must prepare for it. How should we prepare for it? By fasting, so we become vegans. We should be celibate, so we shouldn’t have children.
And so you essentially have a kind of secular religion. And this is something that Voegelin and others saw as the problem in the 20th century, that in the wake of the predominance of Christianity, people didn’t believe in nothing, they believed in anything. And the new religions of the secular sphere, turned out to be in some ways, a good deal worse than the religions they displaced.
Well, we’re here again, with the kind of strange religion of the impending end of the world. And I think it’s just it is much more appealing than “it’s complicated,” which is, you know, the least exciting combination of words. And the thing that historians are compulsively driven to say at the beginning of almost any answer they give to a question.
Freedom vs. Unfreedom
I do think there is black and white, though. And here I’m going to come back at Wigan. I think there is a very profound difference between a free society, in which one can speak freely, and write what one thinks, and meet and form associations with whomever one likes, and an unfree society in which those things are highly dangerous, and indeed, prohibited and may lead you into a jail, even a labor camp, that’s a really big difference.
What is wrong with kids today, and now I do sound like the old fart that I’ve become, is that they have no very clear idea of what an unfree society is like. Hence, queers for Palestine, you know, when radical…
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] We’re doing a fundraiser, by the way, we’re going to send them all over. We’ve got a t-shirt for you, Niall.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] It’s kind of bizarre. I mean, I remember saying to my wife when we lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts, wouldn’t it be funny if all the people who hate me and all the people who hate you simultaneously protested outside our house, and the Islamists found themselves right next to the, you know, the trans activists? How would that go? We’d be able to sneak out the back as they fell on one another. It’s a curious thing that people don’t understand what it’s like to live under Hamas, and they don’t really understand what the Iranian Revolution aspires to do.
They don’t understand what it’s like to live in Stalin’s Soviet Union or in Mao’s China. If they understood that, then they might be more reluctant to do the kind of things that many students attempted to do these days, like write letters of denunciation, call for people to be fired for things that they’ve said. It’s amazing how totalitarian behaviors can creep into a free society.
And I think we’ve just failed to communicate on freedom as a phenomenon to this generation. And maybe that’s just our bad as a generation that we didn’t get across to the Generation Z kids what it was like. I kind of used to toy with the idea of, you know, trips to North Korea, because I don’t think you ever feel quite the same about freedom once you’ve been in an unfree society.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Exactly, and this is, I think, why we started Trigonometry and been talking to so many people about it, because we both know what that’s like from our various experiences. I was going to ask you, as you were talking right at the end about this, because do you think this maybe is a cyclical element of history? It seems that these ideas, mutated as they are, are essentially what we had in the Soviet Union, but along slightly different lines. And it just takes a couple of generations for us to forget.
And then we’re back to square one. And then the power of these ideas is they sound so good. All things to all men, equality, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Is it just, you know, three generations and bam, we’re back to square one?
Historical Amnesia and Education
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Well, I think the kind of amnesia cycle of history that, you know, your grandfather actually fought. My grandfather’s fought in the World Wars. And my father and my mother very clearly remembered being children in that time.
I grew up in the 1960s and 1970s with the war as this sort of ubiquitous collective memory, which even constructed how we played in the playground. And after a certain point, it just sort of wears off. And, you know, I’ll give you an example.
I don’t think anybody watches black and white movies anymore, whereas I did. I can’t get my children to watch them. But if you don’t watch black and white movies, it’s really quite hard to properly to connect with the Second World War because so much of the great World War II movies are black and white.
So that may be true. I think the role of the historian, the role, as I understand it, is to counter that amnesia by as vividly as possible conveying what the experience of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath were like. And I think those of us who do the job seriously, I’m thinking here of Frank Dikötter’s work on China under Mao or Orlando Figes and before him, Richard Pipes on the Russian Revolution, the people who do the job well can transcend the amnesia of the fourth generation by saying, “yeah, I know it’s a long time ago, and you never even met your great grandfather who was fighting the Germans or fighting the Japanese, but you need to know this.”
I don’t quite why we failed so miserably when for a time it felt as if Hitler and Henry VIII were what kids in British schools were taught. Somehow all that teaching about the Holocaust has failed if there are Generation Z students chanting from the river to the sea, Palestine will be free, apparently oblivious to the fact that that implies a second Holocaust. So you kind of find yourself asking, where did all that Holocaust history get us? We clearly didn’t get the message across about why Hitler was bad.
That somehow got lost in translation.
Understanding Antisemitism and Totalitarianism
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] Do you think part of the problem is that we get taught about the Nazis, but we just associate antisemitism with the Nazis and that’s it. So as a result of that, young people only see antisemitism through that particular lens and then they can’t make the connections elsewhere.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] That may be right, that in a sense we’ve compartmentalized it so that, well, that was the Nazis and it somehow doesn’t apply to Palestinian Islamic jihad. I guess that’s possible.
But I do feel as if collectively there’s been a huge failure in historical education. And if we’d done a better job, there would be a greater allergy to symptoms of totalitarianism, such as calls for Israel to be wiped from the map or the kind of propaganda that emanates from Iran. Young people should be much more allergic to that than they seem to be.
And that I think may be because in teaching the history of the Third Reich, we failed not just to make clear that it had a general relevance. I mean, I’ve always felt that a really important feature of historiography to counter is the notion of a German special way that somehow it could only really have happened in Germany. And a lot of my early work was designed to make the exact opposite point that there was nothing really that different about Germany.
And it could have happened elsewhere. That’s a central theme of the War of the World, that the ideas that Hitler bundles together are not made in Germany. The ideas about miscegenation come from the United States.
The ideas about hereditary disease requiring to be controlled by sterilization, that had actually been put into action in the United States before Hitler came to power. So I think we failed to convey that there was a general problem which Hitler exemplified. We turned it into a German problem which Hitler exemplified.
Misunderstanding Hitler’s Rise
And the second thing I think that we failed to do is to come up with an explanation of Hitler’s rise that was really compelling and convincing. There are lots of theories about the rise of Hitler, and they get taught to children, at least in some schools still today. And it’s usually, well, there was this terrible economic crisis, and unemployment went up very high, and then the Nazis came to power.
That’s a kind of standard school textbook version. It’s really unconvincing because unemployment went sky high in the United States as well, and they got Roosevelt. I don’t think that the explanations for the rise of Hitler have worked at all well, the conventional mainstream explanations that we used to teach our children.
Because the truth of the story is that the Weimar Republic had this very perfect constitution. It was an impressive intellectual achievement. It was designed to be the leading welfare state of the world, and it failed disastrously.
It produced first hyperinflation and then a crash and depression. This alienated many middle-class Germans from the whole project of democracy, and it made them highly susceptible to a charismatic leader whose critical feature was that he was the most gifted demagogue of modern times. Not enough of the recent scholarship on Hitler emphasizes that point, the demonic power of his oratory and the personality cult that quickly formed around him.
That’s the really interesting thing. There were lots of fascist parties. Europe had fascist parties just about in every country.
# How Civilizations Collapse (continued)
The Rise of Fascism and Hitler’s Germany
[NIALL FERGUSON:] None of them, other than Germany, had Hitler. And so the real sort of story is not that Germany had very high unemployment. The story is that it had the most charismatic, demonic of all the fascist leaders, and we ought to therefore be really worried about charisma as a force in politics, because it can so easily lead even a highly educated people, which the Germans certainly were in the early 1930s, down a path that goes really fast from an election victory to Auschwitz.
That’s the lesson that I don’t think we properly conveyed. And Thomas Sowell makes the very same point, I think, in “Black Rednecks and White Liberals.” There’s a whole chapter on the Germans.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Excuse me. And he makes the same point. I want to ask you a couple of unrelated things to the end of the world.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Everything is related to the end of the world.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Well, not everything. I’m curious.
The Fascination with the Roman Empire
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] I don’t know if you saw this. I don’t know how much you use social media. There has been a meme going around of women asking their partners, male partners, how often they think about the Roman Empire. And it turns out that the average man allegedly thinks about it about 73 times a day. Wasn’t quite as often as that. I’m exaggerating for comedic purposes. But why do you think we care so much about the Roman Empire? Why is it such an interest to us here, at least in the West?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Well, first of all, I highly doubt that men think about the Roman Empire that frequently. And I’m deeply skeptical about whatever research produced this meme, because it implies that men think at all about anything.
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] You’re a feminist now.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] I’m not sure that there’s all that much thinking going on about any empire or indeed about anything much beyond football.
No, to be serious, in the case of the United States, which I think is where the research came from, Rome is this implicit point of comparison. And it’s there in the architecture. The project was, in some ways, as much a Roman as an Athenian one to create a republic. And so Americans have this uneasy feeling that they might be Rome. And there’s lots of books and articles that feed that theory, not to mention movies from Kirk Douglas to Russell Crowe.
It’s quite surprising how much Roman content Hollywood produced over the decades. So I think that’s why in the United States, the Roman Empire keeps coming up. You only need to go to Washington to see, what is it about this architecture that seems familiar? That’s probably why. I doubt very much that the average Englishman thinks about the Roman Empire once a day or even once a year.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] And why is it that it’s the Roman Empire we tend to talk about and not the Greek Empire? Because a pretty cogent argument can be made that these are where these ideas originated from.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Well, I think you only need to look at the Hollywood list of books about ancient Greece to see why there aren’t many. Rome has, I think, a more straightforward storyline.
I mean, the Peloponnesian War, there must be a reason it’s not been a big Hollywood hit. I think part of what’s straightforward about the Roman story is that the Republic flips to empire once, and the empire then produces a fantastic rogues gallery of monstrous and memorably monstrous emperors. And so the “I, Claudius” factor is there in a way that it just isn’t with the Greek demagogues.
So I think the Greeks just lost out when it came to villains. I mean, where is their Nero? Where’s their Caligula? So it’s a more straightforward moral story. It’s more recent.
And also, I mean, Athens, Rome, with all due respect to my Greek friends, Rome just wins as a tourist destination. It’s got just the most staggering things. And I don’t think the Acropolis can match the Colosseum.
I took my younger sons to Rome last year for a mini grand tour, and the Colosseum just blew them away, as it should. It’s a truly astonishing thing. Or the Baths of Caracalla, or Trajan’s Forum.
And wandering around Rome, one has a very strong sense of the durability of the Roman Empire. I mean, the buildings are still there. And they’re really, really striking for their scale and the duration of the achievement. I don’t get quite that same feeling from going to Athens.
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] Well, ironically, it is the Greek colonies in what is now Italy, in Sicily, that are much more impressive. I mean, if you go to Agrigento, the Valley of the Temple, you get a scale experience there. But yes, I mean, when you walk out of the metro and see the Colosseum, it’s an unforgettable experience.
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] And Carthage, why do we not talk about Carthage at all? Is it because the Romans essentially flattened and destroyed it?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Yeah, that was a win. They set out to do that, and they did achieve it. I think that’s probably the archetypal example of history being written by the winners.
The Enduring Power of Greek Mythology
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] And the one thing that has endured, well, not the one thing, many things have endured about the ancient Greek Empire, which I love reading about. And when I was a teacher, I used to teach the kids, and you could see that they had a magic to it, which was the myths. It’s something that speaks to us. Why do you think that is? Why is Greek mythology, even now, so incredibly powerful?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] I remember as a schoolboy thinking, well, hang on a second. The Romans just took all the Greek gods and renamed them. And so the Greek gods were the real gods, and Rome was just engaged in rebranding. And I think that’s probably part of it. The first school book I ever won as a prize was the Greek myths. And so there is something compelling about that. And it wasn’t where the Romans were at all innovative.
The Greeks, of course, left this great literary legacy, which again, the Romans could only kind of copy because the Aeneid is really just a knockoff. So I think in cultural terms, if you think at all about the ancient world, you have to sort of take your hat off to the Greeks for being the true innovators. But of course, if what you’re interested in is power, then somehow Rome has this greater range, definitely territorially ranged further, and more enduring monuments.
I wasn’t an ancient historian, I hasten to add. In my time, modern history at Oxford just meant not ancient. So I did a lot more medieval and early modern history than ancient history, which I suppose I now regret. But I think that’s the real story.
The Importance of Classical Political Philosophy
I do wish that we did more to teach today’s students about the ancient world, because one of the things that’s most impressive to me is that the Greek and Roman political philosophy provide very important building blocks for understanding what we mean when we talk about Western civilization. And the idea that there are these inherent problems with Republican government that may likely lead to tyranny, it’s such a fundamental idea. The Renaissance is about sort of taking that idea and dusting it down, breathing new life into it, then it becomes absolutely fundamental to Enlightenment thinking.
And that’s such an important idea. And it’s one that I keep reminding my American friends about, because it’s quite plausible that the Republic won’t last indefinitely. And it’s going down a path that seems familiar to any student of classical Western political philosophy, where the Republic becomes corrupt, it benefits the elite, ordinary plebs become disillusioned, and a demagogue comes along and says, look, the whole thing is a racket.
But if you give all the power to me, I’ll put things right. I mean, that’s what’s going to play out next year in the United States. Americans should be worried about that, whether they’re conservatives or liberals.
They should understand that the most obvious threat to the Republic, apart from defeat in war by a foreign power, the most obvious threat is the demagogue who says, I alone can fix this, and clearly has no regard for the Constitution at all. I mean, that’s what Trump is. He is exactly what the Founding Fathers worried about, and he’s here.
The Threat to American Democracy
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] Why do you say that, Niall? You are on the right, I think a lot of people would say, and yet Donald Trump is a creature of the right, as it is now. There are a lot of people who think genuinely he’s the only person who can fix the problems of America, because he comes from outside of the political realm, because he’s not beholden to donors. I mean, your argument about his disregard for the Constitution, I think, after his comments about the election last time, is strong.
People would argue Hillary Clinton said the same thing. Donald Trump is an illegitimate president. They invented the Russia collusion hoax and ran with it for years. Both sides are denying elections. Why is Donald Trump special? Is it because he’s more charismatic?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] I think there are a couple of points to make. One, I entirely agree that the de-legitimation of election results was not something that Trump began. It was used against him in 2016, 2017. And I think that the Democrats, and they’ve done it again, I think, have brought this upon themselves by their almost complete disregard for the concerns of so many ordinary Americans about illegal immigration and crime. They’ve played into Trump’s hands.
And in some ways, the first Trump administration was the successful administration that addressed a great many of the problems that ordinary Americans had been frustrated by. I’ll give you one simple example. If you look at real median household earnings, they completely flatlined from 1999 right the way through until 2016. They did not move at all. And under Trump, they rose 9% in real terms just in three years. And even the pandemic could not undo that gain.
The problem with a second Trump term is that on January the 6th, I think he revealed himself to be a real enemy of constitutional government in ways that ought really to have disqualified him for future office. I said that at the time. I urged friends who were in the administration to resign immediately.
I still think it was a catastrophic but revealing moment in American history. And to reelect a man who’s acted in that way is an enormous suicidal step for anyone who believes in constitutional government. I do.
I think the Constitution is sacred and the president’s role is to uphold it. I don’t think Donald Trump can be trusted to uphold the Constitution or indeed any contract that he’s ever signed. So I don’t think that’s an unconservative position.
I think it’s a truly conservative position. It’s tragic that American voters are going to be confronted with the same choice that they were confronted with in 2020. Joe Biden is an even less credible a candidate because of his age and mistakes that the Biden administration has made. The moment I feel as if events are playing into Trump’s hands. And I think the lesson of history is that republics that go down that path are dicing with death.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] I mean, we could always get Gavin Newsom in. You’d be happy with that, wouldn’t you, Niall?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] I wouldn’t be happy with it. But I think if I were a Democrat, that’s what I would do. I mean, I really would. And I’ve said this to my Democratic friends, if you’re really serious about stopping Trump, you can’t possibly think that Joe Biden and Kamala Harris can do it a second time. And so you really ought to try to lead the old man off stage and clear the way for somebody as utterly cynical and unprincipled as Gavin Newsom, who’s probably capable of beating Trump. But I don’t think that’s going to happen.
At least it’s very late in the day for it to happen now. So yeah, I think coming back to our doleful start, if there’s one thing that worries me about Western civilization, it’s the possibility that its most important component today, the United States, commits a sort of political suicide. It certainly would be in line with much of classical and Renaissance and Enlightenment political theory that that would happen.
And here, I think I agree with Peter Turchin. I think we are approaching a crisis in the United States. But I think it’s more a crisis of Republican constitutional order and its legitimacy than a crisis of the overproduction of elites or demography or any of that kind of stuff.
I just think this is the classical problem that republics run into after a certain point, when the legitimacy of the Constitution is no longer sacrosanct.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Well, we finished where we started, sadness and misery. So Francis will be happy.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] I don’t know what light relief I can offer you. AI will solve all problems. It must be true.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Everything is awesome. Optimists, yay.
[FRANCIS FOSTER:] I think that’s the cope.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] Yeah, not very persuasive.
Closing Thoughts
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] Niall, as you know, we always end the show with the same question. We’ll do a couple of quick questions for our supporters on Locals. But before we go there, what’s the one thing we’re not talking about that we should be?
[NIALL FERGUSON:] I think China’s nuclear program. The fact that China is building a vast nuclear arsenal is a much bigger deal. It gets very little coverage.
[KONSTANTIN KISIN:] You’ve opened up a can of worms that I really want to get into, but we have to let you go. So head on over to Locals. We’ll maybe see if we can get a couple of questions in about that.
Niall Ferguson, thank you very much.
[NIALL FERGUSON:] It’s been my pleasure.
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