Substacks
We’re All Soviets Now Niall Ferguson
Bari here.
In the early days of The Free Press, I put together a fantasy roster. Niall Ferguson was at the top of it. Today, I am thrilled to announce that Niall is joining The Free Press as a biweekly columnist.
Niall’s résumé is a little much. He has two degrees from Oxford and has taught there as well as at Cambridge, NYU, the London School of Economics, and Harvard. He’s now a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution Stanford.
Given the present state of many of those institutions, you might dismiss Niall as an establishment hack who shapes history to serve the acceptable narrative.
That isn’t Niall. Unlike so many of the excellent sheep that enjoy tenure in academe, Niall thinks for himself, a quality you can see on display in any one of his 16 books (and counting), including The Pity of War: Explaining World War I; Kissinger: 1923–1968: The Idealist (part one of a two-part biography); The Square and the Tower; and, most recently, Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe.
For this incredible body of work, King Charles just knighted Niall a few days ago.
In recent years, Niall has been one of the most thoughtful and intellectually honest voices in the cultural battle that has engulfed America’s most storied institutions—including academia. In an epochal essay he published this past December in The Free Press, “The Treason of the Intellectuals,” he argued that “American academia has gone in the opposite political direction—leftward instead of rightward—but has ended up in much the same place” as German academia pre–World War II. “The question is whether we—unlike the Germans—can do something about it.”
Niall is doing something. He is one of the founders of the new University of Austin, where I sit on the board alongside him and where, this fall, we will welcome the university’s first class.
Oh, and did I mention that he’s married to Ayaan Hirsi Ali? In journalism we call that burying the lede.
Sir Niall’s first column is just below. —BW
The witty phrase “late Soviet America” was coined by the Princeton historian Harold James back in 2020. It has only become more apposite since then as the cold war we’re in—the second one—heats up.
I first pointed out that we’re in Cold War II back in 2018. In articles for The New York Times and National Review, I tried to show how the People’s Republic of China now occupies the space vacated by the Soviet Union when it collapsed in 1991.
This view is less controversial now than it was then. China is clearly not only an ideological rival, firmly committed to Marxism-Leninism and one-party rule. It’s also a technological competitor—the only one the U.S. confronts in fields such as artificial intelligence and quantum computing. It’s a military rival, with a navy that is already larger than ours and a nuclear arsenal that is catching up fast. And it’s a geopolitical rival, asserting itself not only in the Indo-Pacific but also through proxies in Eastern Europe and elsewhere.
But it only recently struck me that in this new Cold War, we—and not the Chinese—might be the Soviets. It’s a bit like that moment when the British comedians David Mitchell and Robert Webb, playing Waffen-SS officers toward the end of World War II, ask the immortal question: “Are we the baddies?”
I imagine two American sailors asking themselves one day—perhaps as their aircraft carrier is sinking beneath their feet somewhere near the Taiwan Strait: Are we the Soviets?
Yes, I know what you are going to say.
There is a world of difference between the dysfunctional planned economy that Stalin built and bequeathed his heirs, which collapsed as soon as Mikhail Gorbachev tried to reform it, and the dynamic market economy that we Americans take pride in.
The Soviet system squandered resources and all but guaranteed shortages of consumer goods. The Soviet healthcare system was crippled by dilapidated hospitals and chronic shortages of equipment. There was grinding poverty, hunger, and child labor.
In America today, such conditions exist only in the bottom quintile of the economic distribution—though the extent to which they do exist is truly appalling. Infant mortality in the late Soviet Union was around 25 per 1,000. The figure for the U.S. in 2021 was 5.4, but for single mothers in the Mississippi Delta or Appalachia it is 13 per 1,000.
The comparison to the Soviet Union, you might argue, is nevertheless risible.
Take a closer look.
A chronic “soft budget constraint” in the public sector, which was a key weakness of the Soviet system? I see a version of that in the U.S. deficits forecast by the Congressional Budget Office to exceed 5 percent of GDP for the foreseeable future, and to rise inexorably to 8.5 percent by 2054. The insertion of the central government into the investment decision-making process? I see that too, despite the hype around the Biden administration’s “industrial policy.”
Economists keep promising us a productivity miracle from information technology, most recently AI. But the annual average growth rate of productivity in the U.S. nonfarm business sector has been stuck at just 1.5 percent since 2007, only marginally better than the dismal years 1973–1980.
The U.S. economy might be the envy of the rest of the world today, but recall how American experts overrated the Soviet economy in the 1970s and 1980s.
And yet, you insist, the Soviet Union was a sick man more than it was a superpower, whereas the United States has no equal in the realm of military technology and firepower.
Actually, no.
We have a military that is simultaneously expensive and unequal to the tasks it confronts, as Senator Roger Wicker’s newly published report makes clear. As I read Wicker’s report—and I recommend you do the same—I kept thinking of what successive Soviet leaders said until the bitter end: that the Red Army was the biggest and therefore most lethal military in the world.
On paper, it was. But paper was what the Soviet bear turned out to be made of. It could not even win a war in Afghanistan, despite ten years of death and destruction. (Now, why does that sound familiar?)
On paper, the U.S. defense budget does indeed exceed those of all the other members of NATO put together. But what does that defense budget actually buy us? As Wicker argues, not nearly enough to contend with the “Coalition Against Democracy” that China, Russia, Iran, and North Korea have been aggressively building.
In Wicker’s words, “America’s military has a lack of modern equipment, a paucity of training and maintenance funding, and a massive infrastructure backlog. . . . it is stretched too thin and outfitted too poorly to meet all the missions assigned to it at a reasonable level of risk. Our adversaries recognize this, and it makes them more adventurous and aggressive.”
And, as I have pointed out elsewhere, the federal government will almost certainly spend more on debt service than on defense this year.
It gets worse.
According to the CBO, the share of gross domestic product going on interest payments on the federal debt will be double what we spend on national security by 2041, thanks partly to the fact that the rising cost of the debt will squeeze defense spending down from 3 percent of GDP this year to a projected 2.3 percent in 30 years’ time. This decline makes no sense at a time when the threats posed by the new Chinese-led Axis are manifestly growing.
Even more striking to me are the political, social, and cultural resemblances I detect between the U.S. and the USSR. Gerontocratic leadership was one of the hallmarks of late Soviet leadership, personified by the senility of Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, and Konstantin Chernenko.
But by current American standards, the later Soviet leaders were not old men. Brezhnev was 75 when he died in 1982, but he had suffered his first major stroke seven years before. Andropov was only 68 when he succeeded Brezhnev, but he suffered total kidney failure just a few months after taking over. Chernenko was 72 when he came to power. He was already a hopeless invalid, suffering from emphysema, heart failure, bronchitis, pleurisy, and pneumonia.
It is a reflection of the quality of healthcare enjoyed by their American counterparts today that they are both older and healthier. Nevertheless, Joe Biden (81) and Donald Trump (78) are hardly men in the first flush of youth and vitality, as The Wall Street Journal recently made cringe-inducingly clear. The former cannot distinguish between his two Hispanic cabinet secretaries, Alejandro Mayorkas and Xavier Becerra. The latter muddles up Nikki Haley and Nancy Pelosi. If Kamala Harris has never watched The Death of Stalin, it’s not too late.
Another notable feature of late Soviet life was total public cynicism about nearly all institutions. Leon Aron’s brilliant book Roads to the Temple shows just how wretched life in the 1980s had become.
In the great “return to truth” unleashed by Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, Soviet citizens were able to pour forth their discontents in letters to a suddenly free press. Some of what they wrote about was specific to the Soviet context—in particular, the revelations about the realities of Soviet history, especially the crimes of the Stalin era. But to reread Russians’ complaints about their lives in the 1980s is to come across more than a few eerie foreshadowings of the American present.
In a letter to Komsomolskaya Pravda from 1990, for example, a reader decried the “ghastly and tragic. . . loss of morality by a huge number of people living within the borders of the USSR.” Symptoms of moral debility included apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching. The entire country, he wrote, was suffocating in a “miasma of bare-faced and ceaseless public lies and demagoguery.” By July 1988, 44 percent of people polled by Moskovskie novosti felt that theirs was an “unjust society.”
Look at the most recent Gallup surveys of American opinion and one finds a similar disillusionment. The share of the public that has confidence in the Supreme Court, the banks, public schools, the presidency, large technology companies, and organized labor is somewhere between 25 percent and 27 percent. For newspapers, the criminal justice system, television news, big business, and Congress, it’s below 20 percent. For Congress, it’s 8 percent. Average confidence in major institutions is roughly half what it was in 1979.
It is now well known that younger Americans are suffering an epidemic of mental ill health—blamed by Jon Haidt and others on smartphones and social media—while older Americans are succumbing to “deaths of despair,” a phrase made famous by Anne Case and Angus Deaton. And while Case and Deaton focused on the surge in deaths of despair among white, middle-aged Americans—their work became the social-science complement to J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy—more recent research shows that African Americans have caught up with their white contemporaries when it comes to overdose deaths. In 2022 alone, more Americans died of fentanyl overdoses than were killed in three major wars: Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan.
The recent data on American mortality are shocking. Life expectancy has declined in the past decade in a way we do not see in comparable developed countries. The main explanations, according to the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine, are a striking increase in deaths due to drug overdoses, alcohol abuse, and suicide, and a rise in various diseases associated with obesity. To be precise, between 1990 and 2017 drugs and alcohol were responsible for more than 1.3 million deaths among the working-age population (aged 25 to 64). Suicide accounted for 569,099 deaths—again of working-age Americans—over the same period. Metabolic and cardiac causes of death such as hypertension, type 2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease also surged in tandem with obesity.
This reversal of life expectancy simply isn’t happening in other developed countries.
Peter Sterling and Michael L. Platt argue in a recent paper that this is because West European countries, along with the United Kingdom and Australia, do more to “provide communal assistance at every stage [of life], thus facilitating diverse paths forward and protecting individuals and families from despair.” In the United States, by contrast, “Every symptom of despair has been defined as a disorder or dysregulation within the individual. This incorrectly frames the problem, forcing individuals to grapple on their own,” they write. “It also emphasizes treatment by pharmacology, providing innumerable drugs for anxiety, depression, anger, psychosis, and obesity, plus new drugs to treat addictions to the old drugs.”
Obese? Try Ozempic.
The mass self-destruction of Americans captured in the phrase deaths of despair for years has been ringing a faint bell in my head. This week I remembered where I had seen it before: in late Soviet and post–Soviet Russia. While male life expectancy improved in all Western countries in the late twentieth century, in the Soviet Union it began to decline after 1965, rallied briefly in the mid-1980s, and then fell off a cliff in the early 1990s, slumping again after the 1998 financial crisis. The death rate among Russian men aged 35 to 44, for example, more than doubled between 1989 and 1994.
The explanation is as clear as Stolichnaya. In July 1994, two Russian scholars, Alexander Nemtsov and Vladimir Shkolnikov, published an article in the national daily newspaper Izvestia with the memorable title “To Live or to Drink?” Nemtsov and Shkolnikov demonstrated (in the words of a recent review article) “an almost perfect negative linear relationship between these two indicators.” All they were missing was a sequel—“To Live or to Smoke?”—as lung cancer was the other big reason Soviet men died young. A culture of binge drinking and chain-smoking was facilitated by the dirt-cheap prices of cigarettes under the Soviet regime and the dirt-cheap prices of alcohol after the collapse of communism.
The statistics are as shocking as the scenes I remember witnessing in Moscow and St. Petersburg in the late 1980s and early 1990s, which made even my native Glasgow seem abstemious. An analysis of 25,000 autopsies conducted in Siberia in 1990–2004 showed that 21 percent of adult male deaths due to cardiovascular disease involved lethal or near-lethal levels of ethanol in the blood. Smoking accounted for a staggering 26 percent of all male deaths in Russia in 2001. Suicides among men aged 50 to 54 reached 140 per 100,000 population in 1994—compared with 39.2 per 100,000 for non-Hispanic American men aged 45 to 54 in 2015. In other words, Case and Deaton’s deaths of despair are a kind of pale imitation of the Russian version 20 to 40 years ago.
The self-destruction of homo sovieticus was worse. And yet is not the resemblance to the self-destruction of homo americanus the really striking thing?
Of course, the two healthcare systems look superficially quite different. The Soviet system was just under-resourced. At the heart of the American healthcare disaster, by contrast, is a huge mismatch between expenditure—which is internationally unrivaled relative to GDP—and outcomes, which are terrible. But, like the Soviet system as a whole, the U.S. healthcare system has evolved so that a whole bunch of vested interests can extract rents. The bloated, dysfunctional bureaucracy, brilliantly parodied by South Park in a recent episode—is great for the nomenklatura, lousy for the proles.
Meanwhile, as in the late Soviet Union, the hillbillies—actually the working class and a goodly slice of the middle class, too—drink and drug themselves to death even as the political and cultural elite double down on a bizarre ideology that no one really believes in.
In the Soviet Union, the great lies were that the Party and the state existed to serve the interests of the workers and peasants, and that the United States and its allies were imperialists little better than the Nazis had been in “the great Patriotic War.” The truth was that the nomenklatura (i.e., the elite members) of the Party had rapidly formed a new class with its own often hereditary privileges, consigning the workers and peasants to poverty and servitude, while Stalin, who had started World War II on the same side as Hitler, utterly failed to foresee the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, and then became the most brutal imperialist in his own right.
The equivalent falsehoods in late Soviet America are that the institutions controlled by the (Democratic) Party—the federal bureaucracy, the universities, the major foundations, and most of the big corporations—are devoted to advancing hitherto marginalized racial and sexual minorities, and that the principal goals of U.S. foreign policy are to combat climate change and (as Jake Sullivan puts it) to help other countries defend themselves “without sending U.S. troops to war.”
In reality, policies to promote “diversity, equity, and inclusion” do nothing to help poor minorities. Instead, the sole beneficiaries appear to be a horde of apparatchik DEI “officers.” In the meantime, these initiatives are clearly undermining educational standards, even at elite medical schools, and encouraging the mutilation of thousands of teenagers in the name of “gender-affirming surgery.”
As for the current direction of U.S. foreign policy, it is not so much to help other countries defend themselves as to egg on others to fight our adversaries as proxies without supplying them with sufficient weaponry to stand much chance of winning. This strategy—most visible in Ukraine—makes some sense for the United States, which discovered in the “global war on terror” that its much-vaunted military could not defeat even the ragtag Taliban after twenty years of effort. But believing American blandishments may ultimately doom Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan to follow South Vietnam and Afghanistan into oblivion.
As for climate change, the world is now awash in Chinese electric vehicles, batteries, and solar cells, all mass-produced with the help of state subsidies and coal-burning power stations. At least we tried to resist the Soviet strategy of unleashing Marxism-Leninism on the Third World, the human cost of which was almost incalculable. Our policy elite’s preoccupation with climate change has resulted in utter strategic incoherence by comparison. The fact is that China has been responsible for three-quarters of the 34% increase in carbon dioxide emissions since Greta Thunberg’s birth (2003), and two-thirds of the 48% increase in coal consumption.
To see the extent of the gulf that now separates the American nomenklatura from the workers and peasants, consider the findings of a Rasmussen poll from last September, which sought to distinguish the attitudes of the Ivy Leaguers from ordinary Americans. The poll defined the former as “those having a postgraduate degree, a household income of more than $150,000 annually, living in a zip code with more than 10,000 people per square mile,” and having attended “Ivy League schools or other elite private schools, including Northwestern, Duke, Stanford, and the University of Chicago.”
Asked if they would favor “rationing of gas, meat, and electricity” to fight climate change, 89 percent of Ivy Leaguers said yes, as against 28 percent of regular people. Asked if they would personally pay $500 more in taxes and higher costs to fight climate change, 75 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said yes, versus 25 percent of everyone else. “Teachers should decide what students are taught, as opposed to parents” was a statement with which 71 percent of the Ivy Leaguers agreed, nearly double the share of average citizens. “Does the U.S. provide too much individual freedom?” More than half of Ivy Leaguers said yes; just 15 percent of ordinary mortals did. The elite were roughly twice as fond as everyone else of members of Congress, journalists, union leaders, and lawyers. Perhaps unsurprisingly, 88 percent of the Ivy Leaguers said their personal finances were improving, as opposed to one in five of the general population.
A bogus ideology that hardly anyone really believes in, but everyone has to parrot unless they want to be labeled dissidents—sorry, I mean deplorables? Check. A population that no longer regards patriotism, religion, having children, or community involvement as important? Check. How about a massive disaster that lays bare the utter incompetence and mendacity that pervades every level of government? For Chernobyl, read Covid. And, while I make no claims to legal expertise, I think I recognize Soviet justice when I see—in a New York courtroom—the legal system being abused in the hope not just of imprisoning but also of discrediting the leader of the political opposition.
The question that haunts me is: What if China has learned the lessons of Cold War I better than we have? I fear that Xi Jinping has not only understood that, at all costs, he must avoid the fate of his Soviet counterparts. He has also, more profoundly, understood that we can be maneuvered into being the Soviets ourselves. And what better way to achieve that than to “quarantine” an island not too far from his coastline and then defy us to send a naval expedition to run the blockade, with the obvious risk of starting World War III? The worst thing about the approaching Taiwan Semiconductor Crisis is that, compared with the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962, the roles will be reversed. Biden or Trump gets to be Khrushchev; XJP gets to be JFK. (Just watch him prepping the narrative, telling European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen that Washington is trying to goad Beijing into attacking Taiwan.)
We can tell ourselves that our many contemporary pathologies are the results of outside forces waging a multi-decade campaign of subversion. They have undoubtedly tried, just as the CIA tried its best to subvert Soviet rule in the Cold War.
Yet we also need to contemplate the possibility that we have done this to ourselves—just as the Soviets did many of the same things to themselves. It was a common liberal worry during the Cold War that we might end up becoming as ruthless, secretive, and unaccountable as the Soviets because of the exigencies of the nuclear arms race. Little did anyone suspect that we would end up becoming as degenerate as the Soviets, and tacitly give up on winning the cold war now underway.
I still cling to the hope that we can avoid losing Cold War II—that the economic, demographic, and social pathologies that afflict all one-party communist regimes will ultimately doom Xi’s “China Dream.” But the higher the toll rises of deaths of despair—and the wider the gap grows between America’s nomenklatura and everyone else—the less confident I feel that our own homegrown pathologies will be slower-acting.
Are we the Soviets? Look around you.
Niall Ferguson’s latest book is Doom. Follow him on X @nfergus.
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Craig Murray – by Mr. Fish
Blackburn, England: I am standing with Craig Murray who is running for Parliament in this gritty former mill town. We are on a narrow street with brick row houses that jaggedly descend down a hill. The sky is overcast. There is intermittent rain.
Craig, portly, his white hair unkempt and dressed in a clashing checkered shirt with a paisley tie, is handing out leaflets at the entrance of the Masjid e Tauheedul Islam, Blackburn’s largest mosque. He introduces himself politely to those leaving the midday prayers.
I speak with about half a dozen of the worshippers, who like most of the Muslim community in Blackburn, are of Indian and Pakistani origin. They curtly dismiss the leaders of the ruling Labour and Conservative parties as out of touch with their lives and concerns, including their outrage over the genocide in Gaza.
Craig’s central campaign issue, like that of George Galloway — who was recently elected as MP for Rochdale — is ending the genocide in Gaza, including the halting of all arms shipments to Israel. Craig is running on the ticket of Galloway’s socialist Workers Party of Britain, to counter what he says is the “appalling pro-genocide stance” of the opposition Labour Party, which looks set to win the British elections on July 4, ousting the Conservative Party government led by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak.
The Labour Party has won the parliamentary elections in Blackburn for the last 69 years. The socialist crusader, Barbara Castle — instrumental in exposing the British atrocities in Kenya, including the deaths of perhaps 300,000 Kikuyu people and the detention of up to 320,000 more in over 100 camps, where prisoners were tortured, murdered and died of disease — previously held this seat, as did the former foreign secretary Jack Straw. Straw was decidedly less progressive. He was one of the architects of the 2003 war in Iraq under former prime minister Tony Blair. Craig challenged Straw for the seat in 2005 on an anti-war platform. He received five percent of the vote.
The Labour MP for Blackburn, Kate Hollern, in the last election in 2019, won 64.9 percent of the vote. She deviates from the Labour Party line on Gaza, calling for an immediate ceasefire and a suspension of arms shipments to Israel. She was one of the few party members who remained loyal to Jeremy Corbyn when his campaign to run for prime minister was sabotaged by party apparatchiks close to Blair, who accused him of being an anti-Semite because of his defense of Palestinians.
“I have nothing bad to say about the woman really, except that if elected, she would be part of putting Keir Starmer into Number 10 and I have a very great deal against Keir Starmer,” Craig says of his Labour opponent.
Straw, although out of Parliament, casts an ominous shadow over Craig’s campaign. For, as in most of the constituencies where Labour is being challenged by candidates that oppose Labour’s support for Israel, a second well-funded independent, devoid of political experience or a public record on nearly all issues, is also running on an anti-genocide platform. In the case of Blackburn, this person is Adnan Hussain. While Hussain spends much of his campaign attacking Craig, Craig has held a series of meetings on Palestine, including one where he, Richard Medhurst and I spoke to a packed hall at Saint Paul’s Methodist church in Blackburn. Craig has also hosted campaign events with Professor David Miller, who was fired in 2021 from the University of Bristol for his criticisms of Israel, and Dr. Bob Gill, who has documented the defunding, outsourcing and marketization of Britain’s National Health Service by all ruling parties since Margaret Thatcher. Roger Waters is scheduled to hold a campaign rally in Blackburn for Craig on July 2.
The Muslim media site, 5Pillars, proposed that Craig and Hussain toss a coin to see who should run as an independent against the Labour Party. Craig agreed. Hussain, a 34-year-old lawyer, refused.
“The people behind Hussain’s campaign are Jack Straw’s people,” Craig says. “The people financing and organizing his campaign are Jack Straw’s people. The Labour Party is splitting the challenge. It’s not only here. It’s happening around the country.”
Craig’s cluttered second floor campaign office sits on a narrow street above the Mi Chaii cafe on Whalley Range. Covering the windows outside are huge posters and billboards with pictures of public figures, including George Galloway, Roger Waters and Stella Assange, with their brief endorsements supporting Craig’s candidacy.
Nearly half of Blackburn’s constituents are Muslim. The town is reputed to have more mosques than any town in Europe. British Muslims, like Muslims in the U.S. who have abandoned Joe Biden, have walked away from the Labour Party because of Starmer’s unequivocal support for Israel. In Blackburn’s local council elections in May, Labour suffered a significant decline in votes.
Craig, the former ambassador to Uzbekistan, was pushed out of the Foreign Office after leaking to The Financial Times, in 2004, a memorandum he authored that detailed the CIA torture and extraordinary rendition program in Uzbekistan. Craig says his internal protests to the Foreign Office were ignored.
He exposed practices in Uzbek black sites of sexual humiliation, genital mutilation, the rape of men and women, cutting and the dousing of prisoners with boiling liquid, including the death of a prisoner who was immersed in a vat of boiling water.
“The Uzbeks were doing it on behalf of the CIA,” he tells me one morning as we sit in his campaign office. “At first, the prisoners were mostly Uzbeks who had been captured in Afghanistan. But latterly, people were being brought in from all over the place.”
According to the Council of Europe report on extraordinary rendition, of all the CIA flights that stopped in Poland, 50 percent went to Uzbekistan.
Straw, at the time of Craig’s revelations, was the foreign secretary. He pushed for Craig’s prosecution, something the Foreign Office decided against. Caught in a “cash for access” sting, Straw was forced to retire from politics. But he remains a powerbroker in the Labour Party, especially in Blackburn.
“This is entirely prompted by the genocide in Gaza,” Craig says of his parliamentary campaign. “I wouldn’t have come back were it not for the genocide in Gaza. Starmer’s attitude to the genocide in Gaza reminds me of Straw’s attitude to torture, extraordinary rendition and the Iraq war. The Labour Party is corrupt. It doesn’t stand for any of the principles the Labour Party is supposed to stand for.”
“Gaza represents the dislocation of the political class from the people,” he says. “The people want to stop it, certainly here in the U.K., but they have no leverage. The political class is no longer connected to the people. It is connected to the arms industry, to the lobbyists, particularly the Zionist lobby. That’s where the interests of the political class lie. They don’t care about the people. That’s true of both of the main parties. They suffer no hardship because there’s nobody else likely to be elected. Western democracy has become meaningless. The political class is homogeneous. All of them could move from one of the main parties to the other main party without changing anything. If we’re going to save democracy, we have to offer an actual democratic alternative. Gaza brought that home to people.”
Craig, an ardent supporter of Julian Assange, who produced the most erudite reporting on Julian’s many court hearings, spent four months in prison in Edinburgh in the summer of 2022.
He was found in media contempt of court for his reporting on the trial of the Scottish independence leader Alex Salmond, who was accused of sexual assault.
“It was another example of the state using sexual allegations to undermine and wreck the reputation of an opponent,” he says of Salmond and Julian.
The group of women who brought the charges against Salmond were closely connected to the then first minister, Nicola Sturgeon. It included her chief of staff. Craig was jailed for hinting at this fact in his court reports.
Salmond was found not guilty.
“Over 5,000 individuals wrote to me in jail,” he says. “I answered all those by hand, 50 or 60 letters a day.”
“There were quite a lot of illiterate prisoners,” he says. “If you want anything in jail you have to fill in a form. If you cut your foot and need a sticking plaster, you have to fill a form. If you want a family visit you have to fill in a form. Forms would appear under my cell door. Someone would shout through the door what they wanted filled in. A majority of prisoners are there because of poverty. Their crime is poverty. They’ve all been born into deprivation. They’ve had a very poor education. Most of them were born into addiction. The number who are not addicts is tiny. On my entire block, which would be 120 people, there were two people who weren’t addicts and one of them was me.”
“Most of them are in jail for very, very petty crimes,” he continues. “They shoplift or burgle or deal small amounts of drugs in order to feed their addiction. And then they get put in jail. They get no treatment for addiction in jail. They get prescribed drugs daily because the guards want to keep them dazed. Every morning they get their fix. They serve two years. They’re released back out again. They go and burgle someone else and get caught and then they’re back in again. Most of them have been in jail five or six times. The number of real criminals, as in violent people or people who have done large scale crime, is tiny. Most of them are very, very sad, incapable people who need help with their lives. They don’t need locking up.”
“I hadn’t realized so many people have abject, bleak lives, lives without hope,” he says softly. “Their whole life has been without hope from the day they were born. They never had a chance, never had direction. I thought I was socially aware. I realized I’m not. I didn’t know what it was like at the bottom of society.”
“The state has a monopoly on violence and uses it,” he says. “It used extreme violence against Julian Assange, which had a deleterious effect on his health, both mental and physical.”
On October 16, 2023, as he was returning from a WikiLeaks meeting in Reykjavik, where he also attended a pro-Palestine demonstration, Craig was detained and interrogated in Glasgow airport under Schedule 7 of the Terrorism Act 2000. He was questioned about his relationship with WikiLeaks and his support for the Palestinians. He later received a letter informing him that he was under investigation under the Terrorism Act and that his electronic devices, which had been confiscated at the airport, would not be returned.
The Terrorism Act 2000 is often used to detain and interrogate politically active individuals, members of “suspect communities” such as Muslims, Tamils and Kurds, and journalists, such as David Miranda, for carrying the Snowden files. Kit Klarenberg of The Grayzone was detained under the 2019 Counter-Terrorism and Border Act, after his report revealed journalist Paul Mason’s close ties to British intelligence.
“I’m a traitor in their eyes,” Craig says of the ruling class. “I was an insider, a member of the establishment who turned against the establishment.”
“It’s empathy,” he says when I ask him what drives him, “empathy for the people being tortured in Uzbekistan and for their families, for all those who suffer. I was driven by horror at what happened to the victims of the Iraq war. I am driven by horror at what I see happening to the children of Gaza. I hate human suffering. I do my best to alleviate it.”
For thirty years, federal law has required commercial fishing boats to include a trained observer to ensure the vessel does not engage in overfishing or other prohibited practices. The law specifies that certain classes of boats pay the costs of their own monitors. But, it is silent on herring boats. For many years, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) picked up the cost of the monitors for herring boats.
In 2020, however, the federal government began to run out of money for the monitoring program, and the Trump administration started requiring herring boats to share the costs of the federal monitors, which is about $700 per day. The herring boat operators sued, saying that the NOAA had exceeded its authority.
The Biden administration soon reversed the regulation and reimbursed 100% of the costs incurred by the herring boat operators under the Trump-era rule. Nevertheless, the case, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Gina Raimondo, made it all the way to the Supreme Court. There were simple, narrow ways to resolve the case:
1. The Supreme Court could have found that the case was moot because the herring boat operators had been fully reimbursed, and the rule had been reversed.
2. The Supreme Court could have found that charging the herring boat operators for federal monitors violated the clear language of the statute, which specified which types of boats could be charged.
Instead, on Friday, the Supreme Court used the case as a pretext for overturning a landmark decision, Chevron, that has been a cornerstone of federal regulation since 1984. This has been a longstanding priority for right-wing ideologues seeking to dismantle regulations protecting the environment, curbing abuses in financial markets, and ensuring the safety of consumers.
Why Chevron matters
Under amendments to the Clean Air Act passed in the 1970s, companies that modified or constructed a “stationary source” of air pollution were required to obtain permits. But a key question was left unanswered. What counts as one “source”? Is it an entire industrial complex? Or is it each individual source of air pollution within the complex?
The Reagan administration’s EPA issued a rule allowing companies to consider a grouping of industrial sources of pollution as a single stationary source. This allowed companies to create new sources of air pollution within a “bubble” as long as it was offset by reductions in admissions — or the decommissioning — of another source. The Reagan administration’s interpretation would make the process of reducing air pollution slower because companies could create new sources of air pollution without going through the permitting process.
An environmental group, the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), sued, arguing that the EPA’s interpretation of the statute was impermissible. The case, known as Chevron v. NRDC, reached the Supreme Court in 1984.
In Chevron, the Supreme Court unanimously decided that when a statute contains an ambiguity, courts should defer to the judgment of the federal agency in resolving the ambiguity, as long as the agency’s action is “reasonable.” The Supreme Court found that the EPA acted reasonably and upheld its interpretation of the Clean Air Act.
Over the next 40 years, the Chevron decision has been cited over 18,000 times by federal courts. As the Chevron decision itself illustrates, it is not a particularly ideological decision. But Chevron deference is a critical tool that allows the government to address important and complex problems.
For example, in 1987, Congress, through the National Parks Overflights Act, directed the Department of the Interior, in coordination with the Federal Aviation Administration, to “provide for substantial restoration of the natural quiet and experience.” As Justice Kagan noted in her dissent in Loper Bright, the law left some important questions unresolved: “How much noise is consistent with “the natural quiet”? And how much of the park, for how many hours a day, must be that quiet for the “substantial restoration” requirement to be met?” Under Chevron, federal courts defer to the expertise of the people at the Department of the Interior who understand the nature of the park and what it would take to restore “natural quiet” — as long as the decisions made by the Department of the Interior were “reasonable.”
Other questions are even more technical. Kagan cites the Public Health Service Act’s requirement that the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) regulates “biological products,” including “proteins.” A recent lawsuit challenged the FDA’s determination that an “alpha amino acid polymer” is considered a “protein.” Chevron recognizes that the FDA has the expertise to make these kinds of determinations, not the courts.
Further, federal agencies like the FDA are accountable to the administration, which can be replaced by voters. Federal judges, on the other hand, receive lifetime appointments.
“A rule of judicial humility gives way to a rule of judicial hubris”
In Loper Bright, Chief Justice Roberts, writing for the majority, casts aside 40 years of judicial precedent. “Chevron is overruled,” Roberts declares.
This is fundamentally a power grab. Instead of deferring to the expertise of agencies to implement statutes in the face of inevitable ambiguities, the Supreme Court has empowered itself, and other federal courts, to do the job. “Chevron’s presumption is misguided because agencies have no special competence in resolving statutory ambiguities,” according to the majority. “Courts do.”
As a practical matter, it empowers any federal judge — including hundreds appointed by Trump — to strike down regulations by asserting that an agency misinterpreted a statutory ambiguity. Chevron itself is neutral because it protects the statutory interpretations of liberal and conservative administrations. But if your goal is to dismantle as many regulations as possible, getting rid of Chevron makes your task much easier.
The decision to overturn Chevron is particularly remarkable because it was based on a statutory interpretation. Roberts found that Chevron deference was actually prohibited by the Administrative Procedure Act, a law passed 80 years ago. But if Congress wanted to empower the courts, not agencies, to resolve statutory ambiguities, it could have passed a law repealing Chevron at any time between 1984 and today. But Congress chose not to do so. But the Supreme Court decided to award itself this power anyway.
The farce of Supreme Court nomination hearings
The decision to overturn Chevron was formally made on Friday. But the writing has been on the wall since former president Donald Trump appointed three Supreme Court Justices who were part of the ideological campaign to kill Chevron. Trump’s nominees were all asked about Chevron during their confirmation hearings, and all deliberately gave the impression that they would respect Chevron as precedent.
Chevron “is a precedent of the Supreme Court entitled to respect under the doctrine of stare decisis,” Justice Barrett said in response to written questions. Barrett refused to elaborate in any detail, claiming it “would not be appropriate for me to offer an opinion on abstract legal issues or hypotheticals.”
“As a Supreme Court Justice, if you were to make this decision to overturn Chevron, would you consider the implications on all of the cases in the U.S., and the rules and the uncertainty that it would create?” Senator Amy Klobuchar (D-MN) asked Justice Neil Gorsuch during his confirmation hearing. “Goodness, Senator, yes,” Gorsuch replied. Klobuchar asked Gorsuch about a previous opinion he wrote as a circuit court judge that criticized Chevron. Gorsuch insisted that he had not “prejudge[d]” the case and would “come at it with as open a mind as a man can muster.” He then signed onto a ruling that stated Chevron was wrong from the moment the decision was issued.
Justice Kavanaugh wrote a Harvard Law Review article in 2016 harshly criticizing Chevron. But during his confirmation process, he insisted that he respected Chevron as precedent. “Chevron is a precedent of the Supreme Court entitled to the respect due under the
law of precedent,” Kavanaugh wrote in response to written questions. “As I explained at the hearing, I have applied the Chevron doctrine in many D.C. Circuit cases over the last 12 years.” Kavanaugh then signed onto the majority opinion overturning Chevron, which cited his law review article.
On today’s Front Page from The Free Press, Joe Nocera on how Anthony Fauci went from hero to zero, the Democrats pay the price for DEI, France’s rightward turn, and much more. But first, the latest on the president.
I hope some of you have looked up from the news over the past seventy-two hours. I haven’t. All screen-time limits have been out the window since Thursday’s debate. My eyes are bleeding and show no signs of stopping.
Since the moment Trump and Biden walked off that stage—or in Biden’s case, was escorted off by a wife who later, somehow, made matters worse when she praised him for answering every question—American politics has been stuck in limbo.
Will he? Or won’t he?
Every hour brings a new development. Obama backed Biden, posting that “bad debate nights happen.” Okay, Biden’s in! He’s definitely in. Then half of the The New York Times editorial page roster, as well as the paper itself in an editorial, called on Biden to quit. Okay, Biden’s out! Only a matter of time before he makes the announcement.
For those of you who have lives and better things to do other than doomscroll all weekend, a quick recap of what’s gone down as of press time:
Thirty minutes into the debate, when it was clear Biden was bombing, the first spin dropped: he has a cold.
On Friday, Biden managed to deliver prepared remarks, read from a teleprompter in front of a fired-up crowd of supporters—and this was supposed to be a sign that all was well and Thursday night was just a blip. Bob Woodward said it wasn’t a blip but a “political H-bomb.”
Meanwhile, in the Hamptons on Saturday, Biden reportedly needed a teleprompter for five-minute remarks at a rich guy’s house.
In a report on “the two Bidens,” White House aides explained to Axios’s Alex Thompson that from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. the president is “dependably engaged.” (Good thing the job of the president only requires the hours of a dentist.)
The Biden campaign issued a memo citing snap polls immediately after the debate that suggested no major changes in public opinion. The memo also cautioned that “if we do see changes in polling in the coming weeks, it will not be the first time that overblown media narratives have driven temporary dips in the polls.” (Never mind that most polls and models show that Biden is already losing the race. And never mind the poll published Sunday that shows a jump in the percentage of voters who do not think Biden is mentally or physically fit for the job of president to 72 percent.)
The Biden campaign sent a fundraising email that included a chart showing that Biden leads other Democrats in head-to-head matchups against Trump. (The extraordinary thing about this is not that it shows Biden outperforming various untested Democrats, but that Biden’s team decided to include it in a fundraising email at all.)
The media pile-on continued throughout the weekend with everyone from the Times, the house organ of the Democratic Party, to The New Yorker (ditto), to The Economist adding to the chorus of voices calling for Biden to step down. (“It is sad to go to pieces like this, but we all have to do it,” wrote New Yorker editor David Remnick. Ouch.)
And here’s a taste of the enthusiasm from Democrats sticking by Biden. The best David Axelrod could muster was to post on X: “Unless the @POTUS, himself, decides to quit—which he won’t—that issue is settled. The discussion that is going on now was timely a year ago, when few wanted to have it. It’s largely irrelevant today.”
Democratic congressman Ro Khanna defended the president by comparing the leader of the free world to the fictional boxer Rocky Balboa: “Rocky wasn’t the most eloquent in speech. But he was a fighter.” Is this supposed to make us feel better?
By Sunday, Biden had spun through his fundraisers and made it to Camp David for a prearranged family meeting, complete with a photoshoot with Annie Leibovitz for Vogue. Biden was reportedly eager for ideas from family and advisers on how to proceed and is mulling an interview or press conference to address the age issue head on.
According to some accounts, the strongest voices urging Biden to stay the course are his son Hunter, who “wants Americans to see the version of his father that he knows—scrappy and in command of the facts—rather than the stumbling, aging president Americans saw on Thursday night.” The family blames Biden’s top advisers for the mess and are calling for heads to roll.
Amid all the furious spin, some 300 million Americans are wondering: who will be on the ballot come November? Who is running the country right now?
We don’t know the answer to either.
Is this all too negative? To use the Bidenworld parlance, are Democrats who want Biden to drop out just the “bedwetting brigade”? On Friday, Olivia Reingold headed to New York City’s Stonewall Inn, where Biden commemorated a new monument celebrating gay pride, and got another perspective: that the president’s superfans are standing by him after Thursday’s disaster.
Are they right to keep calm and carry on? Or do those inside the Biden bubble have a hearing problem? Here’s Olivia’s dispatch from “Inside the Biden Bubble.”
On the record, everyone important in the Democratic Party is behind Joe Biden. Privately, it’s a very different story.
Peter Savodnik spent the weekend speaking to more than 20 Democratic activists, strategists, and donors who are panicked and plotting in the event that Joe Biden announces he isn’t seeking re-election.
“Secretly, most of the donors are worried sick and would like to see someone else on the ticket,” a Democratic fundraiser told The Free Press. “They’re not going to speak against him publicly, but they’re very worried—they’re sending specific suggestions about who should replace him.”
I’m allowing myself one more plug for a response to Niall Ferguson’s conversation-driving Free Press essay on why “We’re All Soviets Now.” And only because it’s from the Grey Lady’s always-interesting conservative-in-residence, Ross Douthat. His takeaway: conservatives should be optimists, not doomers. (New York Times)
And for more cheeriness about the United States—we need it right now—here are six charts from Bruce Mehlman that will have you yelling, “America, fuck yeah!” (Age of Disruption)
Foreign officials knew from their meetings with the president what the White House has been trying to hide—and what we all saw on Thursday night. “The reading in Europe is that this has been an unmitigated disaster.” (WSJ)
“At night, I prayed I wouldn’t survive to the next day.” A Ukrainian describes life as a prisoner of war in Russia. (Spiegel International)
In the latest evidence that nothing is safe from attack in the culture wars, a scheme funded by the universally beloved Dolly Parton to give free books to kids has been attacked as “white saviorism.” (The Telegraph)
There are lots of lessons for the far left from Jamaal Bowman’s primary defeat last Wednesday, argues Michael Powell. Whether they’ll bother to learn them is another matter. (The Atlantic)
Top hospitals are offering Long Covid clinics. After studying these programs for a new paper, Vinay Prasad suspects they are little more than scams. (Substack)
Kanye West, the prolific rapper turned prolific antisemite was spotted in Russia this past weekend, where he reportedly shopped, checked out the Red Square, and celebrated the birthday of his fashion designer friend. (Times of Israel)
Almost half a decade after the start of the pandemic, just 6 percent of federal workers are working full-time in their offices and 30 percent are fully remote. Some government agencies are using just 10 percent of their office space. (Washington Post)
Kinky Friedman, the satirical musician, author, and onetime Texas gubernatorial candidate, died last week at 79. (Variety) If you want to unplug from the current news cycle, I recommend Matt Labash’s 2006 profile of Friedman on the campaign trail.
Up next, Joe Nocera reads Anthony Fauci’s new memoir—and is struck by the gap between the public health bureaucrat who got everything right back in the 1980s and the man who flubbed it when Covid hit in 2020.
In his new memoir, On Call, Anthony Fauci devotes tremendous energy and space to his role during the AIDS crisis—with good reason. Despite having spent, at that point, more than a decade as a government health bureaucrat, the 44-year-old scientist could see that the federal government wasn’t devoting enough resources to AIDS research, and that the hurdles required to get a new drug approved made little sense when so many young gay men were dying without access to drugs that just might help them stay alive.
Fauci successfully fought for more research dollars, and he also helped tear down those hurdles so that AIDS patients could try drugs even though they didn’t have the final stamp of approval from the Food and Drug Administration. He portrays himself as a hero in his book—and he was.
Fauci also devotes tremendous energy and space to his role during the Covid crisis. By then, he was 79 years old, with 52 years in government, including the last 36 as the head of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases. He was the government’s chief scientific voice during the pandemic, and he again portrays himself as a hero of the crisis in his book.
But this time he absolutely was not. In fact, his role in the crisis is a big reason why public health officials are now held in such low esteem.
The man who tackled the AIDS crisis was very different from the man who advised presidents—and the country—about Covid-19. The country would have been far better served during the pandemic with the man I’ve come to think of as “AIDS Fauci” rather than “Covid Fauci.” Read on for the full tale of two Faucis.
→ Biden Democrats hobbled by DEI: Over the weekend, Spectator columnist Melissa Chen posted on X that “one of the major reasons the Democrats are in this bind is because of DEI.” She argued that the diversity, equity, and inclusion craze, with its emphasis on identity over capability, is what forced Biden’s team to pick Kamala Harris as his running mate four years ago. “Instead of being responsive to the desires of ordinary people,” Chen writes, “Biden unnecessarily hamstrung himself—and the rest of the country—by announcing the criteria that his VP will be a BIPOC woman. Yes, this was 2020 when everybody was trying to outperform everybody else on how anti-racist they were. Crazy times.” As a result, “we ended up with an inauthentic word salad VP whom no one likes. And the Dems are finding themselves paying the price for not bothering to listen to the people. The stakes are high for the choice of who gets to occupy the highest office in the land. They used DEI to pick a VP, and they eschewed the normal primary process which allows feedback from voters. What we got was a sanitized, highly managed political process, where the candidate of choice was foisted upon us.” Her comments echo that of Free Press columnist Kat Rosenfield, who predicted back in May that this would happen. Sadly for the Dems, the polls suggest that 59-year-old Harris has an even slimmer chance of beating Donald Trump than Joe Biden. “Buckle up,” Chen concludes in her post, “it’s going to be a wild ride till November.”
→ France goes right: Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally party won 34 percent of the vote in the first round of France’s parliamentary elections yesterday. For weeks, polls had predicted Emmanuel Macron’s centrist bloc would be surpassed by the radical right and left—and that is exactly what early projections suggest happened. The far-left New Popular Front won 28 percent of the vote and Macron’s Ensemble bloc came third with 20 percent. This outcome is exactly the result the philosopher Bernard-Henri Lévy feared when he wrote in The Free Press last week that “we urgently need a union of principled democrats of the left, the right, and the center.” France will vote again this Sunday: in districts where no candidate secured 50 percent in the first round, any candidate who won more than 12.5 percent goes to the second vote. And so the week ahead will involve horse trading and unpredictable three-way votes before we learn how many seats Le Pen’s party really gets, and whether Macron and the far right will have to find a way to share power.
Oliver Wiseman is a writer and editor for The Free Press. Follow him on X @ollywiseman.
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