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…