Two days after thousands of Palo Alto residents joined the No Kings protests against what some call rising authoritarianism, historian Niall Ferguson dismissed such fears as an exaggerated and misleading “category error” at a panel Monday evening. 

Ferguson, a Milbank Family Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution and the co-founder of the newly established University of Austin, was the latest speaker in a political science speaker series, POLISCI 31: “Which Side of History? How Democracy, Technology, and Our Lives are Being Reshaped in 2025.” The series is offered through the Stanford Continuing Studies program.

Ferguson was joined by Pulitzer Prize-winning historian David Kennedy and former U.S. Secretary of Education, Margaret Spellings, of the George W. Bush administration, both of whom diverged from Ferguson’s position amid an overall constructive atmosphere.

The panel, titled “Is this the End of the Post-WWII New World Order,” mainly revolved around the discussion of the current American political system vis-à-vis a historical perspective during which Ferguson contrasted the current U.S. politics with Nazi Germany in 1938, when being asked whether the current political landscape is fascist or not.

“I’ll take you back to year five of Hitler, how about that?” he said, adding, “There was no rule of law whatsoever, anybody who is a political target – if they [can] walk out of the courts – will be picked up by the SD.” 

During the forum, a student TA of the course raised a synthesis of student questions submitted in reference to last weekend’s No Kings protest: “We’d like to ask the panel directly, how would you define this era in terms of whether it is fascist or not?”

Ferguson argued that such a question stems from a failure to properly understand history.

“To call a populist, democratically elected government fascist is a category error,” Ferguson responded.

“It’s frustrating to me because I’ve spent much of my career trying to convey to students the nature of authoritarian regimes… and I must have failed, because people don’t seem to understand this fundamental difference,” he added. Ferguson has taught history for 12 years at Harvard, self-proclaiming himself to be “not fit” by Stanford’s history department.

He further deconstructed the perception of President Donald Trump’s uniqueness in American politics, rejecting the idea of interpreting it as an unprecedented historical break despite Kennedy and Spelling’s warning of the “eroding confidence” in American institutions such as the Department of Justice (DOJ). 

Instead, Ferguson cited what he called a “fascinating historical detail,” when Richard Nixon, prompted by his wife Pat Nixon, sent a letter to Trump predicting that whenever Trump decides to run for office, he “will be a winner.”

“The key to understanding the psychodrama we’re seeing here is the Nixonian feature… He is Richard Nixon’s revenge on you and liberal America,” Ferguson told the audience.

In the view of Ferguson, the current state of crisis in U.S. politics stems not from Trump himself, but from two deeper failures: the inability of the American establishment to offer a response to the rise of China, and what he called the corruption of elite universities, among which he believes Stanford is included.

“The elite universities were guilty of a whole range of sins,” Ferguson said. “They had ceased to be meritocratic institutions… There’s been every other kind of diversity except intellectual, ideological diversity.”

In addition to their previous disagreement concerning Trump and the DOJ, Kennedy and Spellings largely approached the panel with different angles. Both of them hold different positions on the current status of American higher education.

“I think a lot of the media attention on the abuses and universities are greatly exaggerated. I think [of] the four or 5,000 campuses around the country today, there is… very little political correctness or wokeness in organic chemistry labs and bio-physics labs and so on. So I think that there’s been a lot of media hype around this,” Kennedy said.

Spellings took a rather nuanced approach, carving out a middle ground between Ferguson and Kennedy. 

While she called the field of elite higher education a “closed shop” and “a cartel that has been very difficult for new entrants like the University of Austin,” Spelling holds the opinion that the real story of American education is happening in the public universities and community colleges. 

“But the American people are going to be educated in our public universities and our community colleges. And that’s what we’re paying them to do. And that’s what they’re paying for. God bless them,” Spelling said.

While the three speakers disagreed on the status quo of the American political system, both Spellings and Kennedy joined Ferguson —who’s role as a provocateur continued until the end — on his closing advice to students. 

“You are almost certainly not reading enough books,” he said as a closing advice to students, while criticizing a society that does not read as one unable to learn the lessons of history.