CrispyFriedBarnacles
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User ID: 2417
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1yr ago
I've wondered the last few years ago, regarding China's treatment of the Uighurs, if there was a geopolitical rhetorical function to that treatment.
Basically, or so the argument would go, the number of states that would consider using concentration camps or muscular ethnic reshaping or even cleansing policies on their undesirable internal demographics is almost certainly much, MUCH higher than the number of states that are willing to publicly acknowledge it or actually overtly enact it as long as American unipolar hegemony is the order of the day. And so letting their own internal demographics shift in undesirable ways while forswearing certain ugly policy choices that they would prefer to use is a specific cost of accepting American hegemony.
In such a world, China blatantly engaging in, say, the use of concentration camps, and then suffering no meaningful consequences for it, could be an intentional, provocative signal of weakening American power, as well as an invitation to other countries to pull away from the current American led order and shift towards a multipolar international order where states can more aggressively manage their own internal ethnic demographics exactly as China does, all with China benevolently claiming "China promotes a world where state sovereignty is respected and the internal affairs of states are their own business".
I'm not saying I believe this, exactly, but I can see a certain logic to it.
(You could imagine an alternate history version of "Russia blitzkriegs Ukraine in 2022, grabs a bunch of territory, and then winds the SMO down" serving a similar provocative international signaling function about the diminished role of American power and a new era of states militarily contesting old borders, but the history we're currently in a much messier and more ambiguous than that)
When I was reading Tony Judt's "Postwar", about Europe after World War 2, one of the points he made is that (though no one wants to admit it because it is so uncomfortable to admit) Hitler to some extent got at least some of what he wanted in Europe, at least for a time; in the Europe that came out of World War 2, there was generally much more ethnic coherence in nations than there had been before World War 2, largely because of mass population displacement and ethnic cleansing. The role of that shift in the general (all things considered) European peace that followed and the rise of solidarity-based welfare states is, again, a seriously uncomfortable topic. See also Robert Putnam and the costs of multi-culturalism on social trust.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
1yr ago
I think there's something really puzzling and interesting going on with American (left-of-center dominated) institutions broadly right now, and I think the phenomenon is captured nicely by this example of the press, the public, and the unpopularity of affirmative action.
As someone who grew up religious and in the South, most of my life, the main feature that distinguished American high-status liberalism from my home cultures was that American liberalism was absolutely masterful in wielding soft power.
My home cultures were much more prone to highly unappealing sanctimony, and authoritarian preening, and scolding, and the telling of musty old just so stories, and dumb Rush Limbaugh-tier propaganda, and attempts to trot out "hello fellow kids" unappealing Christian "rock", and clearly out-of-touch and ignorant fearful conspiracy theories about everything, and simplistic moralizing, and deep discomfort with acknowledging or facing the darker and messier parts of life, and a wariness about asking hard or culturally threatening questions, and prissy Thomas Kincaid-tier "art", and... On and on it went. (And a lot of that remains true to varying degrees for those subcultures to do this day, of course)
And meanwhile, the combination and intersections of art from Hollywood and TV and the popular music industry and popular fiction, and seductive and unrelenting Madison Avenue advertising, and the draw of unfettered consumerism, and the clearly high standards and high status of America's university system, and the seeming rigor and high standards and skepticism and confident nuance of America's great news sources... It was (or seemed to be) a culture of sophistication, and of subtlety and nuance, and very high standards, and of worldliness, and of individual freedom and liberation (especially sexually, of course). It came across as a culture where people were trusted to follow their own bliss, and where the culture was confident enough that people could ask hard questions and follow those questions where ever those questions led them. These different institutions (or at least their portrayal) all came together to create an unrelenting, highly appealing outside cultural force that my home cultures ultimately proved defenseless in the face of and was ultimately entirely undermined by, especially given the weight of outside money and technology pushing it. When I look at the dynamic I experienced, the things that stick out the most are the profound confidence of that outside culture, and the incredible deftness with which it wielded its soft power. It was a culture that understood, in a deep way, that you can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. It had mastered the art of both leading you to the water without you seeing them do it, and also making you want desperately to drink.
That's how it all felt, anyway.
Subjectively, everything I just described above feels like it might as well have taken place on a different planet. Everything that made my home cultures unappealing and weak 40 years now feels like its seeped into Hollywood and Madison Avenue and American universities and ostensibly reputable left-of-center news. And instead of deftly steering masses of people without them even seeing that they're being led, we keep getting this ritual of well-bred, well-credentialed people, who've inherited these fantastic organs of soft power, pulling back the curtain, doing the equivalent of getting up on their rickety soapboxes in very public ways, and loudly berating and scolding the people they once would have masterfully exercised soft power over, undermining their own organs of soft-power in the process and generating all sorts of highly predictable attention and resistance.
It's all very fascinating and puzzling to experience.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2yr ago
Unless we get a Nixon or LBJ, I really don't see any huge changes in how this country is governed.
Some alternative arguments:
A lot of the politicians and voters of that era had military service as one of their primary formative experiences. That enculturated them to accept big projects, large hierarchies, central planning, and non-market power in a way that is frankly alien to most Americans today. It's not so much a question of competence as a question of faith in that way of organizing people. Similarly competent people would almost certainly be in business today instead - but post 2008 financial crisis, I suspect that that blithe faith in markets and business no longer a shared, default assumption by smart, competent younger people either (which portends unclear things about the future).
But also, more importantly, their "competence" was in many cases vastly outstripped by their confidence and even hubris, and the resulting disasters are specifically what led to the current lack of faith in government in the first place. If you read, say, "The Best and Brightest" (about technocratic failures and hubris leading to Vietnam) or "Common Ground: A Turbulent Decade in the Lives of Three American Families" (about technocratic forced busing in Boston in the 70s), you get a really, really clear snapshot of why American faith in big, invasive, confident government collapsed, and why people turned back to markets instead (Gallup and Pew polls captured this collapse of faith in authorities and institutions quite nicely). All those competent politicians were able to get a bunch of bills passed, true, and roll out a bunch of programs, but that didn't mean they were actually competent in terms of being good governmental leaders and sustaining voter support in what they wanted to do, and several of their big programs were astonishing disasters with consequences that are still with us.
CrispyFriedBarnacles
2yr ago
The online rights generally thinks it's futile to court black voters to the GOP, as evidenced by this piece.
I'm very curious if taking account of regional differences might be crucial on this topic, and this is something I've been wondering about more broadly.
Some half-remembered data that I've seen recently but mostly won't double check now:
Blacks in the South have the highest rates of black homeownership in the country - here's the claim
I don't have the chart handy, but I saw a graph recently that showed that blacks in the New South (Georgia especially) are more optimistic that blacks in other parts of the country.
Blacks in the South are also, I'm almost positive, the most religious (just like everyone else in the South).
56% of American blacks live in the South, and this means the South is much blacker than the rest of the country - Georgia is 33% black compared to California's 5%, for example.
By the numbers, though, the biggest concentrated mass of black voters are in Northern or Rust Belt Cities - per this, the top 5 locations for concentrations of blacks are New York, Atlanta, Chicago, Washington D.C., and Philadelphia.
The worst educational outcome gaps between black and white in the country are in intensely liberal, well-credentialed white coastal and college towns.
The share of the black population with college degrees varies quite intensely by city , with the New South doing well and the rust belt often doing pretty poorly.
There are a lot of blacks in the South who are rural, which isn't the case almost anywhere else in the country - and rural black poverty looks very different than concentrated northern urban ghetto black poverty (I saw an observation recently that in the South, as you go more rural, white homicide rates rise and black homicides rates fall until they nearly equalize).
There has been a century long effort by radicals in northern urban cities to use blacks and black failure as a vanguard for political revolution, and that has entailed constant attempts at radicalizing the black underclass, which has almost certainly left a cultural mark on those communities; the South has historically been much more aggressively antagonistic to immigration (and thus the radical traditions and practices that certain immigrants brought with them), and labor unions, and industrial cities before the 1950s, and agitation more generally (and has been much more traditionally Christian), so this cultural and political influence has had much less of an effect on blacks in the South.
Another important group, white Yankees, trace the entirety of their moral worldview and moral history to the fact of blacks being the worlds biggest victims, white Southerners being the worlds biggest monsters, and white Yankees being the saviors of history, and they intensely need social relations to be slotted into that story, resulting in profoundly patronizing and non-functional behavior and excuse making when it comes to black people and black dysfunction, as well as fascinating dumbing down; white people in the South mostly don't do this, and (because there are vastly more black people there) are pretty clear eyed about the fact that plenty of black people can be expected to uphold reasonable standards as citizens and take care of their stuff, and also that black dysfunction is absolute civilizational poison and can not be tolerated (and also, there's no shortage of white trash dysfunction in the South that doesn't look all that different, and that can't be tolerated either).
I could go on with this, because I do find it fascinating, but I'll stop.
The South obviously isn't a utopia, and it has its problems, but (having grown up in the New South and then moved to liberal college towns and Rust Belt cities), the way race relations play out there look pretty different, and that has consequences.
And I don't think it's entirely crazy to imagine a future where Republicans could possibly retool themselves to be more attractive to socially conservative southern blacks, especially men and religious black people. I mean, it would still be an incredible slog, because the parties are still pretty racially coded in the South in a way that doesn't actually have much to do with values or policy, but I can imagine a pathway from here to there.
Now, whether or not Republicans see any point to doing this in Southern states, and whether or not they see it as more useful than getting to terrify all other demographics about black crime by engaging in the right wing version of race baiting, is a different issues. But as internal immigration brings in more northern liberals to the New South, it's possible the current political dividing lines might shift enough that ditching race to focus on uniting all social conservatives in Southern states becomes a reasonable approach. The gulf in values between southern conservative blacks and PMC yankee liberals is really significant, and much bigger than the gulf between southern white conservatives and southern black conservatives, who honestly have quite a lot in common in terms of history and culture and values.
In some ways, all of this reminds me of articles I've read about Hispanics warming up to the Republican party - from what've I've read, Hispanics in Blue states are not responding that well, but outreach to Hispanics in Red States is actually working pretty effectively.
Well, let me try to run with your question, because I think my speculation is a bit orthogonal to it.
Sure, as a great power, the Soviet Union didn't suffer meaningful consequences for operating gulags. Rather, the fact that it was a super power and operated gulags meant that all other nations in its sphere of influence certainly could use similar tools with impunity, AND the U.S. was often forced to turn a blind eye, in the case of various unaligned or less aligned nations, to similar local policies that were offensive to U.S. sensibilities when the U.S. was competing for influence against the Soviet Union. The fact of the Soviet Union having and enacting different policies and norms changed the political environment that all other nations were operating in, especially in places like Sub-Saharan Africa or Southeast Asia that were decolonizing and not in the firm orbit of either superpower. Great powers shape norms in their sphere of influence, and those norms can be an attractive draw for possible members of their orbits. They can be a crucial form of soft power.
So my speculation isn't that China (a rising great power) demonstrates that it can do things that are offensive-to-U.S.-norms, and thus random nation x (a small, non-great power) can also now do things offensive-to-U.S.-norms without consequence. My speculation is that China (trying to end U.S. hegemony and shift to a new world order of multipolarity, with China being one of the poles) could, among many other initiatives, be offering up support of the use of demographic management approaches the U.S. current forbids as one of many carrots for smaller nations to pull out of the U.S. orbit and consider transitioning into a multipolar future where they see their interests draw them closer to China's orbit.
As I say, this is all just idle speculation, of course.
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