How We Lose against China

By Robert D. Kaplan

Thursday, January 21, 2021

 

The Cold War ended not on the battlefield but inside the Soviet Union. There were no tank maneuvers through the Fulda Gap in Germany, nor was there a nuclear armageddon. Instead, one of the two superpowers faced an internal crisis that shattered its society and its European empire. The Cold War was a global struggle, but its end was a matter of domestic politics.

 

This history has profound implications for our new struggle with China, which has been likened to the Cold War. Experts including me have written many books and essays about Taiwan, the South China Sea, and the Korean Peninsula, not to mention cyber and space warfare and, as China advances its Belt and Road initiative across Eurasia, the struggle over trade and trade routes. As with the Cold War, we see the struggle with China as unending. We simply can’t imagine a world beyond it.

 

But what if this new struggle were to end as the Cold War did in 1989: with a domestic evolution in either China or the United States that renders one of the two parties unwilling or unable to continue the competition? If we consider this scenario — a domestic conclusion to a global struggle — we of course assume the fatally weakened party will be China. After all, China is a society of increasing totalitarian dimensions, with a growing and increasingly restive middle class sitting atop a mountain of debt that carries the potential of igniting a domestic crisis. With its blend of communism and capitalism, China may not be truly Marxist anymore, yet it is more and more Leninist as its dictatorship suffocates the public space, leaving only the personal sphere for people to express themselves in. And regimes like that don’t end well, as we know from the examples of the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc.

 

But what if we’re wrong? What if the society that undermines itself first is our own? Why would this come about?

 

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Consider that the United States thrived as a modern mass democracy only in the print-and-typewriter era, which lasted roughly through the end of the 20th century. In communications, that age was defined by major newspapers, which published professionally written and researched articles based on a commonly perceived historical experience. Among major media, objectivity and neutral politics were taken for granted, as public schooling and a military draft enforced a common destiny that pushed people toward the political center and away from extremes. Such centrism was seen on early television as well, with the three network anchors differing in style rather than in politics. Moreover, much of the 20th century was a time when travel overseas was largely the domain of the wealthy and immigrants substantially cut ties with their places of origin: Thus they had no choice but to become, in effect, as the late Harvard political scientist Samuel P. Huntington put it, honorary Protestants like the rest of us. Despite all our troubles, flaws, and inconsistencies, we were a nation. And this also had much to do with a particular level of technological development that spawned a solid middle-class system, encompassing more than just technology, from one coast to the other. It was this nation that waged the Cold War and did not so much defeat the Soviet Union as outlast it and out-compete it.

 

That nation exists less and less, and principally because the technological context is no longer the same.

 

It is impossible to imagine that the presidency of Donald Trump, the Capitol insurrection, electronic mobs, cancel culture (and the self-censorship that accompanies it), and demands for rigid ideological conformity registered in such bland yet browbeating slogans as “diversity,” “inclusiveness,” and “social justice” would have been possible without the influence of social media. The major media have already been conditioned to the new reality. The Manhattan-based trade-book industry, with its need for major-media approval of its products, could be transformed next, in a way that affects what books we buy and consequently what thoughts we think. There is a danger that social media will drive the values and subject matter of book publishing rather than the other way around. The ongoing consolidation of publishing — threatening to crush smaller houses and imprints with distinctive viewpoints — could abet that trend. Such a development would be insidious. It is not a question of this book or that, or this magazine or that. It is just that at some point we might all be fed a brand of soporific groupthink that is different in substance but similar in tone to what obtains in China. And the reaction to such a development will not be reasoned argument, but will express itself in periodic eruptions from the extreme right wing.

 

The process famously began in university liberal-arts departments at the conclusion of the print-and-typewriter era. As ideological conformity continues to degrade the liberal arts, more and more students are gravitating to vocational and other technical subjects, producing a society of what the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset called “mass men.” They all have a technical skill but are ignorant beyond their narrow slots of existence, allowing their minds to be indoctrinated in Leninist fashion with the dreary utopian tenets of woke culture. That is to say, we are slowly becoming subjects, not citizens. We think we are the masters of our own thoughts, even as our thoughts are prepared by a media-mindset that thinks for us. Whereas the Sixties youth revolt was generally restricted to opposing the Vietnam War, the current upheaval, assisted by major media, aims to destroy the very story (and statuary) of Western civilization, with all of its vicissitudes, on the North American continent.

 

Huntington, channeling the late Cornell University historian Benedict Anderson, observed that a successful nation is an “imagined community” only because it is a “remembered community.” No nation, Huntington explained, can operate well in this world without enshrining common memories of “travails and triumphs” and “enemies and wars” that, however distorted, provide national cohesion. Without such a usable history, our future leaders will ultimately lack the spiritual wherewithal to truly fight for our interests. For they, too, will be products of the forces that are causing our nation to be less and less remembered.

 

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Social media — the key independent variable in this ongoing process — work contrary to the nation-state, writes the British journalist and chronicler of postmodern wars David Patrikarakos. Social media create networks of like-minded people regardless of national identity, and thus serve to weaken national identity. The networks they establish can elevate racial, gender, political, or sexual identity above that of the national community. Social media thus balkanize America while allowing powerful transnational economic and political-interest groups to depart America virtually. It is a commonplace now to recognize that our corporate and policy elites are part of a global class of like-minded colleagues and associates who all care much more about the opinions of one another than about those of poorer compatriots in their home countries.

 

To borrow from the conclusion of Stephen Vincent Benét’s epic poem of the Civil War, John Brown’s Body, America has existed in three stages: a North–South nation with a “tropic empire, . . . the last foray of aristocracy,” located in the South; followed by “the great, metallic beast” of the Industrial Revolution, “expanding East and West”; and finally a continental land mass split asunder by globalization, whereby our elites are becoming one with those in Europe and Asia while the left-behind masses inherit the economically depressed nation-state, leading to a lumpen patriotism that was on display on January 6 at the Capitol. It is globalization that constitutes the backdrop to our stark political divisions.

 

Of course, social media and the whole array of digital/cyber inventions also operate in China. But the context there is completely different. China is a Han Chinese blood-and-soil nation that oppresses non-Han subject peoples such as the Tibetans and the Turkic Uyghur Muslims, who tend to live in distinct areas of the southwest and west. China is also increasingly authoritarian, on the verge of being totalitarian. The combination of these factors, plus the high level of technological development achieved by China, allows the regime to use social media as a means of patriotic indoctrination and behavioral control. The electronic mob in China helps unify a prideful nation bordered by enemy ethnic groups and hostile outside forces, whereas the electronic mob in the United States, at least on the left, works against national pride altogether, reducing the American historical experience to genocide against the indigenous inhabitants and to ongoing racism.

 

Obviously, one must beware linear analyses. The trends I have noted, driven by social media, in both China and the United States may not continue, and may take unforeseen twists and turns over the coming years and decades. And China, as noted above, is also fragile. But one should not underestimate the effectiveness of blood-and-soil nationalism and outright repression that are helped rather than hindered by new technology. China is not the old Soviet Union. It is economically advanced and consumer-driven, and it has not made the mistake of liberalizing its political life before liberalizing its economy. Xi Jinping is determined to be the very opposite of Mikhail Gorbachev. Consequently, digital and video technology work in harmony with the Chinese system of control while roiling our own.

 

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We should remember that American democracy still constitutes an experiment. This makes it fragile and perhaps even ephemeral. Rather than blood-and-soil nationalism for hundreds of years, we have had democratic ideals that require constant renewal and thrive in a context of moderation and compromise. Social media gravitate toward the un-fact-checked extremes: That is why the Proud Boys and fringe elements on the left feed on each other. Liberalism admits self-doubt and is therefore leavened by different points of view; the tyranny of social media amplifies the intemperate shouts of the mob.

 

The United States–China rivalry, which will someday come to an end, may take a surprising direction, since at root it is less a contest between two militaries and two economies than between two domestic systems rapidly evolving under the influence of technology joined with globalization. We should not assume that one system is automatically more fragile than the other. The problem is not with liberal democracy; it is with democracy’s ability to remain liberal in an age of postmodern technology. 

 

But we should remember this: It isn’t China that will defeat us. After all, we remain the homeland of Big Tech, of biotech, and of the most dynamic economy and military the world has ever known. Only we can defeat ourselves: because the drift to the political extremes coupled with the hollowing out of public discourse could be analogous to the internal decay of Soviet communism — and thus a pivotal geopolitical event.