Niall Ferguson’s New Year’s Incoherence
May you find someone who loves you the way Niall Ferguson loves the ruling class
This may shock you, but I’m no great fan of Niall Ferguson—the “post-liberal,” Ivy League faux-populist, Peter Theil-fawning, apologist for empires of yesterday and today.
Sure, there was a time when I found his British accent smart because most Americans do. And yes, when I was a twenty-something with pretensions to critical thinking and worldliness, I found his PBS docuseries The Ascent of Money stimulating.1
But he lost me once I realized he had long been a vocal advocate for empire. When I discovered this around 2009 or so, I was “on the left” in only a very thin, almost content-less sense. We all were. I was just starting out in the Obama administration.
My grievance with his defense of American empire was that—as a committed liberal internationalist at the time—he was giving the lie to my project. It was easy to tune out leftists who called America an empire as a pejorative. But to adoringly label it that way? It was a perversion…