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Historian Niall Ferguson likens the US situation circa 2024 to a “late, Soviet America.”
He notes that in 1990, observers were noticing a “ghastly and tragic... loss of morality” within the USSR. “Apathy and hypocrisy, cynicism, servility, and snitching,” were running wild. Nearly half the population thought that theirs was an “unjust society.” USSR leaders were old party hacks...
The Soviet economy was largely fake... almost all of it directly or indirectly controlled by the Communist Party. The government ran chronic deficits... supporting a bloated military that looked powerful, on paper, but couldn’t win a war.
“Sound familiar?” asks Ferguson:
"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."
Bill Bonner
Sloths move at the speed of congressional debate but with greater deliberation and less noise.
PJ O'Rourke
History suggests governments eventually resolve prolonged chaos the old-fashioned way: war. Whether that’s in Eastern Europe, Asia, or somewhere else, the risk is rising. For now, all we can do as individuals is insulate ourselves—financially and geographically—from, as Doug puts it, “the elephants trampling the grass.”
I’m glad to be in Uruguay. Doug Casey’s glad to be in Argentina. Here, the pace is slower, the politics are less theatrical, and the news cycle doesn’t try to kill you before breakfast.
But the U.S.? The republic is gone. The empire is in the open. And under Trump 2.0, chaos isn’t a bug in the system—it’s the system.
Matt Smith
