Does America Need a Sharansky?

Ever since Niall Ferguson, in the pages of The Free Press, propounded the thesis that the United States has increasingly come to resemble the USSR in its final years of decrepitude, a small cottage industry has arisen to take apart his contentions. The single most comprehensive critique is that of Cathy Young in the Bulwark, “Are We in ‘Soviet America’? Not Even Close.” Young found that the task of analyzing Ferguson’s contradictory mélange of comparisons between the U.S. and the Soviet Union was “an exercise in nailing Jell-O to the wall.”

On the other side of the coin are reactions to Ferguson that either defend him or, in some cases, double down on his thesis. One curious case of the latter is that of Gary Saul Morson here in the pages of Public Discourse, in an essay titled “Waiting for Sharansky.” Morson, a professor of Russian literature at Northwestern University, contends that, if anything, “Ferguson understates his case.” 

Like Ferguson, Morson cites, as evidence of our Sovietization, among other things, the rise of a ruling gerontocracy, our rapidly increasing indebtedness, a military “no longer able to match its responsibilities,” and a severe case of moral flabbiness among our elites.

Regarding the gerontocracy, Morson contends that the problem in the U.S. is as obvious as it was in the Leonid Brezhnev era, and is visible in “the kind of debility from which President Biden so evidently suffers.” Just as the aging Brezhnev failed to comprehend the malaise infecting Soviet society, so the semi-senescent Biden, for arguing that inflation in the United States was “transitory,” conveyed the same “inability to grasp the problems of millions.”

In the United States, as in the USSR, continues Morson, there is extraordinary cynicism about public institutions, a cynicism that was accelerated here by the COVID-19 pandemic. 

When Dr. Fauci first instructed that masks would be of no help, and a month later explained that he said that in order to make sure healthcare workers got the few masks then available, he did not seem to realize that a reasonable person would henceforth ask: if he lied for what he considered a good reason then, maybe he is doing so again? 

Concludes Morson: “The discrediting of ‘science’—not science itself, but its representatives—is perhaps the most harmful legacy of the pandemic.”

So, too, has the American military succumbed to the Soviet disease of substituting blinding ideology for a clear-eyed view of reality, and with similar adverse consequences for war-fighting capacity. Here Morson’s exhibit A is the fact that the Navy has placed Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to Be an Anti-Racist, on its trainees’ reading list, leading Morson to conclude that we can “anticipate increased racial divisiveness compromising combat readiness.”

Morson is particularly alarmed by what he contends is America’s “moral decline.” He cites one example after another. “We are no longer,” he writes, “the people who fought the Nazis and raised the flag at Iwo Jima, still less those who shed their blood to end slavery.” Instead, we live in a land of the timorous:

Now I see my colleagues, a couple of thousand of them, failing to resist a few dozen radical faculty and the students they stir up. Each professor trembles at standing up to the mob alone—alone because, as the professor correctly foresees, other faculty tremble the same way. He knows they would not back him because he would find reasons not to back them. Each cowers because all cower.

This timorousness brings Morson to what he says is his single objection to Ferguson’s diagnosis: if anything, Ferguson “is not pessimistic enough.”

The USSR in its final years may have been both decadent and quasi-totalitarian, but at least, writes Morson, it “produced thousands of people with outstanding integrity and courage who had no doubt that there are moral values for which one should suffer death, or worse.” In this department, the United States has failed most of all. “Where, especially among our pampered elites, are the equivalents of Andrei Sakharov, Vladimir Bukovsky, Andrei Amalrik, Solzhenitsyn, Sharansky, Navalny, and so many others? . . . we have fewer people willing to risk their jobs than the Russians had willing to risk execution or the Gulag.”

What can be said about Morson’s searing indictment of the United States as a kind of Sovietized nightmare, only in some respects even worse? Let us consider his arguments one by one.

To begin with, are we ruled by a Soviet-style gerontocracy as Morson contends?

Singling out Biden’s debility for criticism, as Morson does, while remaining silent, as Morson also does, about the evidence that Donald Trump might be suffering from age-related decline is something of a political tell. Whatever the case, it is undeniable that lately many of our national leaders have been of an advanced age. But, of course, our democratic elections (absent in the USSR and Vladimir Putin’s Russia) are mechanisms that, over time, ensure generational turnover. Indeed, no sooner did Morson’s article appear than Biden stepped aside to make way for a vigorous younger substitute. Both the Democratic and Republican parties have no shortage of younger men and women of talent and position who are ready to assume a place on the national stage. Unlike in the one-party USSR, or in Putin’s autocratic Russia, our capacity for rejuvenation is built into our political structure.

Second, did Fauci foster cynicism and discredit science’s representatives by lying about the utility of wearing masks? As is well known, Fauci has been turned into a punching bag of the MAGA Right. The facts in this instance are strikingly different than Morson and the MAGA Right would have them. Initially, when it was not yet apparent that the virus could be transmitted asymptomatically, getting masks to hospital settings where symptomatic transmission was rife was the most urgent priority, and that is precisely what Fauci advocated. As more information accumulated that asymptomatic transmission of the virus was occurring and that masks would therefore be effective even outside of hospitals, Fauci’s understanding changed, and his advocacy changed along with it. Changing one’s understanding when the known facts change is what any reputable scientist would have done. Morson’s charge that Fauci “lied” is a libel. 

Third, has the readiness of the American military been compromised by impending racial strife brought on by the fact that Ibram X. Kendi’s book, How to Be an Anti-Racist, was placed on a reading list by someone in the Pentagon? To ask the question is to answer it. Far-Right figures like Tucker Carlson have advanced this argument as part of a broader point that the American military has become “woke” and weak. There are indeed deep problems with American military readiness, and I have written about them myself. But wokeness is not among the military’s top one hundred troubles. As with so many manufactured controversies emerging from the MAGA universe, it is nothing but an attempt to extend the culture war to yet another arena.

Finally, how about our supposed lack of dissident heroes in the mold of Anatoly Sharansky or Alexei Navalny? This is Morson’s central point and his weakest. 

The truth is that America has not lacked for heroes when it needed them, but it does not have much of a “dissident” tradition—with noble exceptions like abolitionism and the civil rights movement—because there is not much to be dissident about. Ours is a free society and we are fortunately not in need of Sharanskys and Navalnys, individuals ready to sacrifice their liberty and their lives in the service of a righteous cause. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn came to Harvard and scolded the West, and he had a creditable argument, but he did not become a political prisoner here as a result.

There has never been a shortage of genuine heroes in the U.S., past and present, but they are not exclusively found in the academic circles that are Morson’s frame of reference. Morson credits a “handful of brave souls like Joshua Katz, Jay Bhattacharya, and Roland Fryer,” three academics who “risked their careers and reputations,” but comparing them with political prisoners like Solzhenitsyn, Sharansky, and Navalny—the last of whom died in Putin’s post-Soviet gulag—is preposterous. 

 

Still, if one wants examples of political courage, one could point, as Morson does not, to figures like Liz Cheney and Adam Kinzinger who readily sacrificed their political careers for speaking the truth about the danger Donald Trump poses to our constitutional order. Or one could notice Mike Pence, who served Trump unswervingly until a moment when too much was at stake—standing fast for the Constitution when his life was threatened by a mob on January 6, 2021, and not wavering since. Even more pertinently, one could point to the men and women of the U.S. military, ready to sacrifice all for comrades and country, and whose most outstanding members have been recipients of the Medal of Honor. In the morally flabby America described by Morson, the sacrifices of these remarkably brave individuals are erased.

In likening the United States to the failed USSR, Morson, like Ferguson, is very much in sync with the fashions of MAGA world, where on the high end of discourse it has become a commonplace to describe the United States as suffering under “totalitarian liberalism”—a phrase employed by, among others, Patrick Deneen. Over at the low end, one can find Donald Trump himself, posting on his social media platform in a highly relevant context: “The sudden death of Alexei Navalny has made me more and more aware of what is happening in our Country . . . Open Borders, Rigged Elections, and Grossly Unfair Courtroom Decisions are DESTROYING AMERICA. WE ARE A NATION IN DECLINE, A FAILING NATION!” The comparison Morson draws in his piece finds a disturbing echo in Trump’s demagogic rhetoric. 

To be sure, the United States has all sorts of social and political problems, and this very much includes the timorous professoriate which Morson criticizes. But whatever surface resemblance there may be to the problems of the late Soviet Union, they are the problems of an open society, both free and prosperous beyond the dreams of anyone in past times and places.

Unfortunately, Morson looks only at a handful of symptoms that are vaguely comparable to the pathologies of late Soviet society and concludes that the same disease is at work. He does not address the deep causes of Soviet and Russian dysfunction, all of which are absent in the United States—authoritarianism, a command economy, censorship, oppression, terror, the Gulag. 

Having spent five decades as a professor studying and writing about Russian literature and society, Morson, without a doubt, has a profound understanding of these subjects. Indeed, I have often profited from reading his work. But his response to Ferguson represents a deeply unfortunate descent into polemic in the service of an unsavory cause. 

Image by konstan and licensed via Adobe Stock.