"it [China] is making efforts to subvert our domestic political and cultural environment."
In the U.S. I tend to think of China's influence as a symptom of weaker institutions - but not the cause.
Academic thought has evolved over the past 50 years - and leads to a view that existing common culture is deeply flawed and each individual is uniquely talented.
The political stagnancy of the past 20-30 years is also a contributing factor to this institutional weakness. There have been plenty of poor policy choices over the past 20-30 years in the U.S. but you wouldn't know it based on the ease at which incumbents win re-election. Tactically its as if our politicians in the U.S. have learned that by focusing on cultural wedge issues and exploiting tribalism versus running on positive, definite, platforms they can remain in office indefinitely. The worst outcomes for them would be to actually solve a problem and lose an issue to run against.
Yuval Levin's formative/performative binary, when applied to media - especially with the maturation of technology platforms over the past 15 years - helps explain some of the erosion of even a pretense of journalistic integrity in many of the major media outlets.
I don't have the answer to "why now" but I lean towards a view that it is, at minimum, a culmination of what happens when colleges teach people to be less confident about their culture but more confident in their own abilities, an unaccountable political class and the loss of legitimate gatekeepers.
Let's define this a little more concretely though. What are the major policy changes over the past 20-30 years and what have been their demonstrable effects?
I'd submit that the story isn't that a lot has changed and no one has been held accountable, but rather that not much has changed at all. Politicians across the West generally on culture or cynically fantastical platforms of change, but major changes are rare. Now that there is a big problem, COVID, it's not clear to me if it's a cynical refusal to try or an utter conservatism of thought by which politicians have largely decided to no longer change policy at all.
I don't think it was policy changes; I think it was context changes. We used to have major unifying projects; now we don't. The Soviets were an existential enemy that could kill us at any time. During the 90s, most of our attention was focused on building the internet. The War on Terror was a major unifying project for about ten years, but it dragged on and we lost interest. By 2010 or so we had no major unifying projects to distract us from our internal rivalries. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street was probably the first major symptom of this disunity.
Not so much policy changes - policy choices. I think there has been a fair amount of stagnancy here. Iraq/Afghanistan, TSA going union (patriot act in general), Great Recession (more a culmination of policy choices than a single policy).....probably easier to list out poor policy choices vs good ones over past 20-30 years. Probably easier to list out who's no longer in the Senate from 20 years ago versus who is still in. Even in the White House - Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Almost-Clinton, Obama's VP....fairly stable.
Much less awareness of non-U.S. governments - thought Merkel is out after 15 years.
This is really interesting, but I suggest some more thought needs to be put into "In the WW period, the West may have been unwise, or naive, but we were not putting ourselves under systematic pressure to tell lies. The threat came from external enemies (Nazism, Communism), but the internal forces of illiberalism were not as powerful."
Nazism and Communism were both very much products of the liberal West, and shouldn't be considered as "external". In fact, that they began as more or less "internal" reaction and developed into their own competing ideology seems like the a key determinant of liberalism.
Is there a liberal road to stamping out a dangerous competing ideology, or is that anathema?
Hugely underdiscussed is how fear of known, terrible Communism led many Germans to conclude that only Hitler could protect them - that other "liberals" were too weak. Many voters for Trump felt, and still feel, that only Trump is fighting against the anti-Freedom Woke racism irrationality that is taking over so many (no-longer) liberal institutions.
"In the WW period, the West may have been unwise, or naive, but we were not putting ourselves under systematic pressure to tell lies"
My read of the history leads me to say that's far from accurate, and one doesn't have to be done 'independent revisionist' crank to come to that conclusion. The lies back then were different than ours (including a lot of brazenly fraudulent shilling for Communism) but more importantly, the victors' lies get written into national myth narratives and the history fed to future high school students as if they were true, such that it isn't obvious to a normal person how much pressure and lying there actually was back then.
That's why things like the 1619 project are so terrifying, because the woke progressives are our generation's victors, and a generation from now, our successors won't know enough to know that it was all pressure and lies, they'll just think it's true history and that our particular society was the best because so honest and truthy without suppressing the truth that brave and stunning truth-telling scholars and journalists were finally free to tell and teach.
See? The future students who will think this wrong way about our time are ... us ... the way we think wrong about the time of our own predecessors.
If one reads a bunch of Mencken or Nock's alarmed criticism of what was really going on in this regard in the WW era, one will see what I mean. Try One Dozen Candles, or if you want maximum respectability, Gordon Tullock's Open Secrets of American Foreign Policy. We talk about the Hollywood blacklist, but during the WW era, if a writer or scholar stepped out of line on certain matters - like reverence for anything FDR - they would get "cancelled" Avant La Twitter. What happened to Historian Charles Beard provides a good example, going from the most celebrated heights of fame and prestige in his profession and when expressing reasonable (and as it happens, often accurate) skepticism about the story told of the prelude to WWII, getting kicked to the curb and treated like a pariah who had gone mentally ill.
I am surprised the seminar ignoring history. US set a course for growing central government in the early 20th century. 16th amendment brought the IRS into every home and business. 17th amendment canceled the Congressional role of states. The 18th amendment set the stage for national police forces. Wilson added governance by an expert bureaucracy (notably, purging blacks and segregating the military). The 30s built on that foundation. The 40s war years tested the tools of US C&C economy. Orwell published the future in 1946. What's new?
<i>In the WW period, leaders lacked the courage to stop Hitler in 1935-1938.</i>
Japanese leaders lacked the courage to stop America until 1941. After that, they only lacked the ability.
Our economy has a huge number of dependencies on China. Our total military strength is comparable, but their military is laser-focused on the capability to assert China's regional claims while ours is spread over the entire planet and largely specialized toward counterinsurgency. When the Pentagon wargames conflict with China, we typically lose quite rapidly.
Rod Dreher (a double FIT pick) writes about why now, with one of the usual internet suspects but a very relevant POV:
"I keep thinking of what a schoolteacher in Poland told me, in a conversation about how the youth in that country are abandoning Catholicism in huge numbers: that there is no institution there — not family, not church, not the state, nothing — that is more influential in shaping the worldview of the youth than TikTok and other forms of social media.
Like I said, we have never faced a crisis like this. Virtually overnight, a global mode of communication has come into being, one that is radically democratic, in the sense that anybody can say virtually anything, and the system has no way of privileging one voice over any other."
"People’s hunger for truth is easily mistaken for a pure rational desire for accuracy and certitude. Yet our hunger for truth is, at a deeper level, our desperate need for something or, more typically, someone to trust. Where radical distrust in the ordinary organs of knowledge and thought in society prevails, most don’t cut themselves off from everyone else in unrelenting suspicion. Rather, in such situations we typically see a dangerous expansion of credulity, of unattached trust, just waiting for something to latch onto, for someone or something—anything!—to believe in. Alongside this expansion of credulity, we also see a shrinking of the circle of trust. Hence, wild and fanciful conspiracy theories gain traction, and new dissident and tribal communities form around them."
I'm actually here with Arnold because I trust him to tell me what he believes is true. Far more than most other websites (thenewneo.com is my other fav). Most Trump supporters think Trump says what he thinks is true, even if not PC/ Woke, far more than others. The 2016 Roberts essay notes Trump mentioned a vaccine - autism anecdotal case, which Ben Carson & Rand Paul both contradicted. I think Trump honestly thought there might be a link.
Roberts continues (2016 pre-Covid):
"Trump’s argument against vaccines works because people no longer trust the authorities—the governments, the scientists, the medical professionals, etc.—who tell them that they are safe. The biased mainstream media, the liberal elite, lying politicians, activist judges, crony capitalists, politically correct academics, the conspiring government, scientists bought off by big business, hypocritical religious leaders: all are radically corrupt, motivated by self-interest, and radically untrustworthy. In such a situation, people’s realm of trust can become more tribal in character, focusing upon people of their own class, background, friendship groups, family, locality, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc. and deeply suspicious of and antagonistic towards people who do not belong to those groups."
That's a long list of liars - who I also no longer believe.
My own journey away from Libertarianism towards more Christianity is also partly because on a personal level I can trust Christians while not trusting Libertarians nearly as much.
To your 5th paragraph list of technology innovations, I'd add the rise of container cargo logistics. From Malcom McLean's first effort with his re-purposed tanker ship in April 1956*, to the massive container ships of today, we've seen generated a huge paradigm shift in offshore manufacturing and domestic distribution, of goods. ...an expansion of trade patterns perhaps similar in effect to the advent of the Clipper ships, or more likely, the rise of steam-driven ships and locomotives.
China's economic rise is due to its seemingly uncountable population (and weak labor & environmental laws) and the relatively cheap and secure** container transport of goods. Without either of those factors, China would likely have remained a backward, near-third-world country.
* See, "The Box," by Marc Levinson, 2006.
** Whole containers have been and are lost overboard due to various circumstances, and the news tells me that recent supply chain interruption has left containers on stopped trains vulnerable to theft & pilfering.
"it [China] is making efforts to subvert our domestic political and cultural environment."
In the U.S. I tend to think of China's influence as a symptom of weaker institutions - but not the cause.
Academic thought has evolved over the past 50 years - and leads to a view that existing common culture is deeply flawed and each individual is uniquely talented.
The political stagnancy of the past 20-30 years is also a contributing factor to this institutional weakness. There have been plenty of poor policy choices over the past 20-30 years in the U.S. but you wouldn't know it based on the ease at which incumbents win re-election. Tactically its as if our politicians in the U.S. have learned that by focusing on cultural wedge issues and exploiting tribalism versus running on positive, definite, platforms they can remain in office indefinitely. The worst outcomes for them would be to actually solve a problem and lose an issue to run against.
Yuval Levin's formative/performative binary, when applied to media - especially with the maturation of technology platforms over the past 15 years - helps explain some of the erosion of even a pretense of journalistic integrity in many of the major media outlets.
I don't have the answer to "why now" but I lean towards a view that it is, at minimum, a culmination of what happens when colleges teach people to be less confident about their culture but more confident in their own abilities, an unaccountable political class and the loss of legitimate gatekeepers.
Let's define this a little more concretely though. What are the major policy changes over the past 20-30 years and what have been their demonstrable effects?
I'd submit that the story isn't that a lot has changed and no one has been held accountable, but rather that not much has changed at all. Politicians across the West generally on culture or cynically fantastical platforms of change, but major changes are rare. Now that there is a big problem, COVID, it's not clear to me if it's a cynical refusal to try or an utter conservatism of thought by which politicians have largely decided to no longer change policy at all.
I don't think it was policy changes; I think it was context changes. We used to have major unifying projects; now we don't. The Soviets were an existential enemy that could kill us at any time. During the 90s, most of our attention was focused on building the internet. The War on Terror was a major unifying project for about ten years, but it dragged on and we lost interest. By 2010 or so we had no major unifying projects to distract us from our internal rivalries. In 2011, Occupy Wall Street was probably the first major symptom of this disunity.
Not so much policy changes - policy choices. I think there has been a fair amount of stagnancy here. Iraq/Afghanistan, TSA going union (patriot act in general), Great Recession (more a culmination of policy choices than a single policy).....probably easier to list out poor policy choices vs good ones over past 20-30 years. Probably easier to list out who's no longer in the Senate from 20 years ago versus who is still in. Even in the White House - Bush, Clinton, Bush, Obama, Almost-Clinton, Obama's VP....fairly stable.
Much less awareness of non-U.S. governments - thought Merkel is out after 15 years.
This is really interesting, but I suggest some more thought needs to be put into "In the WW period, the West may have been unwise, or naive, but we were not putting ourselves under systematic pressure to tell lies. The threat came from external enemies (Nazism, Communism), but the internal forces of illiberalism were not as powerful."
Nazism and Communism were both very much products of the liberal West, and shouldn't be considered as "external". In fact, that they began as more or less "internal" reaction and developed into their own competing ideology seems like the a key determinant of liberalism.
Is there a liberal road to stamping out a dangerous competing ideology, or is that anathema?
Hugely underdiscussed is how fear of known, terrible Communism led many Germans to conclude that only Hitler could protect them - that other "liberals" were too weak. Many voters for Trump felt, and still feel, that only Trump is fighting against the anti-Freedom Woke racism irrationality that is taking over so many (no-longer) liberal institutions.
"In the WW period, the West may have been unwise, or naive, but we were not putting ourselves under systematic pressure to tell lies"
My read of the history leads me to say that's far from accurate, and one doesn't have to be done 'independent revisionist' crank to come to that conclusion. The lies back then were different than ours (including a lot of brazenly fraudulent shilling for Communism) but more importantly, the victors' lies get written into national myth narratives and the history fed to future high school students as if they were true, such that it isn't obvious to a normal person how much pressure and lying there actually was back then.
That's why things like the 1619 project are so terrifying, because the woke progressives are our generation's victors, and a generation from now, our successors won't know enough to know that it was all pressure and lies, they'll just think it's true history and that our particular society was the best because so honest and truthy without suppressing the truth that brave and stunning truth-telling scholars and journalists were finally free to tell and teach.
See? The future students who will think this wrong way about our time are ... us ... the way we think wrong about the time of our own predecessors.
If one reads a bunch of Mencken or Nock's alarmed criticism of what was really going on in this regard in the WW era, one will see what I mean. Try One Dozen Candles, or if you want maximum respectability, Gordon Tullock's Open Secrets of American Foreign Policy. We talk about the Hollywood blacklist, but during the WW era, if a writer or scholar stepped out of line on certain matters - like reverence for anything FDR - they would get "cancelled" Avant La Twitter. What happened to Historian Charles Beard provides a good example, going from the most celebrated heights of fame and prestige in his profession and when expressing reasonable (and as it happens, often accurate) skepticism about the story told of the prelude to WWII, getting kicked to the curb and treated like a pariah who had gone mentally ill.
I am surprised the seminar ignoring history. US set a course for growing central government in the early 20th century. 16th amendment brought the IRS into every home and business. 17th amendment canceled the Congressional role of states. The 18th amendment set the stage for national police forces. Wilson added governance by an expert bureaucracy (notably, purging blacks and segregating the military). The 30s built on that foundation. The 40s war years tested the tools of US C&C economy. Orwell published the future in 1946. What's new?
<i>In the WW period, leaders lacked the courage to stop Hitler in 1935-1938.</i>
Japanese leaders lacked the courage to stop America until 1941. After that, they only lacked the ability.
Our economy has a huge number of dependencies on China. Our total military strength is comparable, but their military is laser-focused on the capability to assert China's regional claims while ours is spread over the entire planet and largely specialized toward counterinsurgency. When the Pentagon wargames conflict with China, we typically lose quite rapidly.
As Don Boudreaux says in this letter
https://cafehayek.com/2021/12/hung-up-on-individual-right.html
liberalism in the U.S. is still threatened by the many hypocrites claiming that each American should be responsible to their fellow citizens.
Rod Dreher (a double FIT pick) writes about why now, with one of the usual internet suspects but a very relevant POV:
"I keep thinking of what a schoolteacher in Poland told me, in a conversation about how the youth in that country are abandoning Catholicism in huge numbers: that there is no institution there — not family, not church, not the state, nothing — that is more influential in shaping the worldview of the youth than TikTok and other forms of social media.
Like I said, we have never faced a crisis like this. Virtually overnight, a global mode of communication has come into being, one that is radically democratic, in the sense that anybody can say virtually anything, and the system has no way of privileging one voice over any other."
https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/christianity-declines-but-not-spirituality/
Rod quotes Alastair Roberts:
"People’s hunger for truth is easily mistaken for a pure rational desire for accuracy and certitude. Yet our hunger for truth is, at a deeper level, our desperate need for something or, more typically, someone to trust. Where radical distrust in the ordinary organs of knowledge and thought in society prevails, most don’t cut themselves off from everyone else in unrelenting suspicion. Rather, in such situations we typically see a dangerous expansion of credulity, of unattached trust, just waiting for something to latch onto, for someone or something—anything!—to believe in. Alongside this expansion of credulity, we also see a shrinking of the circle of trust. Hence, wild and fanciful conspiracy theories gain traction, and new dissident and tribal communities form around them."
https://alastairadversaria.com/2016/11/08/the-social-crisis-of-distrust-and-untruth-in-america-and-evangelicalism/
I'm actually here with Arnold because I trust him to tell me what he believes is true. Far more than most other websites (thenewneo.com is my other fav). Most Trump supporters think Trump says what he thinks is true, even if not PC/ Woke, far more than others. The 2016 Roberts essay notes Trump mentioned a vaccine - autism anecdotal case, which Ben Carson & Rand Paul both contradicted. I think Trump honestly thought there might be a link.
Roberts continues (2016 pre-Covid):
"Trump’s argument against vaccines works because people no longer trust the authorities—the governments, the scientists, the medical professionals, etc.—who tell them that they are safe. The biased mainstream media, the liberal elite, lying politicians, activist judges, crony capitalists, politically correct academics, the conspiring government, scientists bought off by big business, hypocritical religious leaders: all are radically corrupt, motivated by self-interest, and radically untrustworthy. In such a situation, people’s realm of trust can become more tribal in character, focusing upon people of their own class, background, friendship groups, family, locality, ethnicity, nationality, religion, etc. and deeply suspicious of and antagonistic towards people who do not belong to those groups."
That's a long list of liars - who I also no longer believe.
My own journey away from Libertarianism towards more Christianity is also partly because on a personal level I can trust Christians while not trusting Libertarians nearly as much.
To your 5th paragraph list of technology innovations, I'd add the rise of container cargo logistics. From Malcom McLean's first effort with his re-purposed tanker ship in April 1956*, to the massive container ships of today, we've seen generated a huge paradigm shift in offshore manufacturing and domestic distribution, of goods. ...an expansion of trade patterns perhaps similar in effect to the advent of the Clipper ships, or more likely, the rise of steam-driven ships and locomotives.
China's economic rise is due to its seemingly uncountable population (and weak labor & environmental laws) and the relatively cheap and secure** container transport of goods. Without either of those factors, China would likely have remained a backward, near-third-world country.
* See, "The Box," by Marc Levinson, 2006.
** Whole containers have been and are lost overboard due to various circumstances, and the news tells me that recent supply chain interruption has left containers on stopped trains vulnerable to theft & pilfering.