Adam Tooze: Democracy and Its Discontents: Weekend Reading
Weekend Reading: Adam Tooze is correct when he writes that "across the American political spectrum, if there is agreement on anything, it is on the need for a firmer line against China". The bombs-and-bullets people, the geopolitics people, and the blame-somebody-else people are all agreed. The U.S. needs to do something to strengthen its relative position, and that means it needs to start doing something to China.
But that would be going about it the wrong way. Thinking that the right way to do something is to do something to China is a very bad way to think. The U.S. could still forge a 21st century condominium with China. But all those necessary and needed pieces of action require that the U.S. look and act inwardly, not outwardly:
Adam Tooze: Democracy and Its Discontents: Runciman: "Rather than raging against the dying of the light, Runciman['s How Democracy Ends], like Spengler and Kojève, invites us to adopt a stance of disillusioned realism. If we can see the decline of democratic polities all around us and can diagnose the multiple causes of their eventual demise, that does not excuse us from the responsibility to make them work until the bitter end...
...Democracy has long been the benchmark of Westernization. Talk of a crisis in democracy has relevance precisely because the rise of the Chinese economy under Communist Party leadership puts that benchmark in question.... The most pressing questio.... Assuming current trends continue, will America accept its relative decline with equanimity?...
The concern must surely be that Runciman’s vision of a passive America is in fact overly optimistic. In a perspicacious Op-Ed, Larry Summers recently asked, “Can the US imagine a global system in 2050 in which its economy is half the size of the world’s largest? Even if we can imagine it, could a political leader acknowledge that reality in a way that permits negotiation over what such a world would look like?” Trump has responded to that question in his characteristic belligerent and petulant manner, launching an ill-conceived trade war. But... across the American political spectrum, if there is agreement on anything, it is on the need for a firmer line against China.
Rather than the stoical acceptance of a new reality suggested by Runciman’s scenario, is not the more likely outcome a reconfiguration of American democracy like the one that occurred in the 1930s and 1940s, when the executive branch was given unprecedented power to confront external foes? The risks in a confrontation with Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union were enormous. By comparison, our troubles with Putin’s Russia are trivial. The perils of a new cold war with China will not be...
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