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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32051 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 31, 2022

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Richard Hanania's recent article about how, according to him, this year has shown that liberalism is stronger than many had previously thought inspired me to wonder about what comes first, the liberalism or the success. I would guess that this question is probably meaningless since the answer is that they arise at the same time. At the very least, it is probably not as simple as the liberalism coming first and the success resulting from it.

I was wondering what people here would think about the matter so I will re-post my comment here:

I suspect that a common mistake is to think that liberalism is the state of being of a civilization in which most people support liberalism, whereas the reality is more that liberalism is the state of being of a civilization in which no authoritarian group has managed to completely dominate the others. I suspect that most people who consciously believe in liberalism would become dictators if they could. They do not think that they would, but if the avenues to total rule opened for them they would easily find rationalizations to make total rule by themselves seem altruistic - for example, "we need temporary authoritarianism with us in charge in order to guarantee the long-term survival of liberalism". So liberalism is not the state of being of a civilization which is populated mostly by actual liberals. It is the state of being of a civilization in which multiple competing wannabe authoritarian groups are managing to keep each other in check with none succeeding at gaining total power and completely dominating all the others.

And if this is true, then maybe it is worth it to revise the theory that liberalism leads to successful societies and to say that yes, that is probably true but it may be even more true that successful societies lead to liberalism. It takes a vigorous society to have multiple competing power centers none of which ever manage to come to completely dominate the others. On the other hand, for a society to have only one truly successful power center is a sign of weakness. Such a society lacks the vigor to produce more strong power centers, hence its politics becomes unipolar as one pole crushes the rest.

If this is true - not that I am convinced it is, but if it is - then it is easy to see why liberalism is associated with successful societies. Authoritarian societies are ones that are too weak to prevent themselves from being dominated by one single power center. Liberal societies by definition are those which have been strong enough to have multiple successful power centers that have endured.

I think Hanania and the rest of the 'another 100 years of US hegemony, liberalism has won, end of history for real' is totally wrong.

Everyone (Hanania especially) seems to have gone insane over China's lockdowns, saying it's a neurotic, autistic society. If it's neurotic and it works, then it's not that bad. China didn't have huge death tolls like the US or the rest of the West. The US had about 3000 deaths per million, the Chinese had 4. Even if they're lying by an order of magnitude, they still did an immensely better job at avoiding deaths than the West did. If long COVID turns out to be real and significant, they win there too.

China isn't suffering from stagflation right now like the rest of the world. They have inflation of about 2%, there are worries about inflation being too low. This is because they didn't print huge amounts of money as stimulus. And the damage to the Chinese economy? According to the Asian Development Bank, Chinese growth will drop to 3.3% this year thanks to Omicron and these lockdowns. US growth is somewhere around 1.5% and there's a recession looming. The US and the rest of the West is being forced to raise interest rates to reduce the growth that we paid for with stimulus.

The Chinese got higher growth than we did, with less stimulus. And they won't have to pay the price for that stimulus in inflation.

All in all, China's response to COVID is probably the best in the world. If it turns out that COVID was just the beginning of a new epoch of biowarfare, then they obviously will come out on top there too. And then there's the overwhelming strength of their industrial capacity. The Chinese actually know how to build things, America does not. The program to build the Seattle bike lane will apparently take as long as the entire space race, pic related.

/images/16675172852794697.webp

A French company abandoned the US high-speed rail effort to go somewhere with less political dysfunction - like North Africa:

Now, as the nation embarks on a historic, $1 trillion infrastructure building spree, the tortured effort to build the country’s first high-speed rail system is a case study in how ambitious public works projects can become perilously encumbered by political compromise, unrealistic cost estimates, flawed engineering and a determination to persist on projects that have become, like the crippled financial institutions of 2008, too big to fail.

Let's not forget the $8 Trillion the US spent on the War on Terror, which it decisively lost. The Taliban rule Afghanistan and Iraq is now falling into the Iranian camp.

China didn't have protestors trying to storm Zhongnanhai last year, China doesn't have homeless people with 18 prior arrests raping joggers in their richest, most prestigious city. Leading Chinese politicians do not have their spouses threatened by hammerwielding weirdoes in their own home. China actually surpassed the US in life expectancy this year.

Now American private enterprise has done a pretty good job in technology, in rocketry and so on. But that's not really the role of the state. Not losing wars, maintaining public order, achieving stable economic growth, building infrastructure, maintaining public health, these are all standard roles for the state. China does better (often vastly better) in these sectors than the US, is perhaps worse on the environment while education is unclear (and a lagging indicator).

If anyone's ideology has been discredited, it's the US's anarcho-obstructionist liberalism, not China's party-state.

China isn't suffering from stagflation right now like the rest of the world. They have inflation of about 2%, there are worries about inflation being too low. This is because they didn't print huge amounts of money as stimulus. And the damage to the Chinese economy? According to the Asian Development Bank, Chinese growth will drop to 3.3% this year thanks to Omicron and these lockdowns. US growth is somewhere around 1.5% and there's a recession looming. The US and the rest of the West is being forced to raise interest rates to reduce the growth that we paid for with stimulus.

I see absolute figures for two groups that did not start with same absolute numbers.

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