American Decline Is a Choice. Let's Not Choose It.
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I'm Barry Weiss, and this is Honestly. I generally consider myself an optimist, but even I, watching the news over the past few weeks, but really over the past year and a half, or if you want to go further back than that, the past four or five years, I've been struck with a sense of dread. And I suspect if you're listening to this, you might be feeling that way too.

Pick your poison. It could be the lies told about COVID and the horribly confusing, unfolding response to the virus. It could be about the lies that we were told about the war in Afghanistan and the dishonorable way that we have withdrawn from that country. Or maybe you're really upset about the insane identity politics at home.

What it is for me, it's not so much the specific news event as it is the unshakable feeling I have that we are rudderless, that no one is in the driver's seat, that we're in a kind of free fall as a country and that there's no adult yelling stop enough and giving us a plan, a blueprint for how we can avoid decline. How did we end up in this place?

Why is it that so many smart people I know tell me that American decline is not just a possibility, but that it's inevitable? And why have the people in charge of this country so thoroughly lost the plot? That is the subject of my guest's latest book. It's called Doom, the Politics of Catastrophe. And its author is the brilliant historian Neil Ferguson.

He came on to talk about our no-good, terrible year that we've lived through, but also about how we've gotten here and how it compares to other moments of precariousness in our past. My conversation with Neil covers a lot of ground. We talk about elite hypocrisy. We talk about vaccine passports and whether or not they're a good idea. We talk about the problems with our two-party system and how it's led to incredible polarization.

But ultimately, all of those topics lead us back to the institutions that have cultivated our leaders, the academy. Neil and I discussed the brokenness of our higher education institutions, which rather than being a bedrock for American success, are starting to feel like an ever-growing liability.

The reason that that's a little ironic to talk about with Neil is because he is the product of those institutions. He is credentialed to the point of parity. He's a graduate of Oxford twice over. He's taught at Harvard and Cambridge and NYU and the London School of Economics. And today he finds himself at Stanford, where he's a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution. He's also won a ton of awards and written almost 20 books.

But unlike a lot of professors, he's not satisfied talking about obscure theories or hanging out in the ivory tower. He believes that we are at a very urgent moment in history and that it's essential for us to build new things and cultivate new leaders.

But before we can do that, we need to face the reality of where we are today. I think that's really where this country dies. It dies because its educational system becomes petri dish for illiberal ideas and ideas that are fundamentally contemptuous of the founding principles of the republic, of the republic itself. Stay with us.

Hey guys, Josh Hammer here, the host of America on Trial with Josh Hammer, a podcast for the First Podcast Network. Look, there are a lot of shows out there that are explaining the political news cycle, what's happening on the Hill, the this, the that.

There are no other shows that are cutting straight to the point when it comes to the unprecedented lawfare debilitating and affecting the 2024 presidential election. We do all of that every single day right here on America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Subscribe and download your episodes wherever you get your podcasts. It's America on Trial with Josh Hammer. Neil Ferguson, thank you so much for being on the podcast.

It's an honor, Barry. I can't tell if it's sarcastic because of the accent. No, it really is an honor. You're awesome. The podcast is awesomer. And so it is an honor. Well, I'm really happy to have you here. And not just because of your accent. So...

I wanted to open with your book, Doom, which I think is your 16th or 17th book, which is astonishing to me. And it's a title that kind of perfectly sums up where I think a lot of people are right now. Certainly myself.

18 months into a pandemic that feels sometimes like it's never going to end. And of course, it's not just COVID that we have to feel doomy about. It's the debacle of the American withdrawal from Afghanistan. It's the fact that it feels like we've split into two Americas, depending on how you slice it, red and blue, vaxxed and unvaxxed, the people that order food from

Uber Eats versus the people that deliver it. The fact that we have a president who, let's face it, is out to lunch. And there's just this overwhelming sense, I feel, that we are not being governed by adults with a sense of obligation or duty, but by sort of

conduits for TikTok influencers. So things don't look great. And one of the things that you write in your book is that catastrophes like pandemics or depressions or hurricanes, they don't just change a society. They reveal things that maybe were just out of view. You write, they lay bare the societies and states that they strike.

And so that's where I wanted to start today with you, with what COVID-19 has revealed about America, about our economics, our politics, our culture, and maybe the West more broadly. And I wanted to start with economics because, of course, you're a financial historian by trade. And I wonder if you can kind of give us a lay of the land of where we are economically and what the pandemic has revealed on that score to start off with.

In some ways, the economic impact of COVID-19 has been much greater than the public health impact. And it might surprise you to hear me say that when there is a global death toll in the millions and 700,000 Americans have died from this disease. But by historical standards, that's not a big pandemic.

And it's worth saying right at the outset that I wrote Doom not to exacerbate your feelings of anxiety, but actually to relieve them by pointing out that by the standards of history's great pandemics, this is only just in the top 20 and nowhere close enough.

to the top five. Just to give you an example, in terms of the proportion of humanity, it killed the 1918-19 Spanish influenza was 10 times worse, an order of magnitude larger, even if you accept the maximum possible death toll that The Economist published for COVID, which was something like 13 million. So although this has been a disaster,

It's not really a big disaster. If it were a war, it would be closer to the Korean War than to World War II in terms of the global death toll as a share of population. But its economic consequences have been akin to those of a world war.

That's the surprising thing. For example, if all you knew about the United States was the public debt, the federal debt in relation to gross domestic product, you would think we were in World War III. And you might also ask if it had begun in 2008 and was just ongoing because there's been such a huge run up in public debt and it's on track to rise dramatically.

even higher, maybe even to double by mid-century on its present trajectory. If all you knew about the US economy was the size of the Fed balance sheet, you would think, well, something really disastrous has happened. And the reason for that is that we were able to do things in this pandemic that were never possible before. You couldn't in 1957, when an influenza pandemic struck, tell everybody you have to work from home because they couldn't. Hardly anybody could work from home in 1957.

Many people didn't even have landlines and there was of course no internet. But we had an option that didn't exist before which was just to tell everybody you can't go out to work or to socialize. And these so-called non-pharmaceutical interventions or lockdowns in colloquial English

inflicted the biggest shock to the world economy since the 1929 to 32 depression. And that's the amazing thing. We actually turned a public health disaster that was medium sized into a really huge economic shock.

And it's not clear that there was an enormous benefit from this because the actual public health benefits of lockdowns, with the benefit of hindsight, were probably not that great in relation to the costs that they inflicted. So that, I think, is the...

gut of the answer that I would give. But can I add one little additional point? Of course. You already mentioned in your introductory remarks that this is a society which is highly divided and unequal. And clearly what the pandemic did was, if we didn't already know it, to reveal that and to exacerbate it. So the pandemic's incidence was very unequal. Plagues do not treat

All people equally on the contrary, as is well known, the working class and the minorities within the working class were very hard hit for all kinds of fairly obvious reasons. And the benefits of the policies that the government adopted disproportionately flowed to the asset owners because of the way in which the huge reflationary fiscal and monetary policies worked, just as during the financial crisis. So we had this huge shock, which I think was in some measure self-inflicted,

And we then, as a consequence, magnified the inequalities that are such a striking feature of our time. I mean, it's been a trope for a while, certainly in the circles that I travel in, you know, income inequality, income inequality. But all of a sudden, that moved for me from being sort of an abstraction to something that I could see in my daily life.

You know, and it wasn't just reading statistics like, you know, the combined wealth of 713 U.S. billionaires surged by 1.8 trillion, while 100,000 small businesses permanently closed.

It was in seeing the fact that some people didn't have the luxury of locking down. And in fact, a lot of the people, the laptop elite, I guess, the laptop jockeys that were able to stay home really, really liked it and in fact are extremely hesitant to

to go back to the way things were before. And in my view, are kind of overlooking what it means for people who work in places like cafes and restaurants and hospitals and other places where you actually have to show up. And I'm feeling, Neil, to be honest, I don't really usually feel tremendous class rage. And I all of a sudden in the past year or so really feel angry about this division. Do you feel like that's something that you're hearing from other people?

Well, I, as one of the beneficiaries, if that's the right term of the events of the last 18 months, somebody who was able to move to a second home in a very low density population area and do his work quite easily and in some ways just as enjoyably and productively from his home office online and as somebody who has at least some net wealth, which increased as a result of the Fed and Treasury's policies, I've

Being a net winner, if I wasn't really concerned about the people in a different situation from me who live in crowded places and have nowhere else to go, who have to do people-facing jobs whether they like it or not and therefore were more at risk from COVID before the vaccines were available, if I weren't feeling some concern and empathy and sympathy for those people...

then I would probably deserve to be strung up in a revolutionary uprising. I think one of the challenges that people who are seen to be conservatives, and I'm

seem to be conservatives, have is that we're not very good at explaining that our ultimate goal in arguing for free markets and small government is, in fact, to address precisely this problem because we believe that the institutions of the welfare state have done a bad job of getting people out of poverty and have done a bad job of promoting social mobility. One of the reasons that we very worked up about the state of poverty

education institutions is that we think they're failing the people in the bottom quintile and that the kids who in California had zero school because the public schools closed for a year are the people we should probably be most worried about because this is likely to blight their lives. So you've hit on an issue about which I feel

and passionate because I think we come up with so many bad solutions to this problem that the speed with which people went from identifying the kind of problems we're discussing to the utter non sequitur of defund the police was one of the craziest features of last year. What it revealed, to talk again about revelations, was the extraordinarily complex

a convoluted nature of our political discourse because there we were in the midst of a pandemic that was exacerbating the pre-existing inequalities. And what did we decide to have a wave of protest about? Policing and its allegedly racist character. And what was the consequence of that? That there was a crisis of morale within the police, a large-scale exodus of police taking early retirement.

genuine defunding in some cities and a crime wave that persisted long after the protests that followed George Floyd's death and made things even worse for the people in those communities. Now, that's the kind of thing that I as an historian get

interested in as well as worked up about because it's that law of unintended consequences where lots of virtue signaling people in the progressive liberal elite go along with and promote a slogan like defund the police but they don't have to live with the consequences and so

You know, to put it simply, this is what gets me mad. There's a writer that I like, I think his name's Rob Henderson, who's described that view, the idea, let's say, of abolishing the police, which was an op-ed that the New York Times ran literally with that headline.

And he describes them as luxury beliefs, beliefs that you can only have if you have the capability to get on a private plane and go to your second home, or even if you get on a commercial plane and go to your second home. And I love that idea of a luxury belief. Yes. Speaking of revolutions and let them eat cake, one of the things that I feel that this pandemic has also revealed is just how astonishingly oblivious, uncaring people

tone deaf our leadership is. And you can choose your example, Ted Cruz flying off to Mexico during the power outage in Texas, Gavin Newsom dining at the French Laundry, most recently Barack Obama partying in Martha's Vineyard with, you know, any number of celebrities and disinviting, by the way, all of his former staffers.

Were you aware of that level of tone deafness, cravenness among our political elite before COVID-19? Do you feel the level of contempt for that group that I currently have? Yes, I was aware of it. And I think you would have had to have been wearing some pretty

thick blindfolds to miss it because remember we ran a version of this in the financial crisis. And at that time I was working on financial history more in a more focused way. The Ascent of Money was a book that I began working on in 2006 when it was very obvious that the system was heading for a blow up. And back then I spent some time in subprime America

doing my fieldwork on what subprime mortgages were and how they worked and looking at the ways in which people in very low-income groups were sucked into buying properties with mortgages that they clearly wouldn't be able to afford once they reset.

Looking at that in cities like Memphis, which I vividly remember going to, and then coming back to New York City and seeing the 0.01% parting their way to what turned out to be the last waltz, except it wasn't the last waltz because apart from Lehman Brothers, all the institutions got bailed out.

We've not, in that sense, had that big a revelation over the last 18 months. The United States has been in a gilded age really since the 1990s because what happened was that having won the Cold War, the United States pursued policies, which we loosely call globalization, that massively benefited the 1% of income earners and really did nothing

for everybody else. And then after the great crisis of 2007, 8, 9, you saw that there was more, there was a significant attrition of the middle class. I mean, you mentioned a minute ago how badly the pandemic has treated small business. It was fascinating to see how even efforts by the government to help small business with loans that might not need to be repaid, even that's

turned out to be an opportunity for quite large businesses to get their snouts in the trough. So this isn't a new story. I actually think it's the story of America since the Clinton era. I want to go a little bit deeper into politics. I see the sort of full flowering of the seeds that began maybe in

the Clinton years, but certainly with the Great Recession as the kind of populism that we are seeing right now from the right and the left. It feels like the choices are increasingly, you get Josh Hawley and J.D. Vance, or you get AOC and Cori Bush, and that that's our new normal, and neither of them is going away anytime soon. And I find myself

honestly, in regular conversations with extremely wise and smart people who don't seem to think that, who won't quite say, ah, things are going to go back to the way they were before, but I think are sort of so insulated from a lot of the effects of the kind of changes that we're talking about. They're in that, I don't know, 1%, top 5%, whatever it is, that sort of keeps them insulated enough that they don't quite understand

frankly, the populism that we're seeing. I wanted to get your assessment of that. Is it a new normal? Is it going to dissipate? What do you think? Polarization is not something we just invented in the United States. The U.S. has sustained a two-party system for longer than anywhere else. This is a thing that originated, in fact, in late 17th century Europe,

Britain, and it doesn't exist there anymore, where Britain has essentially a normal multi-party European system now, despite Brexit. But the US is still a two-party system, and it's sort of hardwired to stay that way. It's really hard to imagine third parties having success, despite the fact that there's clearly a significant chunk of the electorate that would, if it only could, vote for a

a third party, the self-styled independence. My colleague here at the Hoover Institution, Moor Fiorina, has been arguing for as long as I've known him that actually the US isn't as polarized as it seems on, say, Twitter, because when you actually look at polling data, when you look at the way that people think, there's this huge middle, a purple middle, but it just doesn't have an institutional representation. And if you had to explain anything

about American politics to the proverbial Martian, the thing the Martian would struggle with was that there are people registered as independents in very large numbers, almost a third of the electorate, but they don't actually have a party. So I think we have to recognize that the polarization narrative gets overdone in mainstream discussion. Partially,

partly because journalists are on Twitter and Twitter makes us look polarised because that's how its algorithms work. I mean, the key thing to understand about social media is that user engagement is the goal and you maximise that with extreme views and moderate, centrist people don't get many followers. So I think we have

at one level, an exaggerated sense of the problem, but there's also a sense in which social media, because they're so ubiquitous, are, in fact, exacerbating it. And that's what I wrote The Square and the Tower about, which was my last book. So the problem with a networked world is, especially if you organise it around network platforms,

that are selling ads, you will in fact exacerbate the polarization. And that is actually something that can become dangerous. The US has had one civil war. And the obvious question to ask over the last few years was, do we end up eventually with another? Does there come a moment when

all those people who ran around saying speech is violence actually end up doing actual violence. Now, I've written about this and I've argued that the US had in many ways more civil war-ish

problems in the late 60s and early 70s. There was a lot more violence of all kinds going on at that point. And a lot of what goes on these days is not really violence. It's kind of ritualized running around, the kind of thing that you see in Portland. I mean, it's kind of, it's jokish violence. It's not really very impressive violence. If you're a student of violence, this is kind of

laughable, really. Do you know what LARPing is, Neil? No, you're going to educate me. It's like live action role playing. It's like Dungeons and Dragons. And what goes on a lot of times in our politics is kind of LARPing, like you're in

of war, but it's actually, it's fakery, really. It's more like a video game. But the thing that I'm focusing on here is I can buy the idea that Twitter makes us seem more polarized than we really are. And as someone who often finds herself in that kind of purple, mushy, middle, centrist, whatever you want to call it, position, I certainly want to believe that. What I'm talking about more is populism. Like the turn...

against a failed elite and a sense that, you know, the average man and woman in this country has been really, really screwed over. And that's something, you know, when you hear a J.D. Vance talk about it or an AOC talk about it, they could sound quite similar. Well, I have a probably slightly stuffy historian's view that this is a feature, not a bug in American political history, that...

Americans have been using populist language actually since the revolution, which was against an elite, the royal elite, that was turfed out as a result of the War of Independence. And then there's a revolt against the successor elite, which is really what Andrew Jackson's about, against the political elite of the founders. And so it goes on. And so

To give you a concrete example, there was really nothing in Donald Trump's rhetoric in 2016 and during his presidency that deviated from well-established tropes of populism going back to the 19th century. Tariffs, classic idea in populist politics. Easy money was absolutely central to the late 19th century populist movement. And above all, the sense that there's a corrupt elite that's screwing you over

and it's entrenched in New York and Washington. I mean, this is standard fear. I could never understand for the life of me why smart people like Tim Snyder at Yale wanted to argue that this was a fast track to Nazism because it bore no relation that I could identify

with National Socialism or any of the interwar ideologies that made Europe in the 1930s and 1940s such a desperate place. There wasn't really any militarism involved at all, whereas militarism was central to fascism. Actually, Trump clearly had great suspicion of the military

So I think it was kind of a category error to think that there was something new about Trump. Actually, it seemed very familiar to any serious student of American political history. And the same can be said of the radical left. The Democrats have had a radical left really for most of their history as a party. If you go back to the 1970s, it was a

as much a problem for the party's leadership as it is now in Congress. I mean, one forgets this, but that is not new either. And I wouldn't worry about it too much, to be honest. I once got told off for telling an eminent television presenter to chill. But when people were telling... She didn't like that. But when people were telling me over and over again...

including our mutual friend Andrew Sullivan, it's the end of the republic. This is Weimar America or it's Rome. I mean, it wasn't because actually, despite even the excesses and the peak lunacy of January the 6th this year, the Trump challenge to the Constitution was an utter failure. It was entirely contained within the Constitution's

safeguards just as the founders envisaged because the founders knew that this kind of thing would happen. They'd studied ancient history. They knew the key lesson of history, which is that if you create a democracy, the big risk is tyranny because a demagogue will come around. They all knew that.

And that's why the Constitution is designed the way it is. Surely they imagined that, you know, a man with a gold toilet and a taste for McDonald's would ascend to be... They did. If you read Alexander Hamilton, he understood exactly the risk that an individual like Trump represented. Because Trump was a true demagogue, as anybody who's closely watched his interactions with a live audience knows. He's got that strange, unlearnable skill.

And so the founders saw this coming, which is why they were pretty careful to make sure that whoever got in control of the executive branch did not have the kind of powers that Trump would love to have had. And it's very hard to obtain them if you don't have them. So I was never that worried about populism. And I remain of the view that the system withstood the stress test. And here we get into some territory we haven't touched on yet. There is a much more profound threat posed here

by the very thing the populist voters were indignant about in the first place, which is the hypertrophic administrative state with its headquarters in Washington that constantly seeks to expand its power and acquire through regulation and legislation and the creation of new government agencies more power, but which is profoundly dysfunctional. And the greatest and most important revelation of the pandemic and the central theme of the book Doom is that what we found out was

that the bureaucracy in charge of public health, including pandemic preparedness, was as useless and incompetent as the bureaucracy supposed to be in charge of regulating banks back in 2007. And guess what? The people supposed to be in charge of national security strategy also have the same level of competence. They can't even evacuate.

a state that they've decided to abandon without leaving most of the people behind that they need to get out. So...

So populists are right to be mad about that stuff. The tragedy of populism is that again and again ordinary people say, God damn it, the corruption. God damn it, the incompetence. God damn it, the hypocritical liberal elites. And they vote for a wrecking ball figure like Trump, and he totally fails to deliver. Okay, so let's take those two things, frustration with the bureaucracy and frustration with its incompetence in order.

The fact that our public health organizations like the CDC and the fact that public health experts like Dr. Anthony Fauci were either revealed to have been telling noble lies or admitted to telling noble lies about the coronavirus and what it would take to beat it, that has led some people I know hesitant to take the vaccine. And they say, why should I trust it?

All of these people lied about all of these other things. They weren't competent in all of these other ways that you yourself admit. So, Neil, I'm curious, what do you say to those people? Well, I would say, first of all, if you cannot compute the risk of a vaccine relative to the risk of a virus...

then you clearly missed out on some important classes in school and college. And that's nothing to do with they lied to me. That's to do with your ability as a citizen to be informed and to understand some basics about probability. And that's nobody's fault but yours.

By the way, this is not the way to convince people to get the vaccine. There is no way to persuade people to get the vaccine. Once they've imbibed the conspiracy theory from the anti-vax network, I have come to the conclusion, having tried every conceivable argument with people I know in this state of mind, that nothing will change their mind except...

except hospitalization and an ICU, which is a pretty effective argument. One of the things that maybe will help people change their minds are things like vaccine passports or like this new Excelsior program that's being unveiled in New York. And I'm very curious what you make of that, because given your conservative bona fides, your skepticism of government power and the surveillance power of big tech,

But also given your, and I agree with you, your belief that there's a common good and we need, everyone needs to get the vaccine in order for us to move beyond this catastrophic pandemic. Where do you fall on a question like that? Well, I think as an historian about this, rather than from some abstract first principles, I've never been very good at abstract political philosophy before.

In a free society, in time of emergency, individual liberty has to be circumscribed. Whether you're being invaded by the Germans or by germs, there are certain clear things that require to be done in the interest of the survival of the community, of the nation state.

The Victorians who really pioneered a small state classical liberalism understood this very well because they had public health problems far worse than us. But they understood that if there was a recurrent problem of cholera, which there was in the early 19th century, then you had to do some clearance and you had to enforce on property owners an infrastructure that would provide clean water and sanitation in cities or hundreds of thousands of people would die.

So this is not complicated any more than it is a complicated question how we should act if we are attacked by a totalitarian regime. Are the same people who currently object to vaccination and obligations to wear masks going to take a similarly maximalist libertarian position when we're at war with China? Will they decide on their own individual basis whether or not to fight to defend the country?

These questions would have struck the founding fathers as idiotic. They had to contend with smallpox as well as the British.

vaccination was an unpopular thing when it was first developed against smallpox in the late 18th century. I talk in Doom about the popular opposition to variolation as it was then known when it was being tried out in New England in and around Boston. But ultimately, if we were facing smallpox, I don't think this debate would be a very protracted one. The thing about COVID is that it's not quite as ghastly as smallpox and doesn't really kill your kids.

If this thing was killing our kids, the debate would be over. Remember polio? There was no anti-polio vax movement because people's kids were dying. But I mean, don't you also believe that it became such a politicized disease in part because of President Trump? I don't think Trump did a good job at all. I think he deserved to lose the election primarily because of his extraordinary ineptitude in dealing with this emergency.

But I don't think he's the principal reason that we had such high levels of excess mortality and such public confusion. He exacerbated the politicization that I think would have happened anyway, certainly of the vaccine issue, because anti-vax has just been around much longer than Trump was president.

I come back to the point that there would be a lot less debate if people's children were dying in significant numbers or if people were covered in hideous pustules as with smallpox. The thing about COVID is that it's been sufficiently non-terrible, going back to where we began, it's not been such a ghastly pandemic, that it's been possible for people to be frivolous about it. Turning from the disaster of COVID toward a disaster maybe farther afield,

I have to tell you, I don't think I've been so upset by a political event since 9-11 as I have by the catastrophic American withdrawal from Afghanistan. You just wrote a column in the Daily Mail about the women who were throwing their babies over the barbed wire to get them into the airport. There's so many stories that are coming out like that. And yet...

Many, many people I know are basically repeating, you know, the famous 2013 Obama line. We can't be the world's policemen. And even though, yeah, it could have gone better, this was essentially inevitable. It seems to me clear that this isn't really about Afghanistan. It's really about us and our self-confidence and morale as a country and about whether we still believe in...

America and frankly, like the goodness of American power and whether or not America is worth defending or not. And even deeper level, you know, about first principles like duty and honor.

I've been very curious to hear about your views about the withdrawal. And if you agree with me that this isn't really about Afghanistan, it's about something far deeper and in a way, because of that, more existential. I mean, the position I hold, which is most unpopular, is that the net benefits of some empires are

have been positive despite there being costs and that American empire, if it could only work better, could be a force for good. Don't call it empire. Americans are allergic to the word, but call it hegemony. Be global policeman. I don't care what you say you're doing.

But the idea that it is a smart idea, that it's a smart strategic move to abandon Afghanistan to the Taliban, who were the people who harbored al-Qaeda, the idea that this is a good outcome is, I think, an impossible sell unless you have entirely given up on the idea of being a superpower. Look, there was nothing surprising about this failure because the American empire has four structural deficits that make it weak.

The first is a manpower deficit. People in America don't want to spend any time at all in a place like Afghanistan. You can't even get the soldiers to stick it for more than six months at a time. Whereas if you really want to run a country like Afghanistan, a whole bunch of you have to go there, learn the language, live there, don't come back. Part one.

Part two, if you have a fiscal deficit from the very get-go, and these days, of course, the deficits of the early 2000s look trivial, but if you are basically running a massive deficit, it's a kind of expensive thing to try to run a country like Afghanistan. So that's against you too.

And then you have the attention deficit disorder, which afflicts the American public, which is like, ah, we're not done with that. Are we nearly there yet? Can't it be over? I mean, four years is basically the point at which the opinion polls will turn against any foreign intervention, as far as I can see. And that's been true even since Korea, which actually turned out not bad.

But this is very much the Vietnam story. And remember, this is after a much smaller commitment of troops and a much smaller American death toll than Vietnam. We've basically thrown in the towel when the death toll had gone to zero for U.S. troops in the last 18 months. And it's just pathetic. There was one other deficit which I left out of that book, the history deficit. There seem to be people who can rise to the highest echelons of American government and

entirely ignorance of the most elementary lessons of history. If there is one thing that is just basic, it is that you do not signal to the enemy in a protracted war of the sort that we were fighting in Afghanistan, we're going, and here's the date.

I mean, it's just that simple. But I know that. And I've never, you know, I haven't written 17 books. I haven't served in a foreign war. That's just commonsensical. So there has to be some other reason for this policy. But there are two things going on here. One, I think, is that Biden for years has believed it's Vietnam and we should just get out. And there were no costs to getting out.

He is a profoundly cynical politician, as you'd be bound to be if you'd spent as long as he has in the Senate of the United States. So, yeah, he's calculated that there's no cost to ditching even the Afghans who helped us as interpreters and fought alongside us. As long as you get the Americans out, it's probably a net gain in the midterm. That, I think, is what he believes. I think it's totally wrong because, like, Americans, when they watch these scenes, are appalled.

But I think that is what he is thinking. But the other thing that is going on here is you see the dysfunction of an excessively bureaucratic, overmanned federal government.

I mean, you know how this decision was reached. It wasn't reached by a handful of people sitting around a table trying to draw the lessons of history. This is the result of the process, the interagency process, which the National Security Advisor's job is to try to coordinate. But every single agency has countless people working with all kinds of different conflicting interests. And the net result, and this has been true for many years in the United States,

States, but it's got worse because the bureaucracy has got bigger. The net result is not a rational strategy. The net result is just the residual after all the interagency battles have been fought and the national security advisor has decided to pick a winner. And I have to say that it

It seems to me there is a problem if you appoint someone to a position of that importance who's in his early 40s and has never run anything. I mean, that's the problem. I mean, he's passed every exam that they ever asked him to pass, Jake Sullivan. But the basic theory of the case that you need a foreign policy for the middle class, i.e., let's just walk away from this because it's not pulling that well, if that's the basis for U.S. strategy, then we deserve to lose Cold War.

two. And we will lose Cold War two because the Chinese are watching all this and the Russians are watching all this. And they think this is the most incompetent government yet. And we thought that Trump had set a new record. I think that. And I feel like

It all goes back to the fact that we don't have leaders. But we also don't have faith. We don't really believe in the enterprise anymore. I did a long piece for The Economist last week saying, look, this is interwar Britain. As Churchill describes it in The Gathering Storm, it's not just that the elites...

have a kind of loss of conviction. Ordinary people don't really believe in the enterprise either. British Empire becomes sort of a joke by the 1930s. And I think in the same way,

ordinary Americans, whether they're populists or not, have a fundamental doubt about American power, which successive presidents since George W. Bush have tried to articulate. I mean, it's not as if there was a profound difference between Obama, Trump, and Biden on this issue. Each one of them in their very different ways has tried to say, we don't want to be the global policeman and we want to bring the troops back home. And Americans basically lap that up. Although, again, it's pretty obvious you don't need to have a huge amount of

knowledge of history to see that if the United States explicitly signals we are not the global policeman, that's like defund the global police. Guess what happens? Well, what happened after Barack Obama announced we are no longer the global policeman was within months Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea and sat back and said, what are you going to do? And our answer was, oh, we will inflict such sanctions on you, such sanctions as will make your eyes water slightly. Yeah.

And that's what's going to happen next. Is Taiwan next? Probably, although actually an empire as extended as the United States can die by a thousand cuts in multiple locations. That was really the problem that ultimately the British Empire faced. And so it might not be Taiwan. It might be somewhere else that we haven't really thought enough about. But

Ultimately, this is a fundamental problem of imperial governance. And as long as Americans pretend to themselves, we are not an empire, we are not an empire, except you've just been in Afghanistan for 20 years. And before that, it was Mesopotamia. It looks like an empire to everybody else. But OK, as long as Americans keep saying we're not an empire, we're out of the empire business, we don't want to be in the empire business, there's a vacancy. Right.

And if you think nobody's going to step into the vacuum, then you haven't really done much history because there are very few periods in history that I can find when there's no great power, when there's no empire, when nobody wants to be in charge. More with Neil Ferguson after this. Speaking of the kind of loss of faith, right, the sense that we don't really believe it anymore, to me this connects directly to the things that happen inside you.

the most elite institutions of American education. You know, I went to Columbia now 15 years ago, and I was going to be a Middle East studies major. And I remember in all of these introductory courses, every single malady and pathology of the Middle East was tied back to one thing, and that one thing was colonialism. This was the great evil. This accounted for everything from widow burning to the Taliban to Al-Qaeda, you name it.

And before we get to the crisis, the brokenness of our education system, especially higher education, I want to talk a little bit about what the original idea and goal of the university was, because I think that's something, honestly, that a lot of people have lost sight of. So take us back. What were the original universities and what was their purpose?

It's a funny thing at university. They've been around a long time as institutions, despite all the changes in economics and culture and technology. They go back to the 11th century, really. The first universities are Bologna and Oxford. And the basic idea hasn't really changed, which is that it's a good idea to find a location and create conditions in which...

the learned and those who would become learned, that is what we would now call professors and students, can work together. There's a specific geographical location, but there's also a certain protection from the outside world because in order to do thinking and teaching at the highest level,

you need to free people temporarily, at least from the constraints of earning your daily bread, because it's pretty hard to do philosophy and subsistence agriculture at the same time. So hence the notion of scholars, you know, people that are paid initially through philanthropy to study and the idea of masters, the people who are the really good scholars who teach, and they too are essentially going to be insulated from the need to earn a daily crust by a

fellowship of some sort. So that's the original idea and it hasn't changed that much in its basic design, though obviously there have been all kinds of variations over the centuries. The problem which I think you've rightly identified is that all over the English-speaking world, it's not just in the United States, a number of things have happened in the relatively recent past that have made

universities, I think, quite broken as institutions. One of them is that there is now a kind of homogeneity, political homogeneity that didn't really exist before. That is to say, nearly all professors are liberals or progressives or outright social justice warriors. And there are just hardly any

professors who don't fit that description. And that hasn't always been true, as sometimes people claim. It's got much, much more true relative to the 1960s or even relative to the 1970s and 80s. So we have an extraordinary ratio of liberals to conservatives or Democrats to Republicans in university faculties. The second thing that's happened is that universities have become, in the United States especially, very bloated institutions with large universities

administrative staffs that outnumber the academic faculty. And many of these administrators are engaged in rather dubious programs of social engineering, which are usually dressed up in language about diversity or inclusion. And then a culture has arisen among students, which has been encouraged by these administrators, of self-censorship or denunciation,

which has entirely chilled the culture or atmosphere in campuses so that people are afraid to say what they think. And that's a very recent origin. That wasn't true even in my first 10 years of teaching at Harvard. It wasn't true. And it happened quite suddenly, really from about five years ago, that everybody started being afraid to speak out in case they got denounced. I see in today's American universities something that

that is uncomfortably like a sort of everyday totalitarianism because people really are writing letters denouncing their professors or their contemporaries to administrators who then behave in a completely high-handed way without regard to due process and there are cancellations of eminent academics for dubious reasons there are people forced to write abject apologies that are something out like something out of darkness at noon the whole thing is really odious

And I can't understand how this happened because I always thought that people only behaved that way if they were in a dictatorship, that you behaved in that way if Stalin was in power or Hitler was in power or Mao was in power. But it turns out you don't need that. Well, that's the thing that I find so strange about this ideological revolution. And I find it fascinating.

very hard to describe because of exactly the phenomenon you're saying, which is it's like people are acting like they live in a fear society, in the freest society in all of human history, and that in the most liberal institutions you have the most sort

sort of illiberal tendencies. There's a statistic that you had sent to me, actually, where there was this recent nationwide survey, 85% of self-described liberal students said they would report a professor to the university if the professor said something that the students found offensive. 76% said that they would report another student. So it's like we're living through

this revolution. The universities are the heart of that revolution. And yet there seems to be no leader. There seems to be no figurehead. And it seems to be happening in

not just in the universities, but in all of our elite institutions all at once. I joke that it's almost like a new operating system for your computer where overnight it goes from Hispanic to Latino to Latinx. And oh my God, if you didn't know that it was Latinx, excuse me, by the third upgrade, like you're a monster. And we could use a hundred different examples for that.

You're someone who's extremely interested in network and network effects. And I wonder if you can kind of apply that analysis to this, for lack of a better term, woke revolution that we're seeing inside the universities and then spread beyond that to the elite institutions of American culture. Yes, I think a revolution might be the wrong term because...

Revolutions do need leadership, and this seems strangely acephalous. It's a largely leaderless network. It's not like Ibrahim Kendi is sitting there coordinating cancel culture across the campuses of America or the corporations, or Robin DiAngelo has some kind of program to seize power. So I think it's more of a religious movement. I think Matty Iglesias was right when he said it's the great awokening.

And we should understand this as a quasi religious cult in which people behave rather in the way that the religious sects of the early reformation behaves. And I think that makes sense. In the square in the tower, I said the nearest thing to the impact of the internet we can find

is the impact of the printing press on Europe. And at first it seemed awesome that everybody could communicate and reproduce ideas at much lower cost, but then it turned out that this was a great way to have 130 years of religious warfare. And in the same way, the internet has created the conditions within which new cults can form and ideologies can

or religions can very rapidly proliferate and they mutate very rapidly because as you pointed out, there's this very low cost to changing the language and the benefit of doing that is that you're constantly ensuring that the faithful have to run to keep up and

And that, I think, is what makes this more like a reformation and less like a revolution, more religious and less political. Ironically, the people who think of themselves as very secular, because by and large these people would say they were secular and certainly aren't conventionally religiously observant, it

in fact, are behaving in ways that are distinctly religious. The odd language, the rituals, the insistence on beginning meetings by stating your preferred pronouns, all of this has very quickly become part of the rituals of the new academic life. And I think it must be a bit like-- it must have been a bit like this in the 17th century.

And, of course, witch crazes are part and parcel of this kind of thing where you have to go after the witches. You have to cancel the terrible, terrible, wicked professors who've committed such crimes

outrageous crimes as to have students round for a drink. I think that was Amy Chewer's crime or such sins as to make inappropriate jokes in a text message to an assistant. That was what Roland Frye did and it got him two years suspension without pay. And I could go on because the list of academics who've been treated in this way is a long one. They're the people being burnt or hanged as witches in this great reformation, great awakening.

What is driving so many people toward this ideological, what you describe as a religious movement? If you feel that you are the righteous, if you're convinced of your rightness, and if you've been persuaded that the non-righteous, the unrighteous are evil, then it's immensely gratifying, even if you can't literally burn them at the stake, to realize

humiliate people publicly, destroy their reputations. And this is the primal urge that drove any number of extreme movements in history. To what extent do you see the kind of what Robert Putnam described, of course, as bowling alone, but just the loneliness of American life, the atomization of American life, the death of

religion, the death of civic organizations as leading people toward looking to political movements like this for meaning in their life. There are a number of interesting competing theories about what's going on. I think if one's trying to understand why it originated in the universities, you kind of have to begin there and ask slightly different questions such as,

Why would it be that young people could write letters informing on people without feeling a sense of shame, without saying to themselves, hang on, isn't this just the way people behaved in Stalin's Soviet Union or Hitler's Germany? And if there's no little voice in their heads saying that, it's because they haven't been taught it.

If there's no little voice saying there's something appalling about the way we're behaving towards this professor whom we're subjecting to a kind of show trial, it's because they've never been taught about show trials. My sense is that part of the problem is that we stopped, if we ever really did it, teaching well the great enemies of...

of the open society, of individual liberty. There weren't good courses on the witch craze of the 17th century. There weren't good courses on the nature of the terror in the French Revolution. There weren't good courses or there ceased to be good courses about life in Stalin's Soviet Union or, for that matter, in Mao's China. Let me give you an example of

the kind of thing that today's students really aren't exposed to. My good friend Frank D'Acurto has written a spectacular trilogy on Mao's China.

which takes you through the revolution itself, the Great Leap Forward and the Cultural Revolution. And these books are the kind of books that should be required reading in colleges across America because they tell us about the recent history of our principal geopolitical rival. But these books are assigned hardly anywhere. And I'm struck by the fact that the content of history education across America has become...

either antiquarian in the sense that it's concerned with things that are really, frankly, quite obscure, or it's become really identity politics and social justice. The principal purpose of history education seems to have become to say how wickedly racist our ancestors were, how fundamentally wicked the past was. In other words, to judge the people of the 18th century or the 19th century by the value system of 2021.

So I think it's actually simpler than everybody's making it. We just haven't really taught the generation currently in college the things that a citizen needs to know to recognize the dangers of illiberalism, to know the enemy.

of a free society. They don't recognize it. They don't look in the mirror and see the Red Guards of Mao's Cultural Revolution. They don't look in the mirror and see the witch burners of Salem. They don't see it. I guess I want to ask if you feel or felt freer as an undergraduate at Oxford in the 1980s than you feel as someone who's written so many books, has so many degrees,

speaking at an American college campus today or in your role at the Hoover Institution, which is the think tank connected to Stanford? I certainly didn't worry back in the early 1980s that anything I wrote or said would have disastrous consequences for my career reputation and even livelihood, whereas around the last decade,

10 years, I and all public intellectuals, all of us who write or speak or do shows like this, we've all had to become very, very much more careful because I have learned the hard way that a single utterance that falls foul of the

conventional orthodoxy can get you into a hell of a place. And that just never crossed my mind in the 80s or for that matter in the 90s and early 2000s. My motivation then was not just to provoke, I've been accused of that before, not just to be a contrarian, but to challenge conventional wisdom. The reason I became a historian was because I felt that much that we think about

the past is wrong, that we don't have good answers to the question, why did Hitler come to power despite decades of research on the subject? So I wanted to be able to challenge the received wisdom. And I wanted to do it in ways that would be not only of interest to a narrow body of academics, but I wanted people to be talking about this because they'd seen it on television. So not only did I write academic books, but I also did television. I wrote for newspapers. And for years, I was able to do this really without fear.

I did a series about the British Empire back in 2002 that today I don't think anybody would dare to commission. So what is interesting is that after a certain amount of time in the United States, I began to encounter the first...

Forms of cancel culture, very, very aggressive, quote unquote, takedowns and smackdowns on social media, viciously aggressive blog posts demanding resignation and sacking for some off the cuff remark that I'd made at a non-public event. And this kind of thing

you know, came in, I think, three different episodes, the net result of which has been to make me very much more risk averse and nervous about things that I say. I've had to start talking the way central bankers talk

do, which is to say, I know that every single utterance I make has the potential to cost me weeks, if not years of my life. And some people would say, good deal. You were far too reckless before. And you said unpleasant or offensive things. They might well say that. But

In all honesty, the general effect of this chilling, if it's not only me but everybody feeling this way, I mean, and I'm relatively bold by academic standards, this cannot be a healthy, this can't be a healthy culture for university. You've got to be able to risk a bit, you know, and say things that are a bit out there to get to the good ideas. Even if 9 out of 10 of those things are wrong, the 1 out of 10 might be right.

I guess when I hear you talk about, you know, how risk averse or maybe even slightly paranoid you've become, first of all, I get it totally. And I also would push back and say, you're someone with enormous success and standing. And if someone like you gives in to this fear, this understandable fear, where does that leave everyone else? I would ask. And also,

Please explain why this stuff matters to normal people. Well, at some level it doesn't at all. The issue that I think everybody needs to ponder, even if they left school without a high school diploma, is what happens to a country, a great and powerful country like the United States especially, if its elite is trained in self-censorship

and if its elite is encouraged to believe that denouncing a person to the authorities is a morally noble thing. If you wanted to write the future history of American decline, and decline might be a good outcome because you can get to fall much quicker than you think without necessarily much intervening decline,

I think begin by looking at the kind of rot within the American education system. From top to bottom, it began at the top, like with the fish rotting from the head, with ideas about education that were fundamentally illiberal. And then these ideas spread down through the system to K through 12. And I think that's really where this country dies. It dies because its educational system becomes...

petri dish for illiberal ideas and ideas that are fundamentally contemptuous of the founding principles of the Republic of the Republic itself.

Where do you see that playing out? Give us a sense of what you mean when you talk about the rot in K-12 education. What are you referring to there? I think I know, but I want you to explain. I have a nine-year-old who, I think he was six when this happened, came home one day from school, Thomas this is, who said, we had a history lesson today, Dad. And I said, oh, that's interesting. What was it about? Well, he said it was about changemakers.

I said, who in particular? He said, well, Martin Luther King. And I said, well, what did you learn about Martin Luther King? What did you learn in this lesson? He said, well, we learned that all white people are bad. That came as a little bit of a surprise, I have to say, especially as it wasn't Martin Luther King's position. I'm sure that wasn't what his teacher said, but it's the kind of thing that a

a young kid of mixed race is likely to be confused by quite easily. And I'd say that illustrates the way that the idea of critical race theory, which was born in the academic elite, has now permeated the entire educational system. And notions of social justice and equity, notions of inclusion and diversity have now become vehicles

for the transmission of basically illiberal ideas. That chilled me. It really did. I was almost ready to head to the airport and restart his education in England. I was going to say, have you considered, A, homeschooling your children? And if the state of American universities stays status quo or declines further, would you actually discourage them from going to an elite American university like the ones that you taught at?

Well, in some ways, we ran an experiment in partial homeschooling during the pandemic, like a lot of people. And I think it's a tough thing to pull off. I don't think one can exclusively homeschool because as with universities, so with schools, so much of education is really what you learn from your peers, not from your teachers. And I'm not sure that I would be an especially good teacher of K through 12 content if

But on the second question you asked, at this point, I would not send my children to an elite American university. No. What would you encourage them to do instead? Oxford or Cambridge. Well, why have those remained immune to this? Partly, they're not wholly immune. It's there. It's certainly there, just as it is in all of the English-speaking world. But wokeism requires a kind of sense of

guilt to have real traction and the truth is that Brits are much harder to guilt trip into feeling that they are in fact all racists. That's part of it. The other part of it is that the institutional structures of Oxford and Cambridge, which I used to complain about because they were so sclerotic,

are in fact the reason that it's pretty hard to decolonize a curriculum, though they'll try. I mean, these things are not confined to the United States like so much else. They are exported. So when I say Oxford and Cambridge, this all is predicated on two things. One, Thomas and Campbell have to get in, and that's some years away. Two, those institutions have to avoid being entirely corrupted by wokeism, and that, of course, they may well be.

I've been rereading this speech that Charles Krauthammer gave in 2009 that was called Decline is a Choice. And he said basically decline doesn't just happen. It's not the weather, you know, and we should resist decline.

And in this recent essay that you wrote in The Economist, you talk about, I think it's called, why the end of America's empire won't be peaceful, which definitely kept me up at night after I read it. And you say there are worse fates than gentle, gradual decline. Can you expand a little bit on those worse fates to...

continue the pessimism that has run through this conversation? Doom. Well, we're back to doom. The thing about decline and fall is that people tend to imagine that we'll be gradual, like getting old is gradual for most people. But things like great powers or empires, or even just big states are complex systems in reality. And complex systems are

don't behave like individual human organisms at all. And they can fall apart really quickly. And that was what happened to the Soviet Union.

that was what happened to a bunch of states in north africa in the middle east in the so-called arab spring so the key takeaway for me from a lot of the history i've done is that that gentle decline is actually not necessarily on offer that you you might find yourself experiencing something much more like a vertical fall and that that's the thing that one has to to worry about and

Going back to an old Toynbee proposition, do great powers, do empires or civilizations commit suicide or do they fall victim to murder? It can be both. You can so weaken your own inner resolve and inner vitality that you do lose when you come into contact with a tougher antagonist. That's the fear. That has to be the fear.

There is a tweet that's been going around on various signal chats that I'm on. I'm not sure if it's gone in the one that you and I are on together, but the tweet goes like this. If you were born in the Western Roman Empire around 400, would knowing what was coming do much to change how you lived your life? You're not going to go join the Ostrogoths or the Huns. At best, you get a quiet vineyard, a comfortable distance from Rome, read some Virgil, and wait.

And various people, various elites, I will say, wrote back, you know, yep, that's my plan. Essentially, you know, we are in this sort of inexorable decline. We're in the decline or fall of empire. And there's nothing that can be done. The best that we can do is sort of go and read some good books and wait for it. I'm really hoping you don't share that deterministic view of history. And I'm wondering...

Well, what we should really do about the state of affairs right now and what you yourself plan to do. Well, I think, first of all, if I had been in the late Roman Empire, rather than just

buggering off to my vineyard, I'd have been saying, don't let the breadbasket fall. For heaven's sake, don't let them take the North African breadbasket. And there were ways that you could have avoided the fall of Rome. As I said, it's not so much gradual decline as very precipitous decline in the case of the Western Roman Empire. And there were avoidable strategic mistakes that led that to happen. So

Part one of my answer is, you know, there were alternatives for late Romans, just as there are for us. And so fatalism is the wrong approach because fatalism is predicated on the cyclical theory of history. Oh, well, it's decline. We might as well just get ready for it. But that's not actually how it works, that you don't get this gradual decline that you could just enjoy in your vineyard. You're just sitting there uncorking the first bottle when they kick down the door and open fire. It's better, I think...

to be convinced of agency to think strategically about what it is we have to do to prevent the a the inner decay descent into totalitarianism and be the success of a totalitarian system which is the people's republic of china we have options we have agency we do have the capacity to find better leaders rather than to be what we are at the moment which is

as my friend at Princeton Harold James called it, late Soviet America. I mean, the Biden administration is late Soviet. You only need to listen to the president speak to be reminded of the P. Gorbachev leadership of the Soviet Union. So no, it's absolutely the wrong attitude to assume that this is inevitable. The US has turned things around before. It was in a terrible mess by 1975. And five years later, it was in a completely different place. And by the end of the 1990s,

we thought that we were the indispensable, all-powerful, full-spectrum dominant,

uber power, but that turned out to be hubris. So it's not just some gentle downward slope. We have to fear a precipitous collapse. Let me give you an example, Barry. Suppose there is a fight over Taiwan, and suppose the opening act of the war is not what we expect, has nothing to do with aircraft carriers, and is in fact a massive cyber attack on the United States that entirely paralyzes our infrastructure. It shuts down the internet, your cell phone doesn't work, everything is offline. Maybe the power grid is out for a time too long.

That's not gentle decline, trust me. We can do something about that. But if our preparedness plan for that disaster is as good as our pandemic preparedness plan, we're in big trouble. So we have time, not much time, to start thinking

thinking hard about what the pandemic revealed about a dysfunctional federal government and what the fall of Kabul is revealing about a dysfunctional national security state and do something about it. And this time, do something real. Electing a TV...

show host as president was definitely not the answer. There has to be a better answer than that. They came up with one in the 1970s. It was called Ronald Reagan. We've got to do the same. What is your equivalent now of your don't lose the bread basket for the late Roman Empire? What is your message now?

The equivalent of the breadbasket is actually global semiconductor production because that's the thing that the Chinese are heavily reliant on, that they can't do for themselves at the highest level. That's why Taiwan matters. It's one of the reasons Taiwan matters. It's also why Europe matters because this is also a part of the semiconductor supply chain. Given that the world is...

a world that runs on semiconductors and will do so ever more, then you mustn't lose that dominance. The Western world has to hang together and retain that edge. That would be the equivalent of the breadbasket today. And where do you go looking for your new Reagans? Where's the best place to look? I imagine you don't think the answer is Ivy League universities anymore.

No, and Reagan would have agreed with that. And indeed, I think a majority of presidents would have agreed with that. No, I'd say you need somebody who has demonstrated administrative competence. And that probably means a governor. That's why Reagan got the job. It wasn't that he'd been great on radio. There's a huge debate going on inside Congress

Just every conversation that I'm a part of, the theme that runs through it is the division between those who believe in reform and those who believe in building anew. Do we want to shore up our decaying institutions? Is that the right way to go? Or is the right way to say, no, we need to build new things? Where do you fall on that, Neal?

False dichotomy. Look, Oxford and Cambridge have been around, as we said, almost as far back as the 11th century. But it's not as if that's all that British higher education consists of. They built a whole bunch of additional universities in later centuries. And in the same way...

We've got some impressive institutions that have fallen into various forms of disrepair. They might be fixable, maybe, maybe not, but we shouldn't hesitate to build new ones in every field. The same applies to every level of education. I think it's a false dichotomy. You have to try to repair the old institutions because there is something of value there. I'm a conservative enough to believe that there is some valuable legacy there

But I think the best way to improve these existing institutions is for them to have to compete with some new ones, as they had to when Chicago came along and when Stanford came along. This is a country that has long excelled at

at doing new things, building new things, and accepting that some things from the past will be obsolescent, will fall into disuse. And that's the American way. That's the great strength this country has over its potential and actual rivals. We have a great track record of renewal

as well as innovation without revolution. The danger that Americans are prone to is to romanticize revolution because their own went so well. But most revolutions go much worse than the American Revolution. Most revolutions, in fact, produce reigns of terror before they get to anything resembling stability.

Americans were naive about the Arab Spring because they thought it was 1776 in Tahrir Square. Some of us said duh at the time and turned out to be right. So I think Americans need to curb their romantic attachment to revolution and recognize that evolution is by and large the way to go. Neil Ferguson, thank you so much. Thanks, Barry.

Thanks for listening. If you want to send us a note, please go to honestlypod.com. We always read your emails and try and get back to you as soon as we can. And if you want to support us, please visit barryweiss.substack.com and subscribe to my newsletter. See you soon.