‘Ordinary Americans’ Can Be Wrong, Too

If Jonah Goldberg will forgive my coming in off the top rope in his cage match with Niall Ferguson—over Ferguson’s insistence that the United States is in a social and political situation similar to that of the late Soviet Union—I have one little point to add. 

While Goldberg shares many of Ferguson’s concerns about “deaths of despair” and the social direction of the United States, he rejects the Soviet comparison on the grounds that the United States is a free, generally prosperous, and generally decent society with a democratically accountable government and liberal institutions, however imperfect, that distinguish it in fundamental and obvious ways from the Soviet Union. About that, Goldberg is correct, and one suspects that Ferguson knows it, which is why he deputizes “ordinary Americans” to make the argument he doesn’t want to make directly, because it is demonstrably untrue. 

When Goldberg says, for example, that American society remains very free in the most important ways—and argues that, indeed, many of our problems are related to an excess of freedom—Ferguson replies: “Ordinary Americans don’t think that.” Ordinary Americans, he says, don’t feel free the way Goldberg and the rest of us dacha-dwelling—he does invoke dachas; I am not making that up—members of the neo-nomenklatura (and yes, he describes the American elite as our “nomenklatura”) do.

And that is where I feel compelled to enter the fray. 

I do not doubt for one minute that Sir Niall Ferguson knows “ordinary Americans” at least as well as the next Oxford-educated gentleman from Glasgow does, having no doubt encountered oodles of them as a Harvard professor or at the London School of Economics or loitering around the Hoover Institution, Stanford being famously thick with specimens of the ordinary. But it never seems to have occurred to him to consider the possibility that, whatever “ordinary Americans” say about the state of the world, there exists the possibility—however remote!—that those “ordinary Americans” are wrong.

The question of whether ordinary Americans live in a free society or in an unfree one is not, finally, a matter of opinion only. There will be some subjective judgment about the question of how free a particular society is at the margins, but the United States is not at the margin. It is a free society. Very. We have universal suffrage, a free press, due process that actually means something, property rights, freedom to travel, etc. Americans may say they do not feel free, and, if they do say that, they are wrong—and it is morally necessary for intellectuals with public voices to tell them so.

It is not as though that hasn’t come up before in other contexts. Americans will routinely tell pollsters that they think we are in an economic recession when we are not in an economic recession, and are especially likely to think poorly of the economy when the federal government is under the control of the political party they don’t like, which is a thing that happens from time to time in a free country that has meaningful elections. As with whether a society is free, there is some judgment and discretion about what counts as a recession, and, when that question arises, you can count on the New York Times to try to work the refs in Democrats’ favor, as they did with the “Don’t You Dare Call It a Recession!” period of GDP contraction in 2022. But the question of whether we are in a recession is not the same as the question of whether Americans will tell pollsters we are in a recession. Reality gets a vote, too. 

The “ordinary Americans” rhetoric is tedious and silly, a variation on the “Real America™” horse pucky the right has been slinging for decades, or the left’s version of that, “working people.” There are real ordinary American working people at Goldman Sachs and Google, with only a small share of real ordinary American working people driving combines in Nebraska or working in Indiana steel mills. And those deaths of despair are not, as Ferguson himself notes, really an issue of “ordinary Americans,” if by that we mean Americans at large. These pathologies—like crime in the 1980s and 1990s, certain sexually transmitted diseases, or a penchant for “Laufeycore” fashion—tend to be concentrated in certain demographics, subcultures, and regions. 

It is not only politicians who need to heed Edmund Burke’s advice about what a representative owes his constituents: “Your representative owes you, not his industry only, but his judgement; and he betrays you instead of serving you if he sacrifices it to your opinion.” Media figures and intellectuals, even more so than elected officials, have a duty to tell the American people when they are full of it, which they very often are.

It is the case that Americans are more likely to die of drug overdoses and drug abuse than are, say, South Koreans—who are more likely to commit suicide than Americans are, as indeed are Russians, Ukrainians, etc. Americans also are a lot more likely to be shot to death or die in a car wreck than are most people in advanced countries. (Americans die on the roads at a rate more than three times that of the hard-driving Germans.) That isn’t because we’re crypto-Soviets. It’s because we’re Americans. 

You know: savages.