The United States punished 24 Chinese officials on Wednesday for undermining Hong Kong’s democratic freedoms, acting days before the first scheduled meeting of senior Chinese and American diplomats since President Biden took office.
Imagine sanctioning all the politicians involved in undermining freedom in Iraq, Libya, Venezuela, Ukraine and Bolivia, among many others?
Meanwhile, the BBC helpfully explains the strategy:
The idea is to counter the Chinese perception that the United States is on the decline, says Michael Green, the senior vice-president for Asia and Japan Chair at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
Chinese commentators like to say that the “winds are blowing to the East.” The financial crisis of 2008, the Capitol Hill riot of 2021 and the years of Trump’s unilateralism in between have reinforced a view in China that the US has been weakened inside and out.
“This meeting in Alaska is geared to show the Chinese are wrong on all three counts,” says Green. “The schoolyard version of this is to say: “You’re not so great…yeah you’re big, but we like hanging out with our allies, democracies, because they’re cool.”
That third paragraph. Wow.
Now, is China a good actor in all ways? Of course not. In many ways it’s a terrible actor. Then again, it hasn’t destroyed multiple foreign countries over the last 20 years in wars of aggression.
The Chinese POV is simple: the “rules based international order” was created by America and its allies when China was at its weakest point in centuries. Expecting China to simply say “what a great order” is deranged. Nor is China acting worse than America did during its rise to power: it is seeking the same sort of influence that America did with things like the Monroe doctrine, but has overthrown fewer governments along the way and launched fewer wars. Far fewer.
America, to the Chinese, wants to freeze international relations at the point of American maximum power and Chinese greatest weakness.
From the American POV, China is terrible. They haven’t obeyed a lot of the rules. They’ve screwed over a lot of American companies in China. They’re aggressively bullying their neighbours (India being the latest, and successfully, I’d say), and contesting with America for control over waters near China that has essentially been an American lake since World War II by building islands in the South China Sea.
But the real problem is simple economics. By various metrics China already has the largest economy in the world. If they continue to grow that will become unambiguously the case: they will be much larger than the American economy.
America has been able to use the current “rules based order” to slow China recently, as when it kneecapped Huawei, China’s leading smartphone manufacturer by forbidding use of US technology, and by convincing allies to not invest in Huawei 5G (where China is ahead), but that technological lead is fading. When the US passed Britain in manufacturing, it took about 3 decades for them to then surpass Britain technologically (though it didn’t matter much, the Brits invented things, the Americans made them.)
The Chinese aren’t stupid, having had a weakness used against them, they move hard to end it.
One irony of the situation is that both countries are terribly led. Xi Jingping is a genius at internal politics, but not competent at actually running the country and terrible at foreign affairs. His first instinct is always to bully, and so instead of other countries falling into China’s arms, as they should given how bad a hegemon the US is, he’s driven countries in America’s arms.
That takes special talent, and while his genius for internal politics has put him firmly in control of the country, it operated better when the oligarchy replaces the supreme leader regularly, not when there was one “great” leader whose talent is mostly to shove people around.
China likewise has a demographic bomb: their population will turn “old” in about 15 years, a consequence of the one child policy. The policy was probably necessary at the time, but the consequence will be a serious slowdown as they have to spend much more of their economy, as a percentage, caring for old folks who no longer work. This same style of demographic bomb is one of the factors that cut the legs out from under Japan’s economic miracle.
In a personal sense, however, none of this is all that important. What I want to emphasize for you is to keep in mind that the world is moving towards a cold war, where it is divided into two mutually hostile blocs. They will have different payment systems (Russia and China and Iran and many others are very tired of the US ability to hurt both individuals and countries, often disastrously, thru financial sanctions). They will have different trade areas and trade rules, and there’s a decent chance they’ll stop even pretending to obey each others IP laws (a major US complaint is that China already often doesn’t.)
It’s going to be very hard to stay “between” these two blocs unless Europe decides to be the third bloc. Being within one set of rules will put you at odds with the other set. Money won’t transfer easily. Trade will be hobbled. Favors will be done for nations inside each bloc, as they were in Cold War 1.0.
So keep this in mind: the unipolar moment is ending. There is unlikely to be “one world”, odds are it’ll be two or three worlds.
And sitting on a fence between them will be frowned on and often very dangerous.
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Bill H
“The idea is to counter the Chinese perception that the United States is on the decline,”
By issuing sanctions in individuals. That may be the most asinine conclusion I have ever read. The idea that issuing a decree that an individual may not come to our country or use our banking system presents us as a powerful nation displays a lack of contact with reality that is difficult to comprehend.
Dan Lynch
Re: the demographic time bomb.
Japan has a very high standard of living, long life expectancy, low crime, and low unemployment. There are some bad thing about Japan but on the whole it’s not a bad place to be born. So exactly what is the problem? The problem is that capitalism does not know how to deal with stagnation. No one wants to own stock in a stagnant company. Capitalism views stagnation as a failure. Productivity gradually eliminates some jobs so those people become unemployed unless there is growth to compensate for the jobs lost to productivity.
I say that is a problem caused by capitalism, not caused by demographics.
China is not exactly capitalist, but in some ways it is. China has a defacto mercantilist industrial policy, and mercantilism has never been sustainable for any country. First you saturate your domestic market, so then you turn to exports to keep your factories busy, then eventually the export market becomes saturated, and also unsustainable because of trade imbalances.
There is nothing preventing us from adopting an economic system that uses productivity increases to give workers more leisure time instead of laying people off or depending on growth or exports to take up the slack. Keynes envisioned a future where we would only work 15 hours a week. Whatever happened to that?
There is nothing preventing us from adopting an economic system with consumption at a stagnant but comfortable level, instead of depending on ever increasing consumption (which creates ever increasing environmental costs) to keep up with the Jones’s and keep the capitalist system running.
There’s nothing preventing us from adopting an economic system where a declining population would be good news because there would be more real resources per capita and less impact on the environment.
But yeah, agree with the end of the unipolar world. It will probably be a cold war but given the bumbling incompetence of our “leaders” there is always the risk of a hot war.
Purple Library Guy
If the last cold war is any basis for judgement, being “in between” may be somewhat dangerous, but it will still be easier than being “outside the US system” is now. And the two blocs will be giving more incentives for membership than the US has had to while it’s the only game in town. The cold war was way better for the third world than the “unipolar moment”.
Agreed with Dan Lynch about demographics and capitalism. Although even in growth terms–my understanding is that Japanese GDP growth (lousy measure as that is) has been all right–ON A PER CAPITA BASIS. It looks bad because, well, the population is shrinking. But consider–if your population shrinks 10% and your GDP shrinks 2%, per capita you’re experiencing something around 8% growth, but the modern press would just say OMG what a disaster their GDP shrank, they’re in a recession! Of course in real life the population shrinkage isn’t nearly that dramatic, but still–if country A’s population shrinks 1% while country B’s population grows 2%, then equivalent economic growth per capita is going to look 3% lower.
I do think that “economic growth” is an odd tricky thing, and its relationship to environmental damage even trickier.
I mean, take computer games. If a few guys use a few computers and write a computer game, and then they sell 5 million copies for $40 a pop, that’s like $200 million in new GDP, plus some more for servers and stuff. But the environmental impact isn’t huge–5 million downloads worth of bandwidth, plus some more from hanging around the web portal (probably Steam) doing chat and stuff. Basically, some electricity, some use of infrastructure that would pretty much be there anyway, and some extra computers, which will poison the environment because we don’t recycle the toxic components worth beans and because planned obsolescence–but that still doesn’t add up to nearly the impact you’d expect to come from 200 million smackers worth of production.
On the other hand, if I’m a manufacturer and I make physical widgets, like washing machines or something, and I decide (colluding with the other oligopolists) to halve their expected lifespan so I can sell twice as many, why, that just increased GDP massively. And it increased environmental impact massively. And it did nobody on the planet any good except for a few greedheads at the top of the company–it just meant people have to buy the same thing twice instead of keeping what would have been working perfectly well if it wasn’t designed to fail.
Both of these things are called “economic growth” in our measurement system. Both would be assumed to have the same environmental impact, but they don’t at all. Depending what you measure and how, I think it would be fairly plausible to have “economic growth” that didn’t mean “growth in environmental destruction”–in fact, if you measured the environmental destruction itself as negative growth, you could have a measure that ONLY called stuff “growth” that didn’t involve growth in environmental destruction.
Willy
Actually, there’s a lot preventing us from adopting an economic system with consumption at a stagnant but comfortable level, instead of depending on ever increasing consumption.
Personally, I’d love a Keynesian workweek with lots of downtime. I was never a schoolyard bully, able to channel any downtime competitive urges into sports, debate and hobbies. With a little more effort, I’d probably be pretty good at Zen and the art of bonsai maintenance.
Assuming we the majority can overcome all the plutocratic inertia and their cultural brainwashing. There will still be a lot of guys out there who’re temperamentally driven to duke it out and dominate. The world is all winners and losers to them. Do we bring back gladiatorial combat and Mesoamerican ball games? Or could they just “turn on, boot up, jack in”?
The Chinese juggernaut seems unstoppable, and it’s not too hard to imagine that with all that power concentrated into the Chinese Communist Party, that a few temperamentally driven towards a more mindless form of dominance, could make things difficult for the many, again.
Hugh
Being a hegemon is hugely expensive, as we in the US can attest. My criticism of countries like China and Russia are that they are still drafting off this old US hegemony. They protest and seek to undermine its constraints. They act like they can get better deals without it. But in a world economy, as a hegemon, you have to start thinking about, and paying for, the costs of stabilizing and securing the countries that are the source of your raw materials, the routes that those materials take to get to you, your domestic industrial base, the outward routes your exports take, and the countries and markets they are going to as well as the trade, economies, and countries that can impact any of these. This is why I have always thought China’s Belt and Road project across thousands of miles of some of the planet’s most politically unstable real estate is a pipedream. Now figure climate change into all this. It will likely render the costs of any hegemony, new or old, impossibly high but it puts the odds for the 30-50 year survival of pretendents like China and Russia at less than 50%.
different clue
Since Free Trade is a major driver of global warmingogenic carbon emissions just by itself, a world of 3 Blocs could hopefully be a world of No More Free Trade, which would reduce carbon emissions just by itself.
Seekers after the Steady State Economy ( which is a nicer sounding name for the Stagnant Consumption-Stagnant Production Economy) will have to find a way to grow themselves a culture-movement living as stagnant a consumption style as they can right now. If they can become dominant enough within the society, they can try forming a political party-movement in the teeth of the Incumbent Parties’ efforts to co-opt its members and pollute its culture and thinking. Such a movement-load of people will have to figure out how to make themselves resistant to cultural and psychological pollution by brain-war agents of the Dominant Establishment pro-Upper Class Death Culture. Such a movement may have to try becoming a leaner tougher meaner hippy movement evolving a Green Life Culture to undermine and tear down the PetroSooty Establishment Death Culture. And then tear down and destroy that Death Culture’s politics and economics and foreign and domestic policy. Especially foreign policy.
A middle-power America will have to figure out how to prevent its own Upper Class from selling America to China in order to stay personally rich by being Branch-Plant-America managers answering to the China Head Office. It may require an extensive and complete legally-based extermination program against these people to stop them, because they won’t stop until they are dead. The-rest-of-us-Americans may have to figure out how to arrange that in order to survive our own selves.
Meanwhile, China will become a more deadly and destructive overlord to all its Near-Abroad colonies as it turns to their resources after destroying its own. Any country which finds itself within the China orbit will eventually become just “one more Tibet” and then just “one more abandoned strip mine”. China’s One Ball One Chain Policy is about extending the range of Great Han Lebensraum resource looting as far as it can.
Willy
One good thing about maintaining a hugely expensive hegemon, is the material benefits for corporations and poor farm boys. It’s like a vast welfare program which also masks a decline in world standing, not to mention that the economic prospects for common citizens. Sorta like the USSR back in the day. Or Germany. Speaking of irony, it’d be especially ironic if America wound up being the baddies, and China the good guys, in some dystopian future.
Chiron
The truth about India is that Modi has been groomed for sometime to be the Anglosphere Gunga Din, the confrontation with China was probably planned well in advance to hurt Chinese interests.
I also see China, Russia and other countries creating a separate financial system to overcome the USD, likely by 2030 or earlier will be a working reality.
Hugh
I see Modi as part of a more general religious reaction to the modern world. You can see this expressed by increased militancy and sectarianism in all the world’s major religions: Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
Jeremy
A Discussion with Geert Vanden Bossche, DVM, PHD & Peter McCullough, MD, MPH
SARS-CoV-2, Vaccination & Early Ambulatory Treatment – a Webinar with Geert Vanden Bossche, DVM, PHD, & Peter McCullough, MD, MPH.
This is a discussion featuring two prominent experts about the pandemic, including possible risks associated with mass vaccination and the low adoption of early outpatient treatment in the US, Canada and in many countries, especially in Europe, which puts considerable pressure on the hospital system and yields relatively poor therapeutic outcomes.
different clue
@Willy,
I can think of an even more dystopian future featuring all baddies everywhere and no good guys anywhere.
nihil obstet
Our elites have no concept of consequences that hurt them. They’ll get what they think is their right (i.e., whatever they want), and the undeserving mass of people will suffer as they deserve. If they see their status and power seriously eroding, they will demand that the government bring the lesser peoples into line. In short, I think the real danger is a nuclear war.
Willoweed
Not all from the last Cold War was negative. A Cold War can have benefits under certain parameters. America would have never reached the moon if it wasn’t trying to one up the Soviets who reached space first. America aid in rebuilding Europe was mostly to keep the Communist from winning hearts and minds.
If competition results in improvement the end of the Soviet Union hurt America in the long run. No longer did we have a competitor that could install motivation, effort and a desire to achieve sports, scientific, and cultural advancements to show how better we were.
The Cold War created problems because the leaders chose to waste trillions on war and the military. Their strategy was to hurt their country in hopes it would hurt the other. A side benefit was the populace was conditioned to believe more tanks, TNT, guns and destruction of third world nations would protect them from nuclear apocalypse. The trillions spent on war served its purpose: providing the rulers with more wealth and power.
Imagine if all that trillions in war money had went to science, health, and education. Sadly a colony on Mars longer lifespans for the serfs and informed wage slaves is detrimental to the powerful so that was off the table.
Astrid
My impression is that the elites already think they’ll be saved by Mars colonies, mind uploads, NZ bolt holes, or their God. So nuclear war and death of millions or billions of useless eaters is fine and unavoidable.
Just need to make sure the remotes for their house slaves’ obedience collars have charged batteries.
bruce wilder
In the 1950s and 1960s, elites in the U.S. were nationalist. They saw their own wealth and privilege as being tied to a specific place and society, and a state they wanted to be run well as a defense against the cold war threat of the Communist Soviet Union which bragged about its social welfare achievements.
The shift among American elites toward a globalist perspective combined with an economic strategy of disinvesting and predation has ruined American politics domestically and made the U.S. a pariah abroad, its military and economic power deployed corruptly on behalf of narrow interests.
I do not expect a Cold War. There was a Cold War, because a significant fraction of both elite and popular opinion preferred Cold over Hot, based on bitter experience.
The current Elite would not know prudence.
bruce wilder
The American elite profited from its hegemon role even as the country as a whole paid a high price. China paid a price for becoming workshop to the world, but its elite was calculating closely for value received even as it made America’s disinvestment pay well for America’s elite and professional-managerial class.
Now we are approaching the end-game where the pmc preside over an empty shell of an economy — Intel can’t make chips, Boeing cannot fly a plane, the CDC cannot test for a virus. And, we have in place a brave new economic doctrine where we can simply print money to restore an economy worn down to third-world standards to high performance.
It is not just that we have no accountability, that no one pays a price for failure, I really think most Americans have completely lost track of socio-political cause-and-effect in the course of a 40-year game of Jenga.
A qualification for membership in the Blob or a place in the Biden Administration is not to see how precarious America’s place in the world really is, precarious and dangerously unearned even for some very negative meanings of “earned”.
Mark Pontin
‘…we are approaching the end-game where the pmc preside over an empty shell of an economy — Intel can’t make chips, Boeing cannot fly a plane, the CDC cannot test for a virus.’
Just so.
Joseph E. Kelleam
From VOA News:
Who the hell asked us to “lead the world”? It’s just an excuse to attack and destroy Rooooosha.
different clue
If someone were to campaign on the slogan . . . ” I want an America that is ready to retreat from the world, not lead it. How about you?” . . . how far would they get?
If that someone were to say exactly the following quote unquote: ” American Exceptionalism doesn’t work anymore. It’s an idea whose time has gone. I am an American Okayness Ordinarian. How about you?” . . . . how far would they get?
someofparts
Also can’t provide cybersecurity, healthcare, or fund public education.
Canada – soon to be the only first-world economy in this hemisphere.
bruce wilder
I think “retreat from the world” suggests an array of definite policy if only in opposition to what has before: anti-free-trade, anti-immigration, anti-global-finance, pro-nationalist, pro-industrial-policy, a defensive crouch behind oceans in a crumbling world, a Little America living the myth of self-contained small-town in much the way Little England thrives in and on the ideal of the English Village. Popular but a very long bet indeed in a world where Google is a global entity. If global business corporations are driven back home, maybe enough will rediscover their nationalism and “immigrant” companies like Lenovo or Honda or Nintendo might contribute to a reconceptualization. What it has going for it, imho, is that it is a comforting framework within which it might be possible to be semi-realistic about how to cope with resource depletion and ecological collapse. Small towns ban frakking to save the ground-water; cosmopolitans in global cities think if water comes in plastic bottles, that is a symbol of luxury not hardship.
American exceptionalism is more a rorschach test. Personally, I would like America to strive to be exceptional, because the general run of states sucks. But others do not share my concept of what the exceptions should be and the exceptions recently have been very bad.
different clue
Here’s a little item from a very recent NaCap thread.
“Biden says Putin ‘will pay a price’ for Russian efforts to undermine the 2020 US election”
Not just Russia getting a hammering from the report naming them. Aaron Maté nailed it in a tweet-
‘@aaronjmate
Shoutout to Lebanese Hizballah, Cuba, and Venezuela for making it into the Russiagate 2021 Edition’
https://twitter.com/aaronjmate/status/1371913882449625097
It looks like Biden is just as willing to risk a thermonuclear exchange with Russia as Clinton would have been if she had become President. I suspect the RussiaGov will endure and sidestep various DC FedRegime pokes with sharp sticks in hopes that America will fall apart and to pieces from within before such an exchange would break out.
A thermonuclear exchange would erase any good which the Establishment Democrats might achieve otherwise.
someofparts
“If someone were to campaign on the slogan . . . ” I want an America that is ready to retreat from the world, not lead it. How about you?” . . . how far would they get?
If that someone were to say exactly the following quote unquote: ” American Exceptionalism doesn’t work anymore. It’s an idea whose time has gone. I am an American Okayness Ordinarian. How about you?” . . . . how far would they get?”
You know diff clue, Americans would be fine with that. Assuming of course that you would not deliberately phrase it in the most unappealing way possible. Americans – the voting majority, that is (if that still counts) – already want that. Only the people who profiteer off of our imperialism want it. The people whose children die in our wars would be thrilled to see them end. And more than that, I think it would be pretty easy to get people to see that we use the military to wreck nations, not save them. Maybe the soldiers who actually push the buttons, or fire the weapons, know what the military is really up to better than we do sitting at our computers in our comfy homes.
Back when Blockbusters still existed I lived in a working-class neighborhood. They had to stock extra copies of Black Hawk Down because it was in such demand. If the people who actually fight our Potemkin “wars” were watching that movie, they are already wise to the scam. They don’t enlist because they think we are saving the world. They enlist because there are no other jobs available that give them a shot at a middle-class standard of living.
Also, add the military to another American thing that is broken, hollowed out from the inside. When the last cold war ended the pentagon invited the war contractors to what the industry still refers to as the Last Supper. They explained that with the cold war over, there would be less money for them so the contractors would have to consolidate to survive. The head of Lockheed at that time told our boy little Billy Clinton that he also wanted the rules against profiteering removed and little Billy obliged him. So yeah, at this point the military is full-on monopoly corruption. The reason the military could not win a skirmish with a herd of bunny rabbits is that it no longer exists to fight effectively, it only exists as a front for out-of-control theft and fraud. Even better, I bet the Russians and the Chinese already know this, ya think?
Maybe the biggest danger to the world is that America, on the way down the economic water slide, will panic and use nukes. Maybe what the world is waiting for is the day when Chinese technological superiority to America is so great they can shut us down online before we can launch anything.
Jan Wiklund
And, of course, cold wars may explode into hot ones. The only reason why we are not all dead is that a Russian colonel showed a remarkable piece of good sense once in 1983: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stanislav_Petrov
Ché Pasa
China, eh? Welp, yeah, China.
China was supposed to be the final domino to fall according to that seminal Project for the New American Century paper put out a couple of decades ago that laid out exactly how the US would obtain and sustain global hegemonic power for the 21st Century — “The New American Century.”
The world would bend the knee to Washington… or else.
The vision was supposedly positive, but we’ve seen the results so far, and they’re disastrous, unmitigated, grotesque. But our rulers insist on carrying out as much of the Plan of Forever Dominance as possible. For no reason now but to do it, no reason really but inertia. Once the ball got rolling, it was too hard to stop or there was no will to stop it.
Of course at no point did the Project or Plan take into account the interests of its subject countries — like China,for example — and always perceived resistance to US domination as that of weak, unimportant countries like Venezuela, Cuba, or North Korea. Basically, the theory was that real opposition could easily be thwarted or bought off or the internal politics of resistant countries — like Russia, for example — could be so manipulated from outside that the nations would simply disintegrate. War, as such, would rarely be necessary — especially after the initial Shock and Awe demonstrations proved that military resistance was futile to the point of insanity.
We can assess how it’s gone so far, and what we see is horror and disaster everywhere the Plan has been implemented. Yet our rulers continue on the path of global domination no matter what. They cannot stop.
The question is, can they be stopped?
China may be in a position to do the stopping. I don’t know. From what I can see, whatever you think of him, Xi is doing what he believes is necessary to fulfill Mao’s revolutionary promise to the Chinese people. This never seems to enter the minds of China critics, as they can only see China from their own, often pecuniary, point of view. To the Ruling Classes, the People never matter, ideology doesn’t matter, promises don’t matter. In China, though, it’s not quite that way.
So we’ll see. A Cold War, actually, may not be a bad thing. Stopping the hegemonic pretensions of the USA and its client states is likely to be an unmitigated good thing. Taming the ruling class in the West is a necessary thing. How exactly it can be or will be done, though…
That’s the question.
bruce wilder
dc: A thermonuclear exchange would erase any good which the Establishment Democrats might achieve otherwise.
!
your view lacks nuance, dc
Bridget
China was supposed to be the final domino to fall according to that seminal Project for the New American Century paper put out a couple of decades ago that laid out exactly how the US would obtain and sustain global hegemonic power for the 21st Century — “The New American Century.”
PNAC produced the RAD paper – Rebuilding America’s Defenses – which was a rebranding of Richard Perle’s “A Clean Break: A New Strategy for Securing the Realm” which was written for Netanyahu and his Likud and militant Jewish backers. It was rebranded in order to induce US planners into believing these actions are in the interest of the United States, and to make it more palatable to US audiences.
The “Clean Break” paper was itself a further advancement of the Yinon Plan, which was penned in 1982. The implementation of these plans essentially defines The Zionist Project as outlined by Ze’ev Jabotinsky all those years ago.
It was never about China falling to US total hegemonic power. It was never about the US or China. It’s about Israel and its partisans.
Dale
Hey, Bruce Wilder, you’re on a roll. Keep it up!
Have any of you good people been to either Russia or China recently? Personally I haven’t, but have a friend who has been to both within the past two years. He is retired military and, until recently, a Trump supporter. He ha s a son who lives and works in China. This young man married a local woman and they have a daughter. My friends daughter lived in Moscow until recently. My friend has visited both of his kids and what he saw and experienced in the two countries has changed him completely. The standard of living for most people in China is rising perceptibly. They live in new apartments, have work (even if it is no more than keeping the street in front of their apartment swept clean every day). Their food is good,excellent in fact. Great public transportation which is affordable. High speed trains everywhere he wanted to go. The list goes on and on. The people he met were happy and proud of their country. He didn’t get to see as much of Russia, but thought they were moving upward also.
Now look at our country; an abysmal infrastructure, failing schools, shitty job market. As a retired military person he wonders how our country thinks it can even imagine fighting a war with either country. We can’t even produce our troops uniforms and boots anymore.
I just read that both Honda and GM have shut down factories for lack of computer chips. As someone here pointed out, Intel is a failing company, it can’t compete internationally. How can you maintain a modern military without the means to provide it with the tools it needs to fight?
Take a look at the community you live in. Homeless people, people without a means to make a living. Hunger everywhere. People refusing to get vaccinated because “freedom”. No real political will to cure these and other myriad problems. And you think we’re a world power? Just remember, It was this country’s intentional policy to ship our industry overseas. So why are we now making enemies of the countries that picked up the slack? America, you mystify me.
Joseph E. Kelleam
“It was never about China falling to US total hegemonic power. It was never about the US or China. It’s about Israel and its partisans.”
Gurl, u cray cray. You’re also a lying POS.
Feral Finster
@Different Clue: Trump already won an election in 2016 on a policy that can be generalized as
“looking after our own affairs”. Now, Trump is weak, stupid, and easily manipulated, and he did not put that policy into practice, but it’s not as if most Americans are itching to put yet another pointless war on the national credit card, at least not without lots of propaganda in the runup.
The below exchange from Hermann Goering and Gustave Gilbert is most instructive.
“We got around to the subject of war again and I said that, contrary to his attitude, I did not think that the common people are very thankful for leaders who bring them war and destruction.
‘Why, of course, the people don’t want war,’ Goering shrugged. ‘Why would some poor slob on a farm want to risk his life in a war when the best that he can get out of it is to come back to his farm in one piece. Naturally, the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia nor in England nor in America, nor for that matter in Germany. That is understood. But, after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine the policy and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy or a fascist dictatorship or a Parliament or a Communist dictatorship.’
‘There is one difference,’ I pointed out. ‘In a democracy the people have some say in the matter through their elected representatives, and in the United States only Congress can declare wars.’
‘Oh, that is all well and good, but, voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same way in any country.'”
http://www.mit.edu/people/fuller/peace/war_goering.html#:~:text=%22Oh%2C%20that%20is%20all%20well,exposing%20the%20country%20to%20danger.
Feral Finster
https://www.ianwelsh.net/cold-war-2-0-continues-to-gather-pace-under-biden/#comment-125309
@ Joe Kellerman:
Depends on the country. The United States would have no interest whatsoever in Syria, if Saudi Arabia and Israel were not demanding regime change there.
Bridget
Gurl, u cray cray. You’re also a lying POS.
The truth hurts.
Bridget
ll you have to do is tell them they are being attacked and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger.
You have to do more than just tell them. People will only believe so much for so long. Lincoln’s quote comes to mind, though his quote taken literally is stupid – no, Abe, you can’t in fact fool all the people some of the time. It nevertheless does a decent job illustrating a larger point.
Thus, false flags.
Hugh
What I would like to hear is in the face of climate change, overpopulation, and wealth inequality what people want to see and expect in a post-US hegemonic world. And please none of the silly Chomskyan ‘if only the US had never existed everyone would be happy and the the thousands of years of war and oppression that predated its existence would never have happened.’
NL
It is quiet before a war. It is not quiet now. The noise is meant to cover up a détente. There is be a war but not just yet. It will be eerily quiet before it starts…
Astrid
The US actively obstructed global efforts climate change, overpopulation, and wealth inequality, so they can be expected to be better, albeit probably far from solved, by the removal of the US from the scene. Also, maybe a million people in the middleeast would still be alive, tens of millions would not be driven from their homeland by US wars and coups, and hundreds of millions would not be living in the aftermath of war. The US removal wouldn’t turn the world into paradise, but it would remove the most consistent state agent for human and biosphere destruct of the last 30 or more years.
But that question’s framing is extremely dishonest, as it automatically dismisses anything other than the impossible answer of utopia ( which Hugh would likewise dismiss as pro-coup Russian/China trolling). So as usual, he’s setting up a strawman, not engaging in an honest exchange of ideas.
Plague Species
Biden didn’t lie. Putin has no soul and he’s a killer. What Biden is wrong about, and maybe lying about too, is making Putin pay. The only way to make Putin pay is to make everyone else pay too — and that’s proceeding with a nuclear attack on Russia. Hey, if it wipes out the human species, it might be a good thing. In fact, it would be a good thing and radiation is an evolutionary catalyst so it will not only wipe the slate of the living clean but in fact it will create the template for a new slate. What a wonderful thought — a world sans the internet and those who birthed it.
Plague Species
I always laugh out loud when McDonald Trump supporting idwad conservatives in “progressive” or “independent” clothing wax on about the abysmal state of affairs in America as if they didn’t have a hand in all of it with their lifelong ardent support of political cretins and their unflagging enabling and support of the filthy rich.
Glenn is one of the people Putin looks to in his effort to destroy America. Glenn does it for free. See, Putin doesn’t hate gays. His fondness for Greenwald proves as much and for that fondness, Glenn carries Putin’s water for free and the dopes who subscribe to Greenwald’s writings ( to the tune of $500,000 per year per Greenwald) foot the bill for Putin because Putin is barely making ends meet economically apparently.
Plague Species
Biden can’t win for losing. On the one hand he’s a Chinese asset according to the Trump supporters and on the other hand he’s engaging in an escalating cold war with China according to same. Can we make up our minds? Which is it, because it can’t be both? Or maybe it can be both. If a guy named Fuentes can be a white nationalist versus a minority, then I guess Biden can be a card-carrying member of the CCP and also be hellbent on opposing China on all things and risk nuclear war with it if need be.
https://www.defenseone.com/ideas/2020/05/china-serious-issue-not-campaign-meme/165540/
Soredemos
@Hugh
Can you ever just once not be disingenuous and not strawman?
@Plague Species
You’re a very silly person.
Dylan Zimmerman Hendricks
there must be some kind of way out of here
said the joker to the thief
there’s too much confusion
i can’t get no relief
Ché Pasa
The PNACers showed how easy it was for a handful of radical neocons to take over not just US foreign policy, but the government in its entirety with the connivance of a corruptible Supreme Court (lookin’ at you Anton) . And then they ran it into the ground.
Most of us are still pretty shell-shocked. The Plan was to start in Eastern Europe, “do” the Middle East (I think there was a list of seven regimes to be overthrown, the last one standing being Tehran), then off to the Russian Federation, which was to be dismantled and the pieces essentially sold off, then, finally, China which was either to be brought into cooperative alliance with the hegemon or be forced to pay the price.
PNACers and their descendants are still largely in control of US foreign policy and they have an enormously outsized influence in the government as a whole. Yes, there is a kind of fusion with Israel, but it is neither complete nor always harmonious (ha).
But the PNAC plans are not the Defense of the Realm plans. They’re related, but they’re not the same, as PNAC’s goal was the permanent establishment of US global hegemony. The US has the power, but so far has proved incapable of using it appropriately or in some cases at all, largely due to the prevalence of a crabbed and psychotic ideology.
Some of the original malefactors of PNAC are still in government despite their manifest failings, and so far, Biden hasn’t shown any interest in defenestrating them or coming up with a different foreign policy ideal. For his part, Trump seemed to want to push the PNAC goals “all the way” — with the odd exception of holding Russia harmless. Likely reasons include the idea that he is deeply in debt to Russian oligarchs and has been laundering money for them for decades, and Russia is a White Power center which ought not to be fucked with. Whatever the case, Russia is in a weakened condition, though not likely to disintegrate soon.
China on the other hand is not weakened, but at least outwardly is strengthened despite numerous challenges. Study Mao. You’ll see how they can weather today’s challenges and many more to come. Something I’m not sure the PNACers and neocons can even begin to fathom.
Hugh
Thank you, Soredemos, for your thoughtful and detailed analysis of what a post-US hegemonic world would look like. You never descend to cheap, empty dodges. How refreshing!
S Brennan
Bruce Wilder put up a couple of comments that are spot on, people complain of my redundancy, oh well, I re-posted them below anyway.
I am a nationalist and unlike “internationalists” I actually respect my opposite number, in Italy, in Japan, Russia, India…and so forth. A guy who won’t stand up for the interests of his country is a piece of $#!t or…more accurately, a quisling.
I think the only way to organize international trade for the interest of all involved are mercantilism & bilateral trade agreements.
Oh no..you say…”can you imagine how hard it would be for a mega-corp business to keep track of 194 separate trade contracts” ? Why yes I can and what’s more, it was done in the past without…wait for it…computers. Mercantilism & bilateral trade agreements allow the democratic elements in a country to have a say in how domestic & international business is conducted. Additionally, each country would be a more independent entity if supply chains were subject to contract renewals…you know, just like a well run multi-generational corporation. Oh no..you say…the Milton Friedman school says; you need to run a country like an athletes body…with such efficiency that it’s always on the verge of collapse, that way if a financial/natural disaster, plague or war occurs the supply chain is broken on essential items and society collapses into ruin. Yep, that’s what the Milton Friedman school is really saying…effing insanity vis-à-vis long term survival.
Lost to the current generation, trade balance stats were a large part of the nightly news. What you say? Really, it wasn’t like it is now, there was not an earlier version of Rachel Maddow yelling Russia, Russia RUSSIA [!!!] every night on the TV. No really, there was a time that everybody in the USA was on the same team, hard to imagine nowadays, but true. Yeah, there really was a time before Bill Clinton, Bush the 2nd and Obama…when America, the American public, kept score and cared deeply on the issue of trade and it really wasn’t that long ago.
_________________
_________________
Bruce Wilder permalink
March 17, 2021
In the 1950s and 1960s, elites in the U.S. were nationalist. They saw their own wealth and privilege as being tied to a specific place and society, and a state they wanted to be run well as a defense against the cold war threat of the Communist Soviet Union which bragged about its social welfare achievements.
The shift among American elites toward a globalist perspective combined with an economic strategy of disinvesting and predation has ruined American politics domestically and made the U.S. a pariah abroad, its military and economic power deployed corruptly on behalf of narrow interests.
I do not expect a Cold War. There was a Cold War, because a significant fraction of both elite and popular opinion preferred Cold over Hot, based on bitter experience.
The current Elite would not know prudence.
Bruce Wilder permalink
March 17, 2021
The American elite profited from its hegemonic role even as the country as a whole paid a high price. China paid a price for becoming workshop to the world, but its elite was calculating closely for value received even as it made America’s disinvestment pay well for America’s elite and professional-managerial class.
Now we are approaching the end-game where the pmc preside over an empty shell of an economy — Intel can’t make chips, Boeing cannot fly a plane, the CDC cannot test for a virus. And, we have in place a brave new economic doctrine where we can simply print money to restore an economy worn down to third-world standards to high performance.
It is not just that we have no accountability, that no one pays a price for failure, I really think most Americans have completely lost track of socio-political cause-and-effect in the course of a 40-year game of Jenga.
A qualification for membership in the Blob or a place in the Biden Administration is not to see how precarious America’s place in the world really is, precarious and dangerously unearned even for some very negative meanings of “earned”.
different clue
…bruce wilder PERMALINK
March 18, 2021
dc: A thermonuclear exchange would erase any good which the Establishment Democrats might achieve otherwise.
!
your view lacks nuance, dc” …
hmmm. . . .
I suffer from an irony deficiency. So if your statement is intended ironically, I fear I may not be sensitive enough to realize that.
If you were being serious about my lack of nuance in that view, all I can do is say . . . well . . . an H-bomb exchange with Russia really would erase any good things otherwise. I don’t see any place for nuance in this particular area.
different clue
The “divide Russia and sell the pieces” plan was also a long-standing plan and desire of the notoriously antiRussianitic racist antiRussianite Zbigniew Brzezhinski. He was not a neocon.
If they shared his goal in this regard, it just goes to show that pigs of a feather wallow together.
Tony Wikrent
Regarding the comments about the demographic time bomb, and steady state economics….
About 15 years ago, when Jerome a Paris (I think that was the person’s handle) still posted on DailyKos, and put up around a third of the content at EuroTrib, they posted a very interesting article on EuroTrib about the steady state of the small, family-owned sector of the French economy. These bakeries and vineyards were content to thrive by meeting the same level of demand their parents and grandparents had met, and living at about the same standard of living. Of course, there were more electronic wizardry like PCs reckoned in the contented non-Parisian life style, but basically these family operations were doing quite nicely in what was essentially a steady state economy.
And of course France is a capitalist economy. So, you have to explain what type of capitalism you are talking about when you argue that capitalism requires constant growth.
Some comments above indicate that the same type of steady state economy now characterizes Japan, which has had a steadily declining population number for over a decade. In fact, I posted at EuroTrib in about the same time frame that the “Lost Decade” of Japan was entirely fake and was only the outrage and/or discomfort being felt by the Wall Street and City of London financial institutions who had forced themselves into Tokyo in the 1980s thanks to Reagan, but found that they couldn’t game the system as they did in USA and UK to create asset bubbles, especially in real estate, and corporate acquisitions.
So, it’s a specific variant of capitalism that requires mindless growth: that of predatory financialization, speculation, usury, and rent extraction. This is an entirely different beast than the industrial capitalism that has been responsible for actual economic progress, though it has almost always been forced to co-exist with predatory financial capitalism. Any number of measures point to this paradox, such as venture capital raised annually being measured in tens of billions of dollars, while the world’s financial turnover EACH DAY is measured in trillions.
The really interesting thing, I think, is that there is NOTHING in the USA Constitution or even in The Federalist Papers about capitalism. Find them online and do a text search if you don’t believe me. So, how did we end up with a capitalist economy now dominated by predatory finance? Look at it that way, and you can begin to identify where things went wrong and what can be done to fix them. Such as the reaction of railroad companies to the 1877 Munn v. Illinois decision affirming that business regulation by government could and should balance the rights of the community against entrepreneurial liberty to use private property as it pleased. It is the pushback to Munn by the railroad companies that created a new, pro-corporate interpretation of the equal protection clause, leading to the terrible Lochner era of jurisprudence.
[See Property, Liberty, and the Rights of the Community: Lessons from Munn v. Illinois
Paul Kens [Buffalo Public Interest Law Journal, Volume 30 (2011)
https://digitalcommons.law.buffalo.edu/bpilj/vol30/iss1/6/%5D
Neo-malthusian environmentalists refuse to acknowledge that it appears to be a natural law that as societies become more economically advanced, the birth rate declines faster than the mortality rate, leading to shrinking national populations absent immigration.
This is a factor of strategic importance, because how does a declining proportion of working age adults support an increasing proportion of retired adults? Technological advancement is the obvious answer: more automation, more robots, more AI. Hence the talk of Keynes 15 hour work week. Essentially, what you’re talking about is the increasing socialization of the economy: socialism is inevitable. But, socialists won’t get us there.
Why? Because socialists misidentify the problem. They think human nature is the problem, and if we just change property relations – eliminate private property – then human nature will change.
This is why I am so keen on reviving civic republicanism. Civic republicanism recognizes the duality of human nature, the human capacity for both good and evil. Moreover, human nature may not be changeable, but it is malleable. Government and social institutions can and should be built that promote the doing of good, and the punishing of evil. Liberalism cannot do this, because liberalism believes that individual liberty is the highest good, not good itself. Hence, as many historians have agonizingly recognized, it required liberalism to triumph over civic republicanism in order for capitalism emerge and become dominant. And, it is important to note that Marx and Engels based themselves on the western liberal tradition, not on civic republicanism. This is why marxism, communism, and socialism have been so devastatingly ineffective at opposing the institutionalization of neo-liberalism and Austrian libertarian economics since the 1940s debut of the Mont Pelerin project.
The Mont Pelerin project of institutionalizing neo-liberalism has been thoroughly documented by scholars such as Philip Mirowski, Steadman Jones, Kim Phillips-Fein, David Harvey, and others. Only Mirowski has written about the philosophical inability of the modern left to oppose neo-liberalism. See Mirowski Hell is Truth Seen Too Late https://read.dukeupress.edu/boundary-2/article/46/1/1/137342/Hell-Is-Truth-Seen-Too-Late
What Mirowski misses is the oligarchical — hence virulently anti-civic republican — backing for the Mont Pelerin project. Corey Robin began to reveal some of that story in his articles on the Austro-Hungarian Vienna roots of Nietzsche, von Mises, and von Hayek. See https://www.thenation.com/article/archive/nietzsches-marginal-children-friedrich-hayek/
But much more work needs to be done on this angle. Hopefully, someday someone will write an expose of the man who was general secretary of the Mont Pelerin Society for nearly two decades, Max Thurn, of the notorious and colorful Bavarian royal family Thurn und Taxis.
All this is why I am so troubled by the lefts’s animus toward Alexander Hamilton. What he understood was that the key to ensuring the survival and success of the United States in a world composed entirely of monarchies and oligarchies was to create a national economy in which national wealth was based on the creativity and inventiveness of the human mind, not on merely agglomerating ever more land, ever more slaves and serfs, ever more precious metals, ever more natural resources, ever more foreign trade. Hamilton shatters the hold of zero-sum feudal economics, something his opponent Jefferson never understood until very late in his life when he grudgingly admitted that manufacturing needed to be promoted in just the way Hamilton had prescribed.
For the coming new age of an increasingly socialistic economy dominated by automation, robots. and AI, we need to revive the political economy of civic republicanism which was established by Hamilton, and base our economy on advancing science and technology created by the inventiveness of the human mind, not an economy based on the speculation, usury, rent extraction, and asset bubbles of neo-liberalism.
The proper foreign relations policy of a republic should surely follow rather obviously: cooperate and encourage all nations seeking to build economies based on advancing science and technology created by the inventiveness of the human mind. USA should be seeking to join China in creating the New Silk Road / Belt and Road projects, and helping Africa industrialize and prosper.
nihil obstet
Our rulers are more into remakes and sequels than the worst Hollywood hacks. They’re doing Red Scare and Yellow Peril as though they hadn’t done it multiple times from the late 19th c. up to today.
S Brennan
MOA gives us this gem:
________________
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: Director of National Intelligence came out with a report today saying that Vladimir Putin authorized operations during the election to under — denigrate you, support President Trump, undermine our elections, divide our society. What price must he pay?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: He will pay a price. I, we had a long talk, he and I, when we — I know him relatively well. And I– the conversation started off, I said, “I know you and you know me. If I establish this occurred, then be prepared.”
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: You said you know he doesn’t have a soul.
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: I did say that to him, yes. And — and his response was, “We understand one another.” It was– I wasn’t being a wise guy. I was alone with him in his office. And that — that’s how it came about. It was when President Bush had said, “I looked in his eyes and saw his soul.” I said, “Looked in your eyes and I don’t think you have a soul.” And looked back and he said, “We understand each other.” Look, most important thing dealing with foreign leaders in my experience, and I’ve dealt with an awful lot of ’em over my career, is just know the other guy. Don’t expect somethin’ that you’re– that — don’t expect him to– or her to– voluntarily appear in the second editions of Profiles in Courage.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So you know Vladimir Putin. You think he’s a killer?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: Uh-huh. I do.
GEORGE STEPHANOPOULOS: So what price must he pay?
PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN: The price he’s gonna pay we’ll– you’ll see shortly.
__________________
One of my criticisms of the Trump Admin was the appointment of Pompeo as SoS and the sad fact that “pompous” secretly blocked ever stated goal of Trump.
[Yes, yes Hugh, Willey et al, I didn’t criticize everything Trump did and I didn’t do it every moment of every day like the “blue no matter who” crowd did. Worse, I pointed out that Pompeo’s appointment and indeed, Gina Haspel’s appointment happened because the “blue no matter who” crowd eagerly supported the 3-letter agencies tar & feathering of Gen [ret.] Flynn to the great diminishment of the USA.]
That said; this interview shows just how sick Biden’s foreign policy is…and this isn’t a recent dementia related development, Biden has had an effed foreign policy outlook his entire political life 1970’s – present.
https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/transcript-abc-news-george-stephanopoulos-interviews-president-joe/story?id=76509669
Willy
Twenty years ago I had to do an onsite for my company for 6 months in Tokyo. Every night I ate dinner at a little ramen shop owned by a friendly guy who’d previously worked in corporate real estate. He’d been part of the Tokyo real estate boom and bust in the ‘80’s, and decided to start anew after having lost everything. I liked the way he said “bullshit”.
I was amazed by the efficiency of everything in Tokyo, like Narita and Shinjuku station, saying that in the states we’d need facilities twice that size for that level of throughput. He’d tell me that everything in Japan had to go through a period of “burshit” to get that way. He’d learned about the “burshit” Dutch tulip craze in business school. He’d wondered how people could get so carried away by obvious speculation bubbles, and then it happened to him. He said the power from the exhilaration overcomes reason, and only after hitting bottom does one realize that mindlessly following greed is burshit. He was much happier living his simpler life.
I believe it’s the Navajo culture which teaches that man is inherently evil, and that everyone must be continuously vigilant to keep that evil in check.
Richard Proenneke was a highly respected diesel mechanic who at age 55, decided to challenge himself by living alone for a year in the Alaska wilderness. He built a little cabin to live in, with no running water or electricity. His only contact with the human world was occasional visits from a bush pilot acquaintance. Yet he liked it so much he lived that way until he was 83. He missed every episode of The Love Boat and the entire Disco scene, and apparently couldn’t care less.
There are a lot of off-grid homesteader how-to videos out there, which get a lot of views. But I’m finding that most are burshit. In one they built a log house outside of Fairbanks, and a shower hut, and a food store hut, and an outhouse hut. I was hoping they’d discuss the obvious, that Fairbanks is below freezing for literally half the year, and the mosquitoes in summer are for real. The outbuildings were unheated and uninsulated. They never addressed the inevitable exposing of asses to 30-below or hordes of mosquitoes. It turns out the channel owners are just taking advantage of a good thing, millions of viewer fantasies about living a simpler life, and the Youtube ad revenues they get.
Reviving civic republicanism seems like a good idea. But I worry that we’ll all either all have to hit bottom burshit first, or figure out how to fight through all that plutocratic burshit. I prefer the second option.
bruce wilder
dc: “I suffer from an irony deficiency.”
Apparently.
Bridget
The “divide Russia and sell the pieces” plan was also a long-standing plan and desire of the notoriously antiRussianitic racist antiRussianite Zbigniew Brzezhinski. He was not a neocon.
If they shared his goal in this regard, it just goes to show that pigs of a feather wallow together.
Very true, and look at the history there. Consider that Brzezinski was born Polish Catholic in Warsaw in the 1920’s and his family was from an area of Poland (Brzeżany) that is now a part of Ukraine.
I imagine there a lot of Poles from that period who aren’t exactly fond of Russia or the Nazis. And they’re probably rather sick of hearing the organized Jewish community rattle on about the proverbial Jewish question, given all the horrors they themselves have been subjected to. They are not alone in that feeling.
Brzezinksi’s cold-hearted psychopathy served him and his masters well. Mika has a nice little life for herself.
different clue
@Bridget,
If you are rather sick of hearing the organized Jewish community rattle on about the proverbial Jewish question, why do you keep bringing it up?
Hugh
That’s really very funny. SB gives us about a 32 line comment in which he criticizes Trump in just one line for something he immediately turns around and blames the Democrats for. So really a 32 out of 32 line screed against Biden and the Dems. I like too that he epitomizes Pompeo, one of the top Trump suck-ups and deadenders, as somehow subverting SB’s beloved orange-tinted Führer.
Bridget
Nice try dc. Keep coming.
different clue
Well bless your heart . . . Bridget . . . and thank you for your interest in my comment. I am always happy to hear from you. Please let me know if you have any other concerns.
Willy
I thought Michael Flynn was a notoriously anti-Islamic neocon?
different clue
@ Bruce Wilder,
“Apparently”.
No “apparently” about it. I suffer from an irony deficiency. Though perhaps “suffer” is the wrong word. Perhaps I should say I ” have” an irony deficiency. I don’t feel any pain because of it. I realize it can cause me to miss things, but that’s okay because ” you can never miss what you never knew.”
Now, if the irony is broad enough and crass enough, I can sometimes notice it. But it has to be screaming like a dog-horn foghorn.
Ché Pasa
Can Tony point us to his definition (not Hamilton’s) of civic republicanism, preferably with contemporary examples?
Soredemos
@Hugh
Hugh, you’ve presented nothing that warrants a detailed response. All you have are Atlantic Council propaganda talking points.
In reality no major figure on the left, Chomsky or otherwise, has ever claimed that the world would magically be a peaceful place if the US didn’t exist. What they have actually said is that the largest purveyor of violence on the planet today is the United States, a claim which is objectively true.
You love the US as hegemon, and are clearly a big believer in the Rules Based Liberal International Order™. That order that you love so much has destroyed three countries and killed millions in just the last twenty years. Neither the Barbaric Slav® nor the Yellow Peril™ that you hate so much can even begin to claim a similar level of damage. You’re asking us to be afraid of the decline of the US and the rise (or return) of other powers, but it’s the US that has left a trail of destruction in its path in recent history. If US foreign policy over the last generation is your idea of stability…
different clue
@ Tony Wikrent,
I read somewhere that Hamilton supported American diplomatic recognition of Haiti when it/they defeated the French and self-conquered their own island and themselves. And that Jefferson and all the others rejected it.
If that is so, would it make sense to highlight that sometimes in writing about Hamilton and try driving the anti-Hamiltonists into a no-escape corner where they are forced to think about why Hamilton would support the Freedom of Haiti if he were such an Oligarchist? Or at least force them to admit that they will never ever think about that question?
Anthony K Wikrent
“What is a republic?” is a question I’ve been grappling with for years., mindful that many, many countries have called themselves a republic that in fact were not. James Fenimore Cooper wrote The Bravo (1831), about a man blackmailed into being an assassin, explicitly to attack Venice’s claim to be a republic. No other novel I have read in my life has a non-fictional introduction explaining the purpose of the novelist.
I posted this in March 2019, before a commenter in a thread on Naked Capitalism suggested putting the word “civic” in front of “republicanism.” Which was quite recently, actually – about a month ago. A few days later, I found that the exact phrase was used in the 1988 issue of Yale Law Journal devoted to the issue of the “republican revival.”
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2019/3/2/1838924/-Liberals-and-the-left-fail-to-notice-and-celebrate-the-intellectual-death-of-conservatism
Excerpts:
A republic is a system of government in which all citizens have an equal right to select their governing representatives, equal access to those representatives, and equal standing before the law. A republic is not a democracy, but a republic is always democratic in form: all citizens have an equal right and access to the electoral process through which government officials and representatives are selected. (For a fuller, but relatively brief description of what a republic is, including some illuminating quotes from the founders, I highly recommend 12 pages from an 1866 speech by Senator Charles Sumner urging passage of the Fourteenth Amendment [1])
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourteenth_Amendment_to_the_United_States_Constitution
….
“constitutional structure” today denotes something quite different than what the term did in the last decade of the 1700s. Today we think of “constitutional structure” mostly in terms of the clauses and strictures of a writtenconstitution. At the time the USA Constitution was debated and written, however, constitutional structure encompassed much more, namely, the unwritten norms of accepted political behavior developed over time and attaining gravitas and power through habit and tradition. In the 1968 Pulitzer Prize-winning book of history, The Ideological Origins of the American Revolution, Bernard Bailyn writes:
….the colonists at the beginning of the Revolutionary controversy understood by the word “constitution” not, as we would have it, a written document or even an unwritten but deliberately contrived design of government and a specification of rights beyond the power of ordinary legislation to alter; they thought of it, rather as the constituted — that is, existing — arrangement of governmental institutions, laws, and customs together with the principles and goals that animated them. So John Adams wrote that a political constitution is like “the constitution of the human body” — “certain contextures of the nerves, fibres, and muscles, or certain qualities of the blood and juices… without which life itself cannot be preserved a moment.” A constitution of government, analogously, Adams wrote, is “a frame, a scheme, a system, a combination of powers for a certain end, namely, — the good of the whole community.” [pp. 68-69]
….
This is not the written constitutional structure with which Lindsey associates “the republican conception of liberty as non-domination.” It is not the conservative and libertarian wet dream of a national government bound and tied by a strict adherence to the enumerated powers of a written constitution. This is an embrace of the noble aspects of humanity to share and cooperate; more to the point, it is a rejection of the selfishness and self-interest that are supposed to be the mainsprings of capitalism.
I found Frank Michelman’s contribution to the “republican revival” issue of The Yale Law Journal (1998), “Law’s Republic”
https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/ylj/vol97/iss8/1/
to be a very difficult read, but richly rewarding, as he eviscerates conservative jurisprudence by articulating the process of how politics, then Constitutional law, comes to obey the dictate of social change, which he calls “jurisgenerative politics.” Michelman explains how a conception of Constitutional law grounded in his conception of republicanism necessarily results in protections to civil rights, and to LGBTG rights. Indeed, Michelman’s essay is centered on refuting the Supreme Court’s decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186 (1986).
I would also point people to the 1962 Minnesota Law Review article by Arthur E. Bonfield
“The Guarantee Clause of Article IV, Section 4: A Study in Constitutional Desuetude”
https://scholarship.law.umn.edu/mlr/863/
Anthony K Wikrent
different clue – I doubt it would be useful to drive anti-Hamiltonians into a corner. I rather doubt they would recognize the position they had been maneuvered into, so there would be no diminution of their chatter and clatter.
It is nonetheless very much worth noting the clear historical pattern that the manumission and abolitionist movements were largely led and composed of Hamiltonians, while Jeffersonians, when they had to choose, largely sided with the slave owners.
Ché Pasa
Tony, thanks. I appreciate the references re: civic republicanism/civic republics.
Am I to take it that there are no functioning current examples of civic republicanism? Have there ever been any? Or is it primarily a philosophical ideal to hold as a goal and work for?
Tony Wikrent
Che – I do not think there has ever been a functioning of civic republicanism that was not compromised in some way or form. So, yes, it is primarily a philosophical ideal to hold as a goal and work for.
In USA, republicanism was obviously compromised by slavery. Also, by very restrictive controls on who was allowed to vote. But as a philosophical ideal, it clearly had immense support and attraction for peoples from all over the world, who sought to emigrate to USA. It could be argued that this was merely attraction to the economic opportunity to get rich quick. But reading books and letter from the US Civil War era, there appears to have been some generalized idea of how USA as a republic needed to be preserved as an example and hope for people all over the world, and thus the Confederacy had to be defeated. I am perplexed but also feel sorry for people today who dismiss the creation of USA as just more elite patriarchal machinations. Heather Cox Richardson , in her book How the South Won the Civil War: Oligarchy, Democracy, and the Continuing Fight for America [Oxford University Press, 2020] an excellent job of juxtaposing the infant republicanism of USA, with the monarchism of Europe and the oligarchism of the south. Creating USA “was not simply an act of rebellion against a particular king; it was an act of rebellion against all kings… “It was a reworking of the very basis human government, a rejection of distinctions among men in the name of equality. It was dangerously radical…. Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense that ‘The cause of America is in great measure the cause of all mankind.’ ”
Allow me to bring up Hamilton again. Because the creation of USA was not only about rejection of the political forms of monarchy and oligarchy, it was a rejection of the zero-sum economics of European mercantile feudalism. This is the really key point to understand about what Hamilton succeeded in setting into motion. For a nation to increase wealth under feudalism, it had to accumulate more land, more slaves or serfs, more previous metals, etc. There was very little that could be done in the way of CREATING new wealth, hence the zero-sum nature of feudalism. Hamilton established an economy based on people adopting new ways of doing things – which means advancing science and technology. Economics no longer is a zero-sum game. National wealth becomes based on the potential of a country’s population to create and assimilate new technologies in economic production.
Hamilton is very explicit about this in his reports. And, in fact, as Secretary of the Treasury, he conducts industrial espionage against Britain, to identify and recruit the newest advances in textile making machinery, steam engines, and other technologies and bring them into the USA, including also trained and skilled operators and mechanicians. This was done in flagrant violation of British law.
Now, here is why I think reviving civic republicanism is the key to our future. Hamilton’s political economy not only frees humans from the zero-sum economics of European mercantile feudalism, it also begins to free human from the drudgery of work. There are some people at the time who recognized and celebrated this: that with the aid of machinery, one person can do the work that previously required 100 people. The idea pops up over and over again in the circles of the Hamiltonians, is carried through the collapse of the Federalists by the groups around Carey in Pennsylvania, and J Q Adams in New England, and carried into the Whig Party. When the Whig splinter over slavery in the 1850s, this political economy is carried into the Republican Party by Lincoln and others. Every reading list I recommend includes Gabor Boritt’s Lincoln and the Economics of the American Dream (Memphis, Memphis University Press, 1978).
Again, Hamilton is very explicit about this: The USA can only survive in a world filled with monarchies and oligarchies if it breaks out of the zero-sum feudal economic system of Europe, and begins to increase the powers of humanity over nature. That’s a theme you see among Hamiltonians throughout the period before the Civil War: increasing the powers of humanity over nature.
What this means is that, in the economy of USA, it is expected that people will have to work less and less to secure the material necessities of life. That’s what political economy under civic republicanism is supposed to be: our people should be moving further and further away from having to bear the drudgery of physical labor. Extending this political economy into the future, given the technologies now being developed, means that we should be aiming for an economy in which all the material needs of life are supplied and distributed with very little or no application of human labor. Sounds utopian, but that’s the trend we should be aiming for. I think this means the increasing socialization of the economy. This is what I mean when I write that socialism is inevitable, but socialists won’t get us there.
I’m don’t think I’ve yet mastered the argument I want to make, but this is where my thinking is headed. Hamilton really is crucial. Remember, Jefferson’s political economy for a republic was based on the physiocratic idea that increases in wealth only come from reaping the bounty of nature. That’s feudalism, isn’t it? Hamilton’s political economy is for increases in wealth to come from the application of the human mind to advancing the scientific and technological modes of the means of production. Thus, Hamilton’s government actively encourages the development and creations of new modes of production. It is not the modes of production determining the political and social structure. Just think of a cell phone – every single technology in a cell phone had its origin as a government program.
Anthony K Wikrent
“There is an untold, probably an unimagined, amount of human talent, of high mental power, locked up among the wheels and springs of the machinist; a force of intellect of the loftiest character. This stunning din, this monotonous rattle, this tremendous power, and the quiet, steady force of these humble, useful, familiar arts, resulted from efforts of mind kindred with those which have charmed or instructed the world with the richest strains of poetry, eloquence, and philosophy… [The machinist] kindles the fire of his steam engine, and the rivers, the lakes, the ocean, are covered with flying vessels…. He stamps his foot, and a hundred thousand men start into being; not, like those which sprang from the fables dragon’s teeth, armed with weapons of destruction, but furnished with every implement for the service and comfort of man. ”
—Edward Everett
Of those who opposed the advance of technology and the spread of machines, Everett demanded: “What is your object? …Do you wish to lay on aching human shoulders the burdens which are so lightly born by these patient metallic giants?”
Additonal
Lincoln’s speech on technology at Wisconsin State Fair
John E. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 (Grossman, 1976; Penguin 1977)
nihil obstet
Tony, thanks for these comments. I’m learning a lot from them.
Soredemos
@Anthony K Wikrent
That’s all very pretty from Everett. Wonder if he every tried his bullshit with people who actually worked for a living and whose jobs were taken away by technological ‘progress’?
If you’re quoting approvingly from Whigs, a species history rendered utterly extinct, you’re probably on the wrong track.