"A republic, if you can keep it".

The "the trajectory of the US on a 'Chinese timescale'" barely even registers. While the CCP might not be that old, China considers itself an ancient society with a level of historical coherence that makes the United States rather insignificant as a lesson in political history.

You've offered a hugely reductive and rosy view of American history. Democracy is easy until it gets hard. America has fought a civil war before. The Congress basically does not function anymore ergo the "imperial presidency". The balance of powers the framers created when the country was a sparsely populated periphery of 3 million people has changed dramatically. George Washington rejected a partisan affiliation and regarded it as a societal disease. He was elected unanimously. Without his personal touch, the country probably would not have survived into the 19th century.

America has come into superpower status as the rest of the world destroyed itself. Post WWII, the quality of our politics have steeply and sharply declined, go back and watch debates from the 1960s. The same civil war cleavages are being debated today, with far less eloquence than a Buckley Jr or a James Baldwin.

People outside of the United States seem to imagine the rest of the world is naive about democracy. No. Rather when you are an old enough society, you experience more things and understand democracy has its own risks - just as any form of government. Democracy is not as easy or "self evident" as Americans think. The nature of American democracy has already changed radically since the founding. If you factor in "universal suffrage" to mean "democracy" then the United States hasn't even existed as a true democracy for 100 years.

Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now? Based on what? It seems obvious to me the next century will necessarily trend towards multipolarity. The chances of any American being born today having a better life than their parents have to approach the chances of techno-utopian fantasy. Which will only be attained if Americans learn to live with China as a partner not an adversary. Chinese scientists may cure cancer. They will innovate and solve other problems for the good of all mankind. Meanwhile in the United States your politicians can't even achieve universal healthcare. That is just one example where the United States has continually failed to make change at pace for decades. WWII recedes farther and farther into the background. So does the Pax Americana. China is not the enemy of the average American. It's just an obvious smoke screen for the homegrown problem - greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.

Please consult your history. I don't even necessarily disagree with your view on China. But it's not made better by essentially setting up a straw man, by suggesting the United States "as a democracy" is somehow especially immune to the same sorts of vicissitudes of history that may inflict themselves on China.

The more I read about American history, the less I think "democracy" really had anything to do with America's success. It does make for nice mythology though. Perhaps it is an accompanying comfort that history is highly contingent, and that it really could have worked out in a myriad set of ways.

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scottLobster 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

"Please consult your history?" You could replace "China" with "The USSR" in this post and be almost indistinguishable from arguments straight out of the 1950s.

You point to universal healthcare, the modern European welfare states that other nations including China have modeled were not high-minded cultural endeavors. They only exist because the devastation of the great depression and WWII made them necessary, and a greater need to make peace with actual communists/leftists that were never a strong political force in the US precisely because we were spared the devastation of WWII.

As for corruption, China recently discovered that many of its nuclear missiles had their fuel stolen and replaced with water and the lids of many of their silos failed to open. Yes the US is having unprecedented problems with corruption at the moment, but the Chinese model is hardly superior in this regard.

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godwinson__4-8 4 hours ago | parent [-]

Fair enough. We can point at each other or come up with examples all day long. Like I could say the United States didn't want to grant civil rights to African Americans as an example of some "high-minded cultural endeavors", but rather they wanted to avoid something like another civil war? Plus it made it sort of "awkward" shall we say for Americans to tell the Soviets and the world about human rights while bludgeoning black people in the streets for having the audacity to ask for basic civil rights.

I mean do you think any society does anything "high-minded" spontaneously? Or are we going to be adults here? You come up with some example that makes China bad. I come up with a counter. I'm not really interested in such a tit for tat. Because it obscures the central point:

The United States hasn't been around for very long. Again, as a "true democracy" not even 100 years. The overriding point I'm trying to make is to suggest that a common hubris found in American discourse should be measured. I'm not under any illusions about China or Europe. All societies have problems. The question is why is the United States any better? And why should I have confidence in that based on a track record of only a few centuries? Especially if the recent trend of the past few decades (closer to a century) has gone sharply down? No, it did not just start with Trump. And it will likely not just magically end with him either. Why does American political discourse constantly fall over itself to talk about Trump as a singular figure while ignoring the tens of millions of the electorate who keep voting for him and have kept him afloat as the dominant political force for a decade?

They will not just disappear. In my mind, the United States is just as likely to elect an even more odious figure in the near future as it is to "move on".

You can say "The Chinese model is hardly superior".

Someone else can say "The United States model is hardly superior".

It's not very interesting. The only point I'm making is maybe treat the other country with some basic respect, as a partner not an adversary. And don't allow your politicians at home to construct foreign scapegoats to distract from their internal responsibilities. The invocation of the Soviet Union along these lines is rather apt. If the Soviet Union's fall was so self evident based on its fundamental nature, one should probably be led to question how much blood and treasure America threw away because its elites convinced its people that it was an existential threat. This trend from Vietnam passed through to Iraq and now to Iran is not looking great. I mean really, what is the trend I'm supposed to see? Can you really blame some governments, especially those outside the "West" from looking for alternative global governance in China?

	▲	scottLobster 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		China does not treat us as a partner any more than we do them. They have spent decades exploiting good will and abusing any attempts at genuine partnership. I don't blame anyone for looking for alternatives to the US in the current climate, but I doubt they'll find a better partner in China. Perhaps more reliable in the short term, in the long run China will try to run the same extraction game on its new "partners" just as it has done in the US. Don't get caught up in their "thousands of years of history". They had thousands of years of history before Kublai Khan, they had thousands of years of history before the first opium war. They still have issues with older citizens stealing toilet paper from public restrooms because they were so heavily traumatized by Mao's famine, and Mao himself would probably have had you re-educated for suggesting he had any historical ties to Imperial China. The current leadership are the successors of that government. The Soviet Union's fall was hardly self-evident before the 1970s, for some decades their GDP growth was surpassing the US. Khrushchev's aggressive speeches are now seen as naive bluster, but there was some hard data to back them up when he made them. The US adapted, as we always have. I'd say the US has a number of structural advantages over China that it is currently squandering, but that won't always be the case. Demographically we're going to be the last major consumer economy standing as the century winds on, we maintain the strongest military in the world when fully committed (Iran isn't even half-hearted, it started out as an unpopular war and nobody wants a land invasion), our natural resources are plentiful, and neither the Euro nor the Yuan nor gold are capable of replacing the dollar. Sure the Trumpers aren't going away, but they are fundamentally incapable of governing and have no real successor to Trump, who is fundamentally incapable of grooming a successor. They were politically irrelevant for the longest time, and only matter now because the establishment failed to maintain living standards. They lack discipline, organization, intelligence, and numbers. All they have is a blatant disregard for any rules, including their own; the longer they're in charge the more enemies they make. Like the communists who attempted to take Berlin by force in 1919, they will wake up one day to find themselves having crossed a line with far less support than they imagine. I doubt they'll take it well, but they won't last.

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Hasz 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I am not Chinese, but the CCP loves to insinuate that the middle kingdom is 5000 years of uninterrupted rule. As we both know, that is hilariously untrue.

> Are you really that bullish on the United States a century from now?

Yes, of course, and I am happy to put my money where my mouth is based on asset allocations. I can also freely invest in the outside world, without CCP capital controls. I can freely insult the US president, congress, and judiciary by name, and not worry about disappearing for 6 months. I don't need a cadre of police to throw an old man who advocated for democracy in jail in HK either.

> greedy elites robbing the country blind, buying elections and achieving corruption at a scale that makes "democracy" seem rather unattractive entirely.

ah, come on now. We both know who comes out worse in that scenario, the princelings make Kushner look like a saint.

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AnimalMuppet 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

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