Niall Ferguson On Where We Are Now

Niall is one of my oldest and dearest friends, stretching back to when we were both history majors and renegade rightists at Magdalen, Oxford. He is now the Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard. He’s also the founder and managing director of Greenmantle LLC, an advisory firm. He’s written 16 books, including Kissinger, 1923-1968: The Idealist and Doom: The Politics of Catastrophe (which we discussed on the pod in 2021), and he writes a column for The Free Press.

For two clips of our convo — a historical view of Trump’s authoritarianism, and the weakness of Putin toward Ukraine — head to our YouTube page.

Other topics: attending Niall’s 60th birthday party in Wales with an all-male choir; Covid; Cold War II; China’s surprisingly potent tech surge; the race for semiconductors and AI; Taiwan; global fertility; Brexit; the explosion of migrants under Boris and Biden; the collapse of the Tories; Reform rising; Yes Minister; assimilation in the UK; grooming gangs; the failure of “crushing” sanctions on Russia; the war’s shift toward drones; Putin embraced by Xi and Modi; Trump’s charade in Alaska; debating Israel and Gaza; the strike on Iran; the Abraham Accords; the settlements; America becoming less free; Trump’s “emergencies”; National Guard in DC; the groveling of the Cabinet; the growth of executive power over many presidents; Trump’s pardons; Kissinger; tariffs and McKinley; the coming showdown with SCOTUS; Jack Goldsmith’s stellar work; Mamdani; Stephen Miller’s fascism; the unseriousness of Hegseth; the gerrymandering crisis; the late republic in Rome; Tom Holland’s Rubicon; Niall’s X spat with Vance; Harvard’s race discrimination; Biden re-electing Trump; wokeness; and South Park saving the republic.

Browse the Dishcast archive for an episode you might enjoy. Coming up: Jill Lepore on the history of the Constitution, Karen Hao on artificial intelligence, Katie Herzog on drinking your way sober, Michel Paradis on Eisenhower, Charles Murray on religion, David Ignatius on the Trump effect globally, and Arthur Brooks on the science of happiness. As always, please send any guest recs, dissents, and other comments to dish@andrewsullivan.com.

From a fan of our latest pod:

In your episode with Johann Hari, you said: “The winner is the argument, not you.”

That seven-word sentence perfectly captures what I love most about the Dish. I’ve subscribed to your various Dishes going back to The New Republic, and over the years I’ve had comments “published” 15 to 20 times. I’ve always appreciated that comments are anonymous. I love that no one is giving my comment any more or less credence because I’m the one who said it, and I love that no one is trying to promote themselves by being the one to have the most viral hot take.

That’s exactly what I’ve tried to create. I wish others would follow. It’s more fun! You just have to leave your ego aside from time to time. Someone once described the Dish to me as a “truth-seeking guided missile.” I sure hope we are.

Another on the Johann pod:

I wanted to share that I’m currently a therapist on several of the FDA psychedelic trials investigating psilocybin (and also LSD) for clinical use; and I’m a state approved trainer for facilitators to offer regulated psilocybin use in Oregon and Colorado. So, first off, thank you for sharing your own experiences! I have some thoughts:

1. For you and your readers, please consider it to be a *huge* red flag when a “facilitator” or “sitter” says they’ve facilitated thousands of experiences and they’ve *never* had a client have a bad experience. This tells me immediately that this person has so idealized psychedelics that literally any experience will be reframed as “exactly what you need” regardless of what you say. It’s important to note that psycho-spiritual difficulty is often an integral part of insight in psychedelic experiences (like any therapy). However, if someone says that after tens of thousands of trip-facilitation sessions that nothing bad has ever happened to a client, they demonstrate a degree of delusional thinking that creates real physical and psychological safety risks.
   
   I might also note that if everything is reframed as the medicine giving you exactly what you need, then the facilitator is alleviated of any accountability. For example, sexual predation is reframed as a facilitator addressing sexual blockage; extreme and prolonged psychological fragmentation is dismissed as you clinging to psychiatric/medical models of reality; and medical episodes (often cardiac) are ignored, sometimes leading to death.

2. You expressed disappointment that you didn’t have an ego dissolution experience during this train wreck of a session. In my opinion, ego dissolution is actually not super helpful for most people. Many times people can’t remember or integrate their experience when they have a full dissolution. They are often left without a framework to understand — and this is probably where religion or even psychology helps. It seems that something closer to a deep loosening of defenses so that people can get in close contact with affect — like a *very* intense psychoanalysis session — is more helpful. If they have some ego, it seems easier to integrate into their lives.

3. Your experiences being so much more religious and mystical as compared to your peers demonstrates that while there is a predictable drug effect, there is no universal subjective experience. Psychedelics really are a kind of “non-specific amplifier” — that is to say, they increase (or amplify) what is already there: mood, thoughts, defenses, and character traits. This is why I think your experiences were so mystical; you’ve already got a profound spiritual identity.
   
   I also believe the religious tend to integrate their experience more easily, particularly at high doses. My hypothesis as to to why: They already have an intellectual, philosophical, moral, and embodied sense of what profound non-ordinary states of consciousness are. That’s what prayer can be, what religious ceremony and ritual seeks to facilitate, and essentially what every religious text describes when exploring prophetic vision and revelation.

Beautifully put. And I agree on all counts. One more on the episode:

I really enjoyed your chat with Johann. It was great to see the different side of you that only he could bring out — in his unique, impish way — and to learn a lot more about your background. I found especially compelling the discussion about your inherent loathing — no doubt heavily influenced by your Catholic faith — of cruelty and humiliation. That sentiment has always shone through in your work, including your way of dealing with guests who sometimes make asses of themselves.

And while I hate to get political in response to a discussion that was largely apolitical, I have to imagine that that sentiment has a good deal to do with your contempt of Trump. He seems to truly delight in humiliation. I can still remember, for example, his attacking Carly Fiorina’s looks during the 2016 Republican primary and then taking it a step further by doing something even worse towards Ted Cruz’s wife.

As much as I share your disgust at seeing enemy combatants humiliated at Gitmo, or the White House mocking those arrested and deported, I’ve always thought that there is no more gratuitous source of cruelty than that from an unnecessary war. The images I can never seem to get out of my head are not the humiliation at Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, so much as the people I’ve met who have to suffer through the rest of life after having limbs blown off or permanent brain damage in warfare. Then, of course, every war has also added individual instances of cruelty when rogue soldiers rape or torture.

Therefore, I’m a little surprised that I haven’t read you giving Trump credit for his efforts towards peace. There isn’t much about him that’s sincere, but he does seem to have a genuine revulsion towards war. And while he exaggerates his success (as always), there’s no denying his considerable accomplishments with Armenia-Azerbaijan, Congo-Rwanda, and Cambodia-Thailand. Even with Iran, it appears that he may have threaded an incredibly difficult needle by damaging its nuclear program while avoiding any escalation.

With Russia-Ukraine, I don’t know that I have ever seen a more unnecessary war as things stand, with both a totally unjustified invasion and then likely over a million deaths even after it became clear that it was a stalemate. It seems to me that Trump’s administration has worked tirelessly to bring the pointless deaths to an end.

I’m not smart enough to know whether the reflexively anti-Trump media is right in arguing that he is playing into Putin’s hands by meeting him and giving him an air of legitimacy, or whether the perpetual-war neocons are right (for the first time in my lifetime) when they argue that dealing directly with Putin will embolden other dictators to launch wars. And I don’t really care at this point. I just want the needless slaughter to stop, and the rest can be figured out later. And while I’m certainly not claiming that Trump’s peace-related successes make up for all the insanity of this term, I don’t know that he’s wrong to feel his oats a little.

Point taken. A core reason I find Trump despicable is his delight in cruelty. He’s a vicious bully — and I have a visceral loathing of that kind of person. But I have, however, also noted his tendency to avoid and loathe war — because it distinguishes him from the classical version of what tyranny is. But then, in the second term, came his support for the ethnic cleansing of Gaza and the West Bank, his use of the military in the drug war and immigration, his claims on Greenland and even Canada, his attack on Iran, etc. He’s less exceptional in this respect than he was.

On another recent pod, here’s a listener in Tbilisi:

I loved your discussion of the Iranian Revolution with Scott Anderson (who just wrote an incisive NYT piece on Georgia).

But I have a small dissent. I’m writing this as a German and not as a diplomat, so this is not special pleading, but having observed dozens of American diplomats up close for over 25 years, and working with some of them, I felt your critique was a tad unfair. Yes, the compound embassies are a problem, but in my part of the world, American diplomats do engage, they make a huge effort to connect, and they know the country well. They have presented some of the best sides of the United States.

Do they miss things? Sure, but so does everyone else. And they missed the run-up to the Iranian Revolution. Scott Anderson points out that even the revolutionaries were surprised at how it went — some of them getting executed by their own side, too. As he says, the eventual result was unlikely.

Diplomacy, like many other professions, can struggle with Black Swan events, but it’s also not the only thing they do. And yes, we need good and incisive journalism — as we needed it for the 2008 financial crisis — to be sensitive to where and how things may go very different from what we expect.

As far as guest recs, this listener has a binder full of gender-critical women:

I appreciate how willing you have been to wrestle with the transgender issue, and you have highlighted how homophobic this movement is. Still, I remain extremely frustrated that you haven’t yet highlighted the impact it has had on women. You continue to speak to men. The feminists you have had on have either skirted the issue or do not understand it to the depth that many feminists like myself do.

You have interviewed Brianna Wu, and I know you have tried to get Sarah McBride on. Please, please, Andrew, you then need to balance this with speaking to women who can articulate the other side of this argument. Some suggestions:

• Kara Dansky, author of The Abolition of Sex: How the Transgender Agenda Harms Women and Girls and The Reckoning: How Democrats and the Left Betrayed Women and Girls

• Meghan Murphy, a Canadian feminist, who was cancelled for her gender critical views

• Riley Gaines, women’s rights campaigner and author of Swimming Against the Current

• Jennifer Sey, founder of XX/XY athletic wear who fights for fairness in women’s sports

But my biggest plea would be for Maya Forstater and Helen Joyce, who work for the British charity Sex Matters. Helen and Maya have been at the forefront of fighting for women’s rights in the UK.

I beg of you to explore the massive impact Trans Rights Activism has had on women who have tried to point out the reality of sex. It’s been terrifying for women to speak about this publicly. We risk cancellation, ostracism, and loss of income. You cannot continue to discuss this without a thorough and fair exploration of the issue. Any previous feminists you have platformed have not come close to scratching the surface.

You can listen to our gender-critical pods with Abigail Shrier, Pamela Paul, Hannah Barnes, Kathleen Stock, Katie Herzog, Carole Hooven, Julie Bindel, and Helena Kerschner — all via the Dishcast archive. Another rec:

I recently listened to your episode with Jonathan Rauch on evangelicals and your “argument” over whether some of Jesus’ teachings were/are political.

Did you ever read The Political Teachings of Jesus by Tod Lindberg? The book was published in 2008, and it didn’t get much attention at the time I don’t think. I’m rereading it now and it’s excellent, so I thought I’d mention to you. Lindberg would make an interesting guest!

I’ll take a look. Another is psyched for an upcoming guest:

You talking with Arthur Brooks about the science of happiness sounds awesome. He is one of the only reasons I remain subscribed to The Atlantic. And we could all do with some reflection on happiness these days.

Another writes, “I just wanted to thank you for taking the extra week off”:

For some of us, Labor Day weekend is the end of summer and the climax of the year: a 100-hour nerd party in downtown Atlanta, or a week-long gathering in the Nevada desert, or celebrating the return of football. Thank you for not adding to our inboxes with one more thing we won’t get around to reading until well into the following week. I hope you and Chris had a fantastic weekend. (And if you really are secret nerds, please come join us at DragonCon in Atlanta. Next year is the 40th anniversary; and it’s sure to go to the next level.)

From a “loyal fan” of the Dish:

I am so glad you are taking more time for your August break. The shooting at the Catholic school in Minnesota is beyond comprehension, as is the reaction from all sides. I am also Catholic and worked in schools for a good portion of my career, including training principals. Take as much time as you need. We need you back fresh and clear eyed in this mad new reality we find ourselves.

On the most recent Dish column, “The Permanent Stain,” here’s a dissent:

I don’t think you are hyperventilating; there’s a lot to be worried about Trump. (And I say this as someone who voted for him.) While I think your catalogue of offenses is a bit excessive, I accept that he has done plenty that, 40 years ago, would have drawn enormous fire — perhaps even impeachment, as you say.

But that’s just it: