By Noah Rothman
Monday, March 14, 2022
The American left and its allies in media have for years
been beholden to a variety of deluded narratives, most of which cast the United
States as history’s bad guy. The U.S., their preferred fictions maintain, is
brutal and imperialistic. It is repressive and bigoted. Its system of
government is outmoded and inefficient compared with more robust alternatives.
These views fast became fashionably mainstream, but fashion is a luxury. The
reemergence of the
world as it always was has shown us that it’s a luxury we can no
longer afford.
Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine has exposed the
fallacies that permeate the intellectual landscape on the left. Moscow failed
in its initial attempt to conduct a speedy and antiseptic war of regime change
that would preserve as much civilian infrastructure as possible. In the
process, Russia proved that the resources and sensitivity to public opinion
required to conduct that kind of complex operation are all but exclusive to the
West.
Russia’s pivot from a lightning war to total war—a
vicious campaign of destruction and occupation typified by the looting of cities, the wholesale slaughter of civilians, and the disappearing of dissenters—tells us something about the
immutability of human nature and the rareness of the West’s self-imposed
restraint.
The appearance of racial
discrimination against Africans in Ukraine conveys the universality of
bigotry, but Russia’s total disregard for its own alleged ethnic categories
that supposedly render Russians and Ukrainians one people reveals the
worthlessness of a political framework that distills statecraft down to the
study of pigmentation.
Even the most favorable readings of a revisionist history like the compendium of essays in
the New York Times’ “1619 Project” contend that its vision is
to guide the U.S. into a future in which it has shed most of its identifying
characteristics. That’s why the conservative movement’s ideological
proclivities, like its fondness for the Constitution as it is written, only
reinforce the nation’s odious foundations. This is the sort of fatuous nonsense
that compels the mainstream arbiters of cultural discourse to spend
Independence Day ruminating on the lies
and hypocrisies codified in the Declaration of Independence, to preen
indignantly over the inadvertent costs of Western conflicts abroad, and to
rob foreign actors of agency and ascribe the world’s many unfortunate events to
American omnipotence.
When confronted, proponents of these arguments will
retreat from their motte (America is a malign force in the world) to a more
defensible bailey (well, there’s always room for improvement). Indeed,
America’s capacity for renewal and reinvention has been revealed as the wonder it
always was by Russia’s inflexibility and regression to a familiar
and repressive mean. America’s propensity for goodness stands in stark
contrast to the absolute evil to which we are witness. These are rigid moral
categories. They make the scholastically inclined squeamish. But what, if not
evil, are you supposed to call a terror war designed to starve, freeze, and pummel a free people into
submission? If your only frame of reference is the conflicts in Afghanistan and
Iraq, it must be shocking to see how every aspect of civilian society in
Ukraine has been mobilized in the service of a genuinely popular insurgency.
The war in Ukraine may help the left shed another scale
from its eyes. With the sudden discovery that our enlightened age hasn’t
banished Bellum Romanum to the history books, the popular culture has been
shocked into abandoning its unrealistic expectation that Covid could be managed
out of existence. It was not long ago that conventional wisdom maintained that
the only obstacle to such a happy outcome is our own political dysfunction. Indeed,
we had been put to shame by the streamlined authoritarian efficiency of
countries like the People’s Republic of China.
In October 2020, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman feted China’s leadership for having
contained the pandemic while, in the West, the disease proved paralyzing. He
marveled over China’s “authoritarian surveillance system,” which had succeeded
in managing the plague in ways “democratic consensus” could not. This opinion
soon found its way into academic
studies on the superior Chinese “model for epidemic preparedness.”
Even objective reporting rehashed Beijing’s preferred narratives. The Chinese Communist Party waged “a ‘People’s war’
against the pandemic—and won,” another Times dispatch read.
In keeping with an intellectual tendency that
subordinates the human suffering under authoritarianism to the glittering
Potemkin monuments to national greatness authoritarians erect, many observers
began to assume that freedom and the public interest were incompatible.
“America has failed at collective action,” Vox.com’s German Lopez mourned. The West’s legal and political
conventions that preserve personal liberty, the argument goes, stood athwart
the widespread adoption of the most effective mitigation strategies. According
to Foreign Policy’s James Traub, those nations with “collective discipline,
deference to authority, and faith in the state” fared well in the pandemic.
Societies without these traits did not.
So much for all that. Today, the virus has come roaring
back in China, and more than 50 million Chinese now find themselves back in
real, 2020-style lockdown. Public transit is halted, and private
businesses are forced to close. Major suppliers to the West are once again shutting down production lines, raising the prospect
of renewed supply-chain problems and fewer consumer goods reaching the
marketplace (which likely entails higher consumer costs and rising inflation
rates). And it’s not just case rates that are a concern. The city of Hong Kong, where 85 percent of the public has received
the Chinese Covid vaccine, has seen its worst rates of
hospitalization and death from Covid infection of the entire pandemic.
It turns out that the West’s capacity for innovation
coupled with its culture of free inquiry and public scrutiny did, in fact, produce
better results. As the West sloughs off pandemic-era mitigation measures
(despite having higher case rates on paper), China is trapped in a vicious
cycle of its own making.
The intellectual temptation toward self-hatred among not
just among progressives but those
on the right who share the left’s antipathy toward American ways of
doing business isn’t going away anytime soon. It is nothing short of
providential, though, that the forces of history regularly remind us how wrong
they are.
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