Niall Ferguson ranks among the most respectable of conservative intellectuals, at least based on his mainstream credentials (Harvard professor, fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution, author of numerous books from major publishing houses). You might think Ferguson would be a bit wary of handing power to an unhinged madman. You would be wrong.
Ferguson, in an op-ed for the Daily Mail, explains why democracy is not only safe in Donald Trump’s hands, but why Trump poses less of a danger to the republic than Kamala Harris. To protect democracy, Ferguson, suggests, we should elect Trump.
The eagerness with which even the most coddled right-wing intellectuals have justified Trump’s increasingly naked authoritarianism is a devastating indictment of the right’s teetering commitment to democratic norms, and the state of conservative thought in general.
It is possible to detect four arguments in Ferguson’s column. Let us walk through them step-by-step and behold their pompous vacuity.
First, he asserts that Trump cannot pose a serious danger to democracy because he is funny:
“Does Trump look or sound like Hitler? To answer that question, I refer readers to his hilarious performance at an annual fund-raising dinner for Catholic charities in New York on October 18.
Tradition dictates that presidential candidates in attendance tell jokes at their own expense. Harris broke with convention and appeared in an unfunny video rather than in person. Trump jokingly declined to send himself up, saying: ‘I guess I just don’t see the point of taking shots at myself when other people have been shooting at me for a hell of a long time.’ He proceeded to skewer the Democrats.
Or how about the good humour with which Trump dished out fries in a memorable election stunt at a drive-in McDonald’s. The Führer didn’t do stand-up. Nor did Mussolini serve fast food.”
This is a very puzzling claim. While Trump is capable of getting laughs, the examples Ferguson provides (crudely insulting his opponent rather than mocking himself, posing at a McDonald’s) are not actually cases of him being funny. Nor is there any reason to believe that a capacity for humor is incompatible with right-wing authoritarian politics. Hitler was capable of getting laughs when desired (here he is mocking Franklin Roosevelt’s warnings about his aggressive intentions, to uproarious laughter). Even if Hitler was not generally a funny man — and he wasn’t — there’s no obvious connection between a lack of humor and threatening democracy. It is a bit like saying Trump can’t be a fascist because, unlike Hitler, he lacks a mustache.
Second, Ferguson suggests that Trump cannot be a right-wing authoritarian because he has the support of half the country:
“In the past three weeks, according to averages of all the polls, Trump has pulled ahead of Harris in all seven of the swing states in this election — Georgia and North Carolina in the south, Arizona and Nevada in the west, and Michigan, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin in the midwest — and not because Americans thirst for fascism …
The reality is that, regardless of how recklessly he behaved that day, the Democrats have failed to persuade around half of likely voters that his conduct revealed him to be a Hitler-like threat to democracy.”
Ferguson seems to be defining the notion of electing a dangerous authoritarian as a conceptual impossibility — if he were truly dangerous, Ferguson reasons, people wouldn’t elect him.
The historical record shows that many dictators have initially gained power through democratic means. Hitler’s party did not win a majority in the 1932 parliamentary election, but it assembled an elected majority with support from conservatives who thought Hitler was an irresponsible demagogue but preferred working with him and advancing their policy goals to sharing power with the center left. (There is a lesson here that Trump’s conservative allies seem persistently uninterested in learning.)
Third, he argues that the only way a president could do serious damage to American democracy would be by amending the Constitution:
“Assuming he won on November 5, how would Trump — as some of his critics fear — change the Constitution to give himself a third term. That is something unambiguously ruled out by the 22nd Amendment. It’s not even something a president is empowered to propose.
And what if, as in his first term, Trump sought to change U.S. immigration policy by executive order, but the courts struck it down. What could he do if the Supreme Court upheld the initial court ruling?
And, finally, if Trump ordered the U.S. military to take action against domestic political opponents, where is the evidence that the senior echelons of the Army would be willing to carry out such an order?
The rule of law is deeply embedded in the U.S., not just because it is, by design, a republic of laws, but also because it remains a country run to a striking extent by people with law degrees. In addition, it has an officer class deeply committed to the separation of the military from politics.”
It is true that the Constitution provides significant protection against autocracy, but it is hardly bulletproof. It does not stop a president from using the Justice Department to prosecute political enemies, punish media that report critically (both steps Trump took during his first term, while being stopped from going much farther by advisers who Trump is determined to sideline a second time), and freeing from prison his paramilitary allies who joined in his first coup attempt.
Having defined the true threat as plans to amend the Constitution, Ferguson proceeds to argue that it comes from Harris, not Trump:
“Indeed, the irony is that it is not Trump but the more radical Democrats who openly discuss constitutional changes that would fundamentally alter the U.S. political system to their own advantage. To give one example of many, in an article published two years ago in the New York Times, two liberal professors at, respectively, Harvard and Yale, Ryan Doerfler and Samuel Moyn, urged Democrats not to try to ‘reclaim’ the ‘broken’ Constitution but to ‘radically alter the basic rules of the game.’”
Trump has said he would like to “terminate” parts of the Constitution. Harris has never said anything like this. In lieu of any statement like this from Harris, a member of her campaign, or even a Democrat elected to any level of office, he supplies an op-ed by two professors unaffiliated with the Harris campaign. It is not even clear they support Harris — one of the authors of the offending op-ed, Samuel Moyn, is a left-winger who seems to delight in Trump’s success as a humiliation of the liberals, whom he treats as his main enemy.
There are many radical proposals for unconstitutional procedures, like holding military tribunals for Trump opponents, a notion former Trump chief national security adviser Michael Flynn has toyed with. Ferguson believes Harris should be held to account for every op-ed written by any member of the political left, while Trump is innocent of association even for proposals floated by his own former administration members.
“I admit it: I was wrong about Donald Trump,” writes Ferguson. “I thought on January 6, 2021, when rioters stormed the Capitol, that his political career was at an end.” This is a fascinating confession of error, because it is extremely incomplete. After Trump’s failed attempt to seize almost power four years ago, Ferguson called him “a demagogue and a would-be tyrant whose disregard for the rule of law and encouragement of sedition and insurrection have, very fortunately for us all, been thwarted by his own incompetence.” He now confesses he was wrong only in his expectation that these traits doomed Trump’s career. Ferguson does not take back his description of Trump as a would-be tyrant.
What does this discrepancy tell us? That Ferguson’s denunciation of Trump’s coup attempt was wrapped up in a belief that Trump couldn’t win again. Now that he sees Trump can win, his would-be tyranny has become a price worth paying.
