Time for Some Straight Thought

Evidently, Financial Times columnist Janan Ganesh is more liberal than yours truly. That means, he is more liberal than many other readers of this blog. If you prefer to live in an echo chamber, you will happily ignore the thinking of people more liberal than you.

In truth, the left has been trying to force us all to live in an echo chamber. It imposes its jejune opinions like sacred dogma. 

You do not overcome this form of thinking by setting up your own dogmas. You overcome it by accepting that you might be wrong, and that rational thought and deliberative debate will eventually shed light on the issue. Besides, was it not interesting and informative to hear Larry Summers, a true blue Democrat, warn against the inflationary excesses of Biden administration policy? 

And when it comes to China policy, I have often quoted the thinking of a conservative like David Goldman, editor of the Asia Times, one of the few who seems to be thinking clearly about the reality of the situation.

Among those defending free and open debate is a British socialist by name of Glenn Greenwald. (via Maggie’s Farm) In a recent Substack he analyzed the current thrust toward mind control. He states clearly that the mania about shutting down speech that some censors in Silicon Valley call disinformation is an effort to exercise despotic control over what people are allowed to think:

The war on "disinformation” is now one of the highest priorities of the political and media establishment. It has become the foundational justification for imposing a regime of online censorship. Around the world, new laws are being enacted in its name to empower the state to regulate discourse. Exploiting this cause, a small handful of billionaires are working in unison with Western security state agencies — under the guise of neutral-sounding names like The Atlantic Council — to set the limits of permissible thought and decree what is true and false. Corporate media outlets are attempting to rehabilitate their shattered image by depicting themselves as the bulwark against the rising tide of disinformation.

It is an understatement to say that this righteous cause is a scam. That its motive is power and control over speech and thought — to eliminate dissent and discredit competition — rather than a noble quest for truth is almost too self-evident to require explanation. No human institutions should be trusted with the inherently tyrannical power they seek to arrogate unto themselves: to decree truth and falsity with such authoritative power that views they have decreed "false” become prohibited, off-limits, even worthy of punishment.

As for Janan Ganesh, in his latest column he took out after those who believe that what is happening in China is our fault. If only, if only…. The Republican side of the debate holds that we erred grievously in allowing China into the World Trade Organization in 2001, under a Republican administration, incidentally.

Ganesh believes that we are trafficking in nonsense. We are doing so, by his lights, in order to pretend that we are still in control, that we are still in charge, that no one could ever have succeeded without our collusion, and without their cheating. He sees it as a form of trauma management, a topic near and dear to this blog.

At a later point in his column he explains that the American left suffers from the same mental deformity. Anything bad that happens around the world is our fault. On the left the fault will lie in capitalism and patriarchy.

What motivates their efforts is a sincere desire to spare others from the same grief. But so does a deep psychic need to claw back control. Having been done to and acted upon by a capricious world, the feeling of agency, however brief, soothes them.

So, Ganesh considers the rise of China to be a trauma. It shows that America is no longer lord and master of a unipolar world. Those who think such thoughts believe that this happened because we made a mistake, that we let it happen.

Note well, this diminishes whatever successes China may have achieved and deprives them of pride. It is always dangerous to attack peoples’ pride. In any event, the American right believes that none of it would have happened if we had not let China into the WTO. Some even go back to 1949 when the rallying cry was that we lost China. To which, Ganesh suggests that we should get over ourselves.

Nations too have losses to process. Whether or not China ever surpasses it, the US has been bereaved of its 1990s unipolarity. It copes with the trauma by dwelling on what could have been done about it. If only China had not been waved into the World Trade Organization 20 Decembers ago. If only successive White Houses had not been so credulous in their dealings with Beijing. The recriminations go back to 1949, when, as some Republicans still fancy, the US “lost” China to communism.

What is the alternative to this form of rather self-aggrandizing thinking?

On the surface, this self-reproach looks courageous and honest. In fact, it is the easy way out. The alternative is to admit that the much larger and older country was bound for world eminence (again) once it began to open up under Deng Xiaoping in the 1970s. The west might have postponed its arrival at the top table, at some cost. Preventing it outright was never in its power.

A useful corrective. Ganesh believes that we blame ourselves, or we denounce prior administrations because we prefer guilt to impotence. And we prefer to indict prior administrations than deal with the current state of play in the China-American relationship. In other words, we would rather deal with a counterfactual-- the situation if we had not allowed China into the WTO-- than the reality on the ground.

Impotence is more painful to own up to than guilt. The rest of the democratic world finds it no easier than America. “How the west invited China to eats its lunch”, has the luridness and fake-Everyman patter of a Fox News headline. It is in fact a BBC one, from last week.

Obviously, this last spasm of self-aggrandizement does not just come from the right. As Ganesh notes, it comes from the BBC. But, was it realistic?

Consider its two implications. First, the WTO, in 2001, could have plausibly blackballed a fifth of humanity that had just undergone a generation of market-friendly reforms. Second, doing so would have somehow only stymied China, and not the west, even though American and other companies gorged on low-wage labour there ever after.

It is worth noting, if only in passing, that Americans have enhanced their standard of living by buying cheap goods from China. We cannot produce the same things at a similar cost in America.

If this were just academically wrong, it need not detain us. But there are political consequences to this fantasy. One theme that Donald Trump rode to the White House was that US elites were derelict and even complicit in China’s rise. Presidents Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama are still held to have sold out industrial America (but not credited for the cheap consumer goods that flowed into many of the same households from a trading China). The premise that a mighty China is some kind of aberration, and not just a regression to the historic mean, props up a lot of US populism.

Ganesh believes that there is nothing abnormal about the rise of China. China had been a great nation in the past, but had given itself over to self-destructive policies, first among them, Maoism. So, the rise of China is a reversion to an historical mean.

The left has been trafficking the same self-aggrandizement. Ganesh offers some examples. Better to blame ourselves than to admit that our sphere of influence and control is limited:

Progressives have their own version of this solipsism. A vicious civil war in the Arabian Peninsula? Blame western arms sales. Poverty in Africa? The Washington Consensus. Meltdown in Afghanistan? How dared we abandon it. Even people of a liberal or centre-ground bent have persuaded themselves that Russia is autocratic because Kremlin-friendly magnates are allowed to buy up Mayfair. According to this view of the world, nothing bad happens anywhere that does not trace back to a western root. It is a stab at global consciousness that could not be any more parochial. It is a pretence of humility that is actually the most fantastical claim of omnipotence.

We are, he continued, out of touch with reality. We are living in what he calls a “self-flattering delirium.”

The west is forever confronting a harsh “truth” (how guilty we are) in order to duck a harsher one (how marginal we are). To deny that the rest of the world has a mind and will of its own was strange enough in 1949, when the US accounted for a large enough share of global output to at least aspire to shape distant events. To keep it up in this century is to live in a self-flattering delirium.

Talking tough about China has become the rage in Republican circles. It is macho posturing. It assumes that China cannot prosper on its own, but, if I may, it also fails to notice that attacking a nation’s pride and reputation-- as we do all the time-- will most likely produce pushback. If you threaten a nation’s face, be ready for the counterattack.

It also gives rise to a jarring intellectual contradiction in Washington. China hawks scold a generation or two of US leadership for enabling its rise. Mike Pompeo, while secretary of state, seemed to wonder if even Richard Nixon’s recognition of the “red” state in 1972 was naive. The trouble with this surface toughness is that it suggests China doesn’t have enough going for it to prosper under its own steam. If so, why the hawkishness? Why the eternal vigilance and military largesse? China cannot be an awesome century-long rival and an unwitting creation of soft-headed free-trade liberals all at once.

Ganesh closes by suggesting that containing China is not a viable policy option. If that is so, what then?

The truth is that no one takes China more seriously than those who recognise that it is too vast and ambitious to have been contained for long, with or without WTO membership. The real hawks are the fatalists.