Niall Ferguson, Tendentious Op-Ed Writer for Hire.

Oh, Niall...

Photo by hannah grace on Unsplash

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World has a lot of vital tasks, but one of them is to identify op-eds that merit a critical take. In the weeks right before a U.S. presidential election, that is a challenging task — not because they are hard to find but because they are everywhere. It’s a toss-up election, the stakes are high, and everyone is losing their damn minds. Of course there are going to be a lot of really, really stupid op-eds.

So, which one should I choose? It is tempting to go after Washington Post owner Jeff Bezos, who penned a laughable defense of his cowardly decision not to endorse a presidential candidate. But that is too easy a mark. A quick read of Bezos’ op-ed reveals:

1. No one at the Post edited a word of it — and I can’t say as I blame them!

2. Bezos contradicts himself multiple times — as when he notes that trust in the media is falling in annual public surveys and “something we are doing is clearly not working” while also acknowledging: “When it comes to the appearance of conflict, I am not an ideal owner of The Post.”

3. The only useful piece of information contained in the op-ed is Bezos’ acknowledgment that it was his call, thereby contradicting the laughable-on-its-face defense of the decision by WaPo publisher Will Lewis.

Little wonder that TNR’s Jay Willis concluded, “Bezos’s column is, to use a term of art in the publishing industry, bad: a jumble of unsupported assertions, inapposite bromides, and circular reasoning.” Bezos is a classic Ideas Industry victim of his own plutocracy: he is so wealthy that no one can speak truth to money. 99% of the time he therefore operates in a criticism-free bubble. This cocoon is how Bezos managed to lose 250,000 subscribers in less than a week.

The hard-working staff here at Drezner’s World feels no need to belabor any further criticism on Mr. Bezos. No, the ideal focus for this newsletter is on those who believe themselves to be honest intellectual brokers while pumping out bullshit.

And this brings us to campus political broker noted historian Niall Ferguson, currently the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. A few days ago Ferguson penned a Daily Mail op-ed entitled, “Why Kamala Harris poses a greater threat to democracy - both at home and abroad - than Donald Trump.” Ferguson concludes that op-ed with: “Republic or Empire? I would say the latter looks more vulnerable to four more years of Democratic government than the former does to four more years of Trump.”

This is quite the confusing and provocative claim from Ferguson! It is confusing because Ferguson used to be pro-empire in his writings. I remember reviewing his 2005 book Colossus for the Wall Street Journal; in that book, Ferguson lamented that the U.S. wasn’t imperialist enough!

In fairness, however, that was almost twenty years ago — people change! So let’s move on to the provocations. How does Ferguson manage to argue that Kamala Harris is a greater danger to democracy than Donald Trump? Let’s bullet point the highlights:

• Trump is not a fascist because he can be funny: “Does Trump look or sound like Hitler? To answer that question, I refer readers to his hilarious performance at an annual fund-raising dinner for Catholic charities in New York on October 18…. how about the good humour with which Trump dished out fries in a memorable election stunt at a drive-in McDonald's. The Führer didn't do stand-up. Nor did Mussolini serve fast food.”

• Even if Trump is a fascist he can’t implement fascism: “The question is not how far Trump has authoritarian proclivities: it is how far he would be able to indulge them if re-elected to a second term…. The rule of law is deeply embedded in the U.S., not just because it is, by design, a republic of laws, but also because it remains a country run to a striking extent by people with law degrees. In addition, it has an officer class deeply committed to the separation of the military from politics.”

• Harris has anti-democratic ideas. Actually, not Harris but… two Ivy League professors? “the irony is that it is not Trump but the more radical Democrats who openly discuss constitutional changes that would fundamentally alter the U.S. political system to their own advantage. To give one example of many, in an article published two years ago in the New York Times, two liberal professors at, respectively, Harvard and Yale, Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, urged Democrats not to try to 'reclaim' the 'broken' Constitution but to 'radically alter the basic rules of the game'…. who is to say that, if elected president with majorities in the Senate and the House, Harris would not be open to such revolutionary schemes?”

• In the realm of foreign policy, a Harris administration would not deter but a Trump administration world: “The foreign policy of the Biden-Harris administration likely condemns Ukraine to be defeated; Israel to risk a war against Iran, with only limited U.S. support; and Taiwan to fear a blockade by China at some point in the next four years. The signature term of this administration has been 'de-escalation'. On closer inspection, this term is the functional opposite of 'deterrence'. We cannot know for sure if Trump is right when he says that the attacks on Ukraine and Israel would not have occurred if he had been re-elected in 2020. All we know is that no such acts of aggression by authoritarian powers occurred during his first term.”

So, basically, Ferguson acknowledges that Trump has authoritarian impulses but suggests that he’s not really a fascist because he has a sense of humor and the adults in the room will contain his worst impulses. Harris, on the other hand, might act on the ideas of a two-year old New York Times op-ed and — unlike Trump — will let America’s allies down.

There are two possible responses to Ferguson’s claims. The first one is simple and to the point:

The second is to stress the myriad ways that Ferguson needs to delude himself in order to make his case. To believe that Harris represents the greater threat to American democracy, Ferguson must first studiously ignore everything that Trump’s former advisers and staffers from his first term have said about him. He then needs to pretend he is ignorant about Trump’s campaign statements regarding the “enemy from within” and why Nancy Pelosi and Adam Schiff are a bigger threat than Russia or China.

But the depth of Ferguson’s massive efforts at self-delusion would not stop there. He also has to ignore the reason why Trump talked constantly about wanting Hitler’s generals — so he could have military officers who followed his orders blindly rather than obeying, say, the Constitution. Furthermore, Ferguson must pretend that Trump’s second term of office will play out exactly like his first term, even though there are excellent reasons to believe that the second term would be different:

The guardrails that partially thwarted him in the first term — Congress, the civil and foreign service, his own staffers — were badly eroded during his first term. What is noteworthy is not that Trump wants to enhance presidential power — some of us were warning about that issue years ago — but the degree to which Republican elites and voters have wholeheartedly embraced these ideas as well. If he wins again, he will likely do so with GOP majorities in the House and Senate along with a conservative Supreme Court. A lot of the public threats coming from the Trump campaign seem designed to drive out folks Trump would want to purge from the bureaucracy anyway. In other words, the guardrails will be weak to nonexistent if he wins again.

Who, exactly, does Ferguson think will stop Trump this time? Stephen “America is for Americans and Americans only” Miller? Tom “Send in the Troops” Cotton? The folks Trump wants to hire without any FBI background checks?

Ferguson’s most impressive intellectual backflip, however, is to hypothesize that Kamala Harris will eagerly implement policies suggested in a two-year old New York Times op-ed because — oh, wait, Ferguson provides zero evidence that Harris would do this!! It is just a silly hypothetical — but Ferguson must believe it to be more likely than Trump attempting to implement anti-democratic and illiberal policies. Otherwise Ferguson’s entire argument collapses onto itself.¹

As for Ferguson’s foreign policy predictions, readers should give them the weight of gossamer. It rests on Donald Trump being more capable of credible commitment and coercive diplomacy than Kamala Harris, and Trump’s past history on this score makes this a laughable assertion.

For Niall Ferguson to believe that Kamala Harris is a greater threat to democracy than Donald Trump, he has to ignore facts in evidence, treat fanciful hypotheses as lead-pipe cinches, and wave away any contrary information with a leaf-blower. Bear that in mind the next time Ferguson presents himself as providing an expert opinion on anything other than the Rothschilds.

1. If Ferguson really was worried about the things he is concern-trolling about, he would vote for Harris. The Senate is very likely to be controlled by the GOP after the 2024 election, and the best way to prevent government overreach would be divided government.