War, Pandemics & Elections

Warfare

History Hit

History

4.5 • 943 Ratings

🗓️ 2 November 2020

⏱️ 29 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

It's election time and for this episode James is joined by one of the most famous Historians in the world, Niall Ferguson. Niall delves into United States election history to explore how this 'year of catastrophe' might impact the results, and how these results might, in turn, increase the possibility of a Second Cold War. Wilson, Roosevelt, Truman and Johnson: four Democrat Presidents elected on domestic policies, each of whom led the United States into international war. Might this election bring a similar result? A Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and a senior faculty fellow of the Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard, Niall is also a visiting professor at Tsinghua University, Beijing and the author of fifteen books.

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello, welcome to the History Hit World Wars podcast. I'm James Rogers, and in this
0:04.3	episode we're delving back through history to learn some lessons about
0:08.7	pandemics and viruses from wartime that can teach us a little bit about the crisis that we're going
0:14.6	through today.
0:16.5	In fact, we can learn a bit about how it can impact elections because this is our US election
0:22.4	special and we have one of the most famous
0:24.7	historians in the world Neil Ferguson to talk us through this history of pandemics from
0:29.2	the first world war and the Spanish flu through to our current period of chaos. We even hear a little about just
0:35.9	how previous pandemics have shaken the political, economic and social core of society for far, far longer than we ever think.
0:46.0	And what this might mean for the US election in 2020.
0:50.6	Now of course you know Neil from his PBS and BBC TV shows and his best-selling books
0:56.0	The Pity of War, The Assent of Money and the Square and the Tower to name just a few he's
1:01.0	written 16 but his latest book is Doom the politics of
1:05.4	catastrophe where Neil sets the great crisis of 2020 which is I'm sure is what
1:11.1	it's going to be called in history into its broad historical perspective.
1:15.6	So enjoy this episode as we live through an important period of history and await these monumental
1:22.1	results from the US election. Hi Neil, thanks for coming on the podcast. My pleasure. Now you've been warning about
1:42.1	the threat of coronavirus since the World Economic Forum in Davos back in January 2020.
1:48.0	What was it about being a historian that heightened your senses to the potential impacts of this pandemic.
1:54.6	Had you been studying the economic impact of World War I and the Spanish flu,
1:58.7	so much that you started to see the warnings of history?
2:02.0	I think historians, if they do their job well, are better attuned to this kind of scenario, which doesn't happen very often, not often enough for it to be in everybody's living memory.
	...

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