Waiting for Sharansky

In a recent piece for The Free Press titled “We’re All Soviets Now,” Niall Ferguson argues provocatively that, in some important ways, America today resembles the Soviet Union in its decline and fall. If so, we need to make sure that we do not suffer the same fate.  

Some commentators, most notably Jonah Goldberg, have argued that the similarities Ferguson traces between the USA and the Soviet Union in its final years are superficial. Having spent a half-century studying Russia and the USSR, I disagree. If anything, Ferguson understates his case.  

The many examples Ferguson mentions center on our moral decline. We are no longer the people who fought the Nazis and raised the flag at Iwo Jima, still less those who shed their blood to end slavery. Benjamin Franklin memorably told his fellow American revolutionaries that they must all hang together or assuredly they would all hang separately. Now I see my colleagues, a couple of thousand of them, failing to resist a few dozen radical faculty and the students they stir up. Each professor trembles at standing up to the mob alone—alone because, as the professor correctly foresees, other faculty tremble the same way. He knows they would not back him because he would find reasons not to back them. Each cowers because all cower. That is why, as Lenin understood, a handful willing to use “whatever means are necessary” can dominate the rest.  

Lenin proved right, but, as he did not foresee, Russia also eventually exhibited something very different: a tradition of bold, heroic dissidents willing to stand up for the truth, and for each other, despite the terrible cost of doing so. Human rights activists; Jewish refuseniks; Baptists and Lithuanian Catholics prevented from practicing their religion; Crimean Tatars trying to return to the homeland from which Stalin banished them; Ukrainians and Estonians seeking autonomy—the USSR gave birth to these, too. Following in the footsteps of their predecessors from tsarist days, they established their own still more heroic tradition extending across decades. Each generation of dissidents read the memoirs of previous ones to learn how to behave under extreme pressure, as Alexei Navalny recently read Natan Sharansky’s book Fear No Evil. (So did the imprisoned Nelson Mandela.) If we are to recover our moral courage, we would do well to develop our own equivalent tradition, appropriate to our own history and current circumstances. As we unwittingly imitate the worst of Soviet culture, we need deliberately to imitate the best as well.

Ferguson mentions several signs of American decline, including rapidly increasing indebtedness, a military no longer able to match its responsibilities, and aging leaders. When we go into debt, we consume what our descendants will have to pay for. And at some point, which we may be approaching, it becomes obvious that the debt cannot be repaid and so it becomes impossible to borrow. If there should be a crisis or a war, and our enemies surely know our financial condition, we would be unable to deal with it adequately. Après moi, le déluge: we are living selfishly and foolishly.

In addition to the military’s shortcomings that Ferguson mentions, we may also point to its curriculum of “anti-racism.” When the Navy places Ibram X. Kendi’s book How to Be an Anti-Racist on its reading list, it is hard not to anticipate increased racial divisiveness compromising combat readiness. Even if it didn’t, something is amiss. Whenever an institution substitutes a social goal for its primary purpose (when medical schools include social justice topics instead of some displaced medical instruction) that purpose is weakened. If those topics are treated tendentiously, as they are bound to be, students may also become comfortable with less than rigorous scientific reasoning.

Aging, of course, is not in itself a problem. Three of our Supreme Court Justices (Sotomayor, Alito, and Thomas) are in their seventies, two (Roberts and Kagan) in their sixties, and the rest in their fifties, but none shows the kind of debility from which President Biden so evidently suffers. I suspect Ferguson has in mind the inability of older people, especially if they surround themselves with those no less remote from ordinary folk, to appreciate life as most people live it. Brezhnev’s real problem lay in his failure to comprehend the society over which he presided. In his new book on the Russian dissidents, To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause, Benjamin Nathans remarks that Brezhnev was sincerely perplexed as to why anyone would protest against the paradise the Soviets had built. When President Biden argued that inflation is “transitory,” under control, and not so serious as under Trump, he conveyed the same inability to grasp the problems of millions.   

Like the Soviets, Americans have grown, to use Ferguson’s word, “cynical” about their institutions. This cynicism has developed rapidly over the past decade or so, especially since 2020; still worse, it is accelerating. No wonder why: consider how scientists and their spokespeople have betrayed our trust. When Dr. Fauci first instructed that masks would be of no help, and a month later explained that he said that in order to make sure healthcare workers got the few masks then available, he did not seem to realize that a reasonable person would henceforth ask: if he lied for what he considered a good reason then, maybe he is doing so again? By the same token, when the CDC allowed the teachers’ unions to override official procedures to modify COVID-19 guidelines, a reasonable person would wonder whether similar political considerations shape other guidelines.

The discrediting of “science”—not science itself, but its representatives—is perhaps the most harmful legacy of the pandemic. In the Middle Ages those who wanted to preclude objections claimed a revelation from God; an appeal to “science” now plays the same role, which means that anyone who wants to shut down debate invokes it. Sadly, with the pandemic, and sometimes with climate change, scientists themselves have argued this way, for what they assured themselves was a good cause. What they did not sufficiently appreciate is that henceforth the rational response would be not to trust statements made in the name of science. These scientists cried wolf, and in the next crisis, when we need to have trustworthy information, reasonable people will not know whether to believe it even when it is scrupulously presented.  

As Ferguson points out, that was true in the USSR to a still greater degree. Marxism-Leninism described itself as the science of sciences, more certain than physics and chemistry. That was one reason dissidents were placed in insane asylums: to doubt Marxism-Leninism was like questioning the law of gravity. Only drugs could help such madmen, and so, to cite one example Nathans mentions, “one religious believer spent several months at a psychiatric hospital being treated with insulin injections to cure him of his belief in God.”  

In the USSR, the ultimate test of a theory was whether it promoted the interests of the Party, which, as the avatar of history itself, had to be right. In our terms, something was deemed true if and only if it promoted “social justice.” That view is not very far from the ideology prevailing in many American humanities and social science departments. When one can refute a theory by pointing out that its authors were old white men, or by saying that it entails harmful consequences for various victim groups, then one is saying that the only acceptable theories are those with proper political consequences. In that case, why should people trust what social scientists say? The conclusions drawn from their research are evidently given in advance. The authority of scholars depends on the assumption that they have been guided by the search for truth, and that they let the chips fall where they may. Otherwise, they are just propagandists with tenure.  

The public also sees that academics actually guided by facts are hounded, disciplined, or fired. If so, then it is plausible that many others may disagree with the prevailing consensus but deem it wiser to keep silent. When proponents of a reigning truth cite the consensus of experts, one knows that, as in the USSR, it has been manufactured. 

As in the USSR, some who detect the problems with prescribed beliefs may get themselves to accept them. They assure themselves that reality is one way while their eyes see otherwise, and so they learn to live in two worlds at once. Soviet dissidents, who knew 1984 well, called this state of mind doublethink. Natan Sharansky described just how this doubleness became unbearable for him as it did for others, and how liberated people felt when they at last publicly affirmed the truth. These dissidents repeatedly explained that they spoke out even when they believed their cause was “hopeless,” from a desire to be true to themselves, to make public self and private self coincide.

I detect doublethink and the fear of speaking the truth all around me. Several colleagues confide in me the opinions they cannot share with others. They need to tell someone what they think. I take their trust as a compliment, but I wonder how many other professions today are governed by a similar ethos. Bari Weiss’s experience at The New York Times suggests that journalism is. Cynicism about our institutions seems entirely justified, which is why, as Ferguson demonstrates, it is rapidly growing. My only objection is that, since this lack of trust in institutions is reasonable, it seems odd to call it “cynicism,” a word suggesting a predisposition to think the worst regardless of the facts.

Ferguson’s stress on deaths of despair reminded me of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s warnings when he arrived in America a half-century ago. He was struck by the fact that Americans seemed to assume that life is about maximizing individual happiness. Isn’t that what they teach in first-semester economics? And what else could life be about?  Since life presents vicissitudes, despair is always around the corner for those who think this way. For someone who survived the Gulag, and knew dissidents who risked punishments that Americans could not imagine, this view of life seemed astonishingly shallow. How could a people like that, Solzhenitsyn asked, ever muster the strength to defend itself? Why risk one’s life when there is nothing else that matters? A country lacking enough people who would die for it won’t survive long. For that matter, why not commit crimes when one can do so with impunity? 

During a speech at Harvard University, Solzhenitsyn detected the “telltale signs by which history gives warning to a threatened or perishing society.” Referring to the electrical blackout that struck New York in 1977, he observed: 

the center of your democracy and your culture is left without electrical power for a few hours only, and all of a sudden American citizens start looting and creating havoc. The smooth surface film must be very thin, then, the social system quite unstable and unhealthy.

Of course, the riots that swept the country after the murder of George Floyd were much more extensive. Just make it clear that shoplifting small amounts entails no consequences and soon stores have to close.

When Aleksei Navalny, after having barely survived poisoning by Putin’s secret police, returned to Russia, an astonished journalist asked former dissident Natan Sharansky why anyone would do that. “We all knew that he would be arrested at the airport,” the journalist said. “Does he not understand such simple things?” The question angered Sharansky because the journalist evidently assumed that life is about oneself. Sharansky’s answer was, he confessed, “pretty rude”: “You’re the one who does not understand something. If you think the goal is survival—then you are right. But his true concern is the fate of his people—and he is telling them: ‘I am not afraid, and you should not be either.’ ”

The journalist’s question represents the worst of our tradition, while Navalny and his Soviet predecessors represent the best of theirs. So here is my one objection to Ferguson’s diagnosis: it is not pessimistic enough. For all its decadence, the USSR produced thousands of people with outstanding integrity and courage who had no doubt that there are moral values for which one should suffer death, or worse. Where, especially among our pampered elites, are the equivalents of Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Andrei Amalrik, Solzhenitsyn, Sharansky, Navalny, and so many others? To be sure, we have a handful of brave souls like Joshua Katz, Jay Bhattacharya, and Roland Fryer, who risked their careers and reputations, but we have fewer people willing to risk their jobs than the Russians had willing to risk execution or the Gulag. Their example has so far not proven inspiring enough to create a tradition of courageous American truth-tellers, whose support each other courageous person can sense;  which is what Sharansky had in mind in calling his autobiography Never Alone.

Yes, our economy is stronger than the Soviets’. We are still producing amazing technology, as the USSR never did. Millions try to get into our country, while the Soviets prevented anyone from leaving. Our lives are much better than theirs, and, for the moment, we are still freer. But the moral character of our elites is much weaker than it used to be and is worsening rapidly.

On the other hand, our elites are not everyone. Our best hope lies with those deplorables who pay their debts, show compassion to their neighbors, and view their individual lives as less important than eternal moral and spiritual values.

Image by  Helen Filatova and licensed via Adobe Stock.