Niall Ferguson’s Late-Stage Epiphany

The Historian Who Saw No Threat to Democracy Now Sees a Threat to the Markets

Niall Ferguson has suddenly discovered that Donald Trump might wreck the global financial system. In his recent piece for The Free Press, the historian who spent years dismissing concerns about Trump's authoritarianism now warns that the administration's economic policies could trigger a financial crisis of historic proportions.

This revelation would be more compelling if Ferguson hadn't spent the last several years assuring us that those raising alarms about Trump were simply caught in partisan hysteria. While some of us warned about the systematic dismantling of democratic institutions, Ferguson confidently proclaimed that Trump posed “no threat to democracy” and that the U.S. system would “contain Trump's impulses.” He explicitly rejected comparisons to authoritarian figures, arguing that Trump was merely part of a “populist tradition” that posed no fundamental danger to our constitutional order.

Now, as Trump imposes tariffs that Ferguson admits might “wreck the global financial system,” the historian finds himself in an awkward position. He recognizes the economic peril while still clinging to the hope that “deregulation” and “fiscal reform" might somehow save the day. This intellectual contortion reveals more than just inconsistency—it exposes the fundamental blindness of establishment conservatives who normalized Trump's rise while refusing to acknowledge its ideological foundations.

I should note that sometime ago, I removed The Free Press from my list of recommended reads, given what I perceive as Bari Weiss' intellectual dishonesty and serious questions about the nature of her relationship with Peter Thiel. This context matters because Ferguson's placement within this particular media ecosystem is not incidental. The Free Press has consistently provided intellectual cover for the techno-libertarian project that seeks to replace democratic governance with privatized alternatives—precisely the transition that figures like Thiel and Curtis Yarvin have been working toward for years.

Ferguson's piece is part of a broader pattern at The Free Press and similar outlets that have consistently framed opposition to Trump as more dangerous than Trumpism itself. This media infrastructure has adopted the position that “excesses” on the left—particularly around identity politics—somehow represent a greater socio-political threat than the authoritarian politics of personality and power embodied by Trump and his enablers.

Let's be clear about what this stance actually accomplishes. By treating concerns about democratic backsliding as partisan hysteria while elevating cultural grievances to existential threats, Ferguson and his colleagues have helped normalize precisely the conditions that make Trump's anti-democratic project possible. They've created an intellectual environment where defending democratic norms is dismissed as “Trump Derangement Syndrome” while actual assaults on constitutional governance are treated as mere policy disagreements.

Ferguson is not an objective observer of these developments. His credibility on Trump's dangers has been thoroughly compromised by years of dismissive analysis that amounted to: “Trump is no big deal. The institutions will hold. Stop freaking out.” After January 6th, after years of lies, demagoguery, and illegal conduct, Ferguson still maintained that a second Trump term posed no fundamental threat to our constitutional order.

Now he sits here telling us, with apparent surprise, that “Trump might actually fuck some things up here”? This belated economic concern rings hollow when detached from the broader context of democratic erosion that Ferguson spent years minimizing. His selective anxiety about tariffs and currency manipulation feels less like genuine insight and more like an attempt to position himself as a reasonable critic after years of enabling Trump's worst impulses.

What Ferguson and similar commentators fail to acknowledge is that economic disruption isn't separate from the assault on democratic governance—it's part of the same project. As I've documented, figures like Thiel and Yarvin have explicitly advocated using economic and technological disruption to accelerate the transition away from democratic institutions. When Ferguson expresses hopes for “deregulation” and “fiscal reform” without acknowledging their role in this broader anti-democratic agenda, he's continuing to provide intellectual cover for the very forces he claims to be concerned about.

It is remarkable to me that people within this bubble—this supposed vantage point of a “refreshing center”—operate from the underlying premise that all excess from their left-flank is systemic, pernicious, and of existential import, while the spectacle we see before ourselves every day—this carnival of daily moral horrors—is treated as merely the domain of calling balls and strikes, like one might critique how high the top marginal tax bracket should be.

This fundamental asymmetry in moral and analytical frameworks reveals the bad faith at the heart of Ferguson's position. When university students protest for Palestinian rights, it's a civilizational crisis requiring immediate intervention. When the President of the United States attempts to overturn an election, it's merely an unfortunate episode that our institutions can easily absorb. When progressive academics use terminology that Ferguson finds objectionable, it signals the collapse of Western civilization. When Trump systematically dismantles democratic norms and institutions, it's just politics as usual.

This isn't serious analysis. It's cynicism masquerading as objectivity—a performance of reasonableness that conceals deeply partisan commitments. Ferguson and his colleagues at The Free Press have built their brand on claiming to transcend partisan divides while consistently minimizing threats from the right and magnifying those from the left. The result is a distorted analytical framework that has fundamentally misjudged the greatest dangers to our constitutional order.

What makes this particularly galling is how Ferguson now attempts to position himself as a clear-eyed economic analyst warning of potential disaster, without acknowledging his role in enabling the very situation he critiques. After years of telling us that concerns about Trump were overblown, after dismissing warnings about authoritarian tendencies as partisan fear-mongering, Ferguson now wants us to take seriously his concerns about tariffs and monetary policy—as if these exist in isolation from the broader assault on democratic governance that he spent years downplaying.

These aren't serious people engaging in good-faith analysis of our political moment. They're cynical actors who have helped normalize the most dangerous threats to our democracy while maintaining just enough critical distance to claim intellectual independence when convenient.

Ferguson and his peers aren’t just failing to see the danger—they are helping manufacture the conditions for it to thrive.

“The paranoid spokesman sees the fate of conspiracy in apocalyptic terms—he traffics in the birth and death of whole worlds, whole political orders, whole systems of human values. He is always manning the barricades of civilization... he does not see social conflict as something to be mediated and compromised, in the manner of the working politician. Since what is at stake is always a conflict between absolute good and absolute evil, what is necessary is not compromise but the will to fight things out to a finish.”

— Richard Hofstadter, “The Paranoid Style in American Politics,” 1964