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2020-01-27 Home Front: Culture Wars

[Powerline] - From early in our nation’s history, America’s intellectuals have mostly looked down on their own country and yearned for it to be like someplace else‐someplace more sophisticated, and more in tune with "modern" intellectual currents, whatever they might be at the moment. That is a long history, which I will skip over. In our own time, American intellectuals have claimed that Soviet Russia, Germany and Japan were harbingers of the future that the U.S. needed to imitate. In each case, the point was that we had to shed our archaic freedoms and enter the brave new world of central planning under the control‐benign, of course!‐of intellectuals and bureaucrats. Strangely, however, American free enterprise has managed to outlast and surpass all of those supposedly more advanced challengers.

Most recently, China has been the favored nation of the future. It has the advantage over Germany and Japan of being straightforwardly authoritarian (if no longer exactly Communist), which endeared it to anti-democratic liberals like Tom Friedman. Thus, liberals have eagerly calculated the future time when China’s GDP‐or alleged GDP, as dictatorships have always been better at producing statistics than goods and services‐would surpass ours. Given that China has three times our population, that would not seem to be a signal accomplishment. Nevertheless, liberals looked forward to it.

...I could be wrong; it has happened once or twice. But I suspect that the current public health crisis spells the end of China envy among American intellectuals. The context, of course, is the Trump administration’s standing up to China’s dictators. Like Toto, Trump has pulled back the curtain on the Chinese fraud. To coin a phrase, one might say that China’s economic "juggernaut" is in fact a paper tiger.

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-01-27 00:00|| || Front Page|| [12 views ] Top
File under: Commies

#1 The grass is always greener....

Posted by DooDahMan 2020-01-27 00:33|| 2020-01-27 00:33|| Front Page Top

#2 Most American's want to control their own lives.
Most American intuhlektuwals want to control other people's lives.

Posted by Bright Pebbles 2020-01-27 03:13|| 2020-01-27 03:13|| Front Page Top

#3 Most American intuhlektuwals want to control other people's lives.

Don't remember (never learned) what happened to their ilk in Sov. U.?

Posted by g(r)omgoru 2020-01-27 03:22|| 2020-01-27 03:22|| Front Page Top

#4 I have long felt China to be a paper tiger.

Posted by Dale 2020-01-27 05:56|| 2020-01-27 05:56|| Front Page Top

#5 Of all the moronic policies foisted on this nation by our shitty Global-Grifter Uniparty these last 30 years, tying our economy tightly to China and fueling their rise from basket-case to superpower was without question the stupidest.

Posted by Lex 2020-01-27 08:29|| 2020-01-27 08:29|| Front Page Top

#6 Ref #5: You can thank Henry Kissinger and his globalist pals for that stroke of genius.

Posted by Besoeker 2020-01-27 09:27|| 2020-01-27 09:27|| Front Page Top

#7 Giving the ChiComs most free trade was such a major F-up. Jimmy Carter, the cheerleader.

Posted by Woodrow 2020-01-27 09:54|| 2020-01-27 09:54|| Front Page Top

#8 My $0."2 about how this clusterfook evolved:

The China Free-Trade El Dorado has been the wet dream of every Yankee trader, Protestant missionary and English imperialist for 200 years.

In 1971 Kissinger and Nixon stepped in and introduced a very different, coolly realpolitik game: play the China card vs Brezhnev's USSR.

After this smashing success, and Nixon's resignation and the Ford Ditherment, Nixon and Kissinger left the scene and the Grifters and cookie-pushers took over. They hihacked a very sensible foreign policy and perverted it, setting us on the road to ruin.

First the missionary impulse (Jimmuh) and the Yankee trader impulse (Reagan & his successors) took over. At that point, Kissinger-- old cynic that he is-- went along for the (consulting) ride, I think...

In short Kissinger isn't blameless but his contribution was mixed, as much positive (during the Cold War) as negative (going along with post-Cold War grifting). Primary blame belongs elsewhere: plenty to go round, including shitty tech industry CEOs and VCs especially.

Just my $0.02.... YMMV

Posted by Lex 2020-01-27 10:07|| 2020-01-27 10:07|| Front Page Top

#9 Xi isn't so much worried about the virus it self but that the Chinese and other Asians will take it as meaning he has lost "The Mandate of Heaven " . When that happens things will get very ugly.

Posted by Thaith Elmeresing6163 2020-01-27 10:07|| 2020-01-27 10:07|| Front Page Top

#10 ^ re tech industry's contribution to this debacle, allowing tech transfer, esl AI and 5G, to the ChiComs was inexcusable.

Criminal, actually.

Shame on those greedy, stupid seditious f---s.

Posted by Lex 2020-01-27 10:10|| 2020-01-27 10:10|| Front Page Top

#11 Astonishing, and depressing, to think of what extraordinary opportunities this nation had thirty years go when the Soviet Bloc collapsed and China was a basket case economy if no consequence to anyone.

A thought experiment: Imagine if we had had a Jacksonian administration throughout the 1990s. We likely would not have expanded NATO beyond maybe Poland at most. Unlikely that in 2002-03 we would have launched a two-decades long land war in Asia, instead maybe stomping the p!ss out of the talibs, deposing Saddam and leaving the Ba'athists in power (outside of Kurdistan). And faking our troops OUT.

A Jacksonian would likely not have allowed the Wall St Grifters to dominate our economy as they did (and are beginning to do again)-- maybe we could have avoided their tanking the world's economy in 2008. And we could have prevented the whole Zero nightmare, the Iran Grift, BLM and MeToo madness... Sigh.

Posted by Lex 2020-01-27 10:26|| 2020-01-27 10:26|| Front Page Top

#12 *And taking our troops out.

Posted by Lex 2020-01-27 10:27|| 2020-01-27 10:27|| Front Page Top

#13 #11 Yes. Continuing your thought experiment: Jacksonians would never have gone into Somalia. And without the subsequent "Blackhawk Down" withdrawal fish food would never have gotten the idea for 9/11 in the first place.

Posted by The peanut gallery 2020-01-27 13:17|| 2020-01-27 13:17|| Front Page Top

#14 Also no Bosnian intervention. Possibly no backlash against us by nearly the entire Russian population, and possibly friendly relations now with Russia.

IOW, a Jacksonian would have kept China DOWN and allowed us and the Russians to collaborate on containing China and suppressing Islamists.

Posted by Lex 2020-01-27 13:28|| 2020-01-27 13:28|| Front Page Top

01:36 NN2N1
01:34 Grom the Reflective
01:32 crazyhorse
01:07 Grom the Reflective
00:28 Angealing+B.+Hayes4677