US Needs to Take History More Seriously YouTube video by Niall Ferguson Why The United States Needs to Take History More Seriously https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pmdxYTyrI-E Could you put your hand up if you are an American citizen; now keep your hand up if you intend to vote for Donald Trump; he must still be a coffee now put your hand up. if you think that what we're seeing in American politics this year is unprecedented all right. I'm here to tell you that you're wrong it's um in fact eminently precedented that there should be a populist backlash against globalization it's happened before but you have to take a deep breath and stop worrying about the 1930s. my dear old friend Andrew Sullivan wrote a scintillating piece for New York magazine warning that Donald Trump represented tyranny and many people including myself have been prompted by the events of the past 12 months to reread Philip Roth's extraordinary book the plot against America which if you haven't read you should read Roth imagines an isolationist presidency Charles Lindbergh are taking the United States into fascism the slogan of the isolationists in the 1930s was of course America first but I want to try and persuade you that this is not the right analogy and indeed that the more Donald Trump is compared with Hitler the more likely paradoxically he is to win because his supporters simply aren't convinced by that analogy I'm going to be like a celebrity chef now I'm going to give you a recipe Gordon Ramsay style but my recipe is for populism and if you come into my historical kitchen I'll show you that it takes just five ingredients and that Americans have cooked this meal before so the first ingredient for a populist backlash is an increase in immigration and if one looks at measures like this one which shows you the percentage of the u.s. population that is foreign-born you'll see that in a remarkably short space of time since the 1980s we've returned very close to the peak in the late 19th century that's to say the foreign-born share of the u.s. population is now close to that 40 percent peak that we saw in what I'm going to call the first age of globalization the period before 1914 when the United States or enormous our inflows of migrants predominantly but not exclusively from Europe so ingredient number one is is a big surge in emigration ingredient number two is an increase in inequality we don't have good inequality data for the late 19th century the partly because we don't have income tax a data from that period but we can see and the work of Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty has shown this that in the last decade or so we have nearly returned in terms of income inequality to the levels of the pre frost World War and 1920s periods so that's the second ingredient the third ingredient if you want to have a populist backlash is an increasing perception of corruption a sense that the political system is bent crooked and we can see in surveys of American attitudes just how far major institutions of American life that most obviously Congress have suffered dramatic declines in their reputations so the the popularity or favorability of Congress and the public eye is down into single digits the fourth ingredient which is a little bit like turning up the heat under the pot is a major financial crisis there have only really been three financial crises comparable in size to the one that we experienced in the aftermath of 2008 one is very famous the 1929 stock market crash in the subsequent depression one is much less well known the earliest of the three and that was the 1873 financial panic which was followed by a period of stagnation in economic growth that lasted right into the 1890s in fact contemporaries call that the Great Depression you now have four key ingredients for a populist backlash all that you need is to add one secret sauce in order to achieve peak populism you need a demagogue you need someone who can connect with the voters who are aggrieved about all the things I've just described you the increased immigration their increased inequality the financial crisis the sense that the system is rigged is corrupt and that is what has happened in this election and all the experts all the pundits have been completely blindsided by this phenomenon the only people who could possibly have seen it coming I think were historians who certainly in my case saw that after the financial crisis and all it's matter economic turbulence there would be a backlash the only question would be really who the demagogue would be now many of you think this is unprecedented but I would guess that many of you have never heard of this man and indeed don't recognize him even the Californians probably have no idea who this is let me tell you the story of Denis Kearney Denis Kearney was the Donald Trump of the 1870s and Denis Kearney came on the scene after the 1873 crisis with a very straightforward and to us familiar message the message was that our problems the problems of the working man of California are due to immigration and a corrupt political establishment it's amazing to me really that Kearney is so completely forgotten because he was one of the most successful populist s-- of the era so successful that his slogan the Chinese must go that was his campaign slogan was in fact translated into legislation it became policy now the kind of arguments that keone made about the Chinese in the 1870s were very similar to the arguments that we've heard Donald Trump make about a whole range of different immigrant populations since he began his campaign last year from Mexicans to Muslims they were partly economic but they were partly cultural and the solution in both cases was the same get them out stop them coming do not underestimate the power of this populist message in 1882 the United States Congress passed the exclusion act which ended Chinese immigration to the United States it was the first of a succession of legislative measures designed to stop immigration and it began with the Chinese and by the 1930s it had excluded a whole range of other groups from immigration and indeed had effectively ended him into the United States by the time of World War two metaphorically tyranny was calling for a wall and in this wonderful cartoon you can see the Curie i'ts literally building a wall at the San Francisco Harbor to stop the Chinese coming in we underestimate this kind of populist message at our peril because the lesson of history is that it can translate not just into votes it can translate into a backlash against globalization itself mandated by the legislature the fascinating thing about populism is that although it loves to use the language of nationalism it is itself a global phenomenon then as now there was populism happening all over the place tyranny was just part of a worldwide backlash against globalization in the 1870s and 1880s there were populist in Germany there were populist in France there were populist in Britain some were anti-semitic the British populous were anti Irish but the characteristic features of populism were the same in all cases and the recipe the Gordon Ramsay paetynn recipe for populism was essentially the same - I've been arguing that the United States of amnesia needs to take history more seriously in fact I recently proposed with my old friend Graham Allison that the next president of the United States needs a council of historical advisors because frankly the economic advisors haven't done that well maybe we could try learning from history instead of defunct macro models let me give you some lessons of history to reflect on i think the first important lesson is the one i've already sketched for you populist s' all over the world in the late 19th century achieved a significant roll back of globalization it wasn't just the United States that restricted immigration the Australians did the same and sometimes it was quite explicitly designed to achieve a racial purpose to have white only Australia not only that but in other countries including the United States the backlash against globalization led to tariffs reduced free trade and attacks on free capital movement to bankers were a favorite target of late 19th century populist just as they're a favorite target today so I think one obvious lesson of history is that globalization is politically reversible if it doesn't have majority support it can be undone and that's why we should take not only Trump's proposals for migration restriction seriously but also the proposals that he's made repeatedly on the campaign trail to engage in a trade war with China and potentially to restrict the freedom of us corporations to invest overseas something he's been very explicit about let's underestimate this at our peril another less obvious lesson of history however is that the last populist wave the last backlash against globalization didn't achieve as much as its proponents had hoped in the political realm populist did not form many national governments they got into legislatures they scared political establishments but populist candidates didn't become president William Jennings Bryan was the most famous populist leader you probably have heard of him but he never became president despite three runs at the White House Denis tyranny vanished from the political scene so completely after he'd achieved his great victory in 1882 to the point that nobody today has heard of him and perhaps one day it will be possible to ask a roomful of people have you heard of Donald Trump and nobody will have just consider that blissful possibility so populist don't necessarily get power it may indeed elude Trump we'll see another thing that people often must misunderstand about populism is that it's not especially belligerent the great category error that we keep encountering is the conflation of populism and fascism fascism is about men in uniforms with armaments engaging in warfare the central goal of the Nazi regime in the 1930s was war its goal of economic recovery was its tool of economic recovery Wars rearmament there's a fundamental difference in that sense between the populism we see today and the fascism of the 1930s the low-level violence the crass incitements to violence of this campaign are quite different in kind from the major plans for war that the fascist leaders engaged in in the 1930s so I think it's a mistake to worry too much about that as a potential consequence of this election that's to misunderstand the nature of populism apart from saying he'll annihilate Islamic state in ways too mysterious to reveal to us Trump has it seems to me very little of the neoconservative legacy of interventionism in fact on the whole he would like to get the United States out of the Middle East after he has annihilated Islamic state in a mysterious way and the sorts of war that Trump promises are trade wars not war Wars a fourth important lesson of history to grasp is that populism is a very finite political phenomenon in the case of the period that I'm interested in the late 19th century it's sort of peaked in the 1880s and by the eighteen twenties was beginning to fade there's a good reason for that when you think about it the populist remedies for the problems of America then and now are snake oil they don't actually work it doesn't improve the living standards of aggrieved working class or lower middle class white Americans to end globalization it won't improve their lives to halt immigration or to engage in a trade war with China quite the opposite a fascinating lesson of recent Latin American history is the reminder that populism doesn't work and after you've tried it for a decade or so you get disgusted and turn away from it that happened in Argentina last year it's sort of happening slowly and painfully in Brazil and it will happen I think in Venezuela so the good news is that populism will run out of road because it's solutions to our problems are inherently bogus what came after the populism of Dennis Pyrenees generation this all cheer up er Google crowd progressivism you probably already feel progressive it's just that you're not terribly well organized progressive at least not politically unfortunately in this election campaign Hillary Clinton has emerged as the candidate of the status quo this is what I call the the snafu scenario I don't know if you know the military acronym snafu from world war ii world war ii it stands for situation normal all effed up and that's essentially what the Clinton campaign is offering more of the same this is not an impressive and compelling narrative for the electorate today the trouble is that the alternative that Trump is offering is best summed up in the acronym fubar another world war two acronym which stands up for effed up beyond all recognition it seems to me is the choice that Americans are being confronted with and that's a very bad choice indeed was said earlier today I think rightly that for young people this choice just seems like a choice between evils it's an enormous turnoff the lesson of history is that the left liberalism has to reinvent itself in order to defeat populism it needs to come up with more compelling answers to our contemporary problems than the ones that the current Democratic Party establishment offers that was what happened in the late 19th and early 20th century in the United States and elsewhere to the great antidotes of populism was progressivism there's only one catch paradoxically it was the progressives not the populist who ender ended up giving the world world war one the great conflagration of 1914 happened with populist sfrom Woodrow Wilson to Lloyd George in power and that teaches us two important things with which I'm going to conclude the first is that while populist Tsar band to F up things beyond all recognition domestically they're unlikely to produce the kind of class Cataclysm that arose in 1914 it's the progressives who have the worst track record in American history when it comes to getting involved in really big conflicts there's another lesson of history there for American liberals stop pretending that it was conservatives who got the United States into the world wars into Korea into Vietnam Iraq in this sense is the outlier and so let me conclude with your worst nightmare your worst nightmare is not a trump presidency my progressive friends your worst nightmare is a successful trump presidency which begins with the ultimate bromance Donald Trump in Moscow making peace in Syria think about that scenario it could be happening in just a few months thank you very much indeed |