The liberal international order, functioning as designed on the single most consequential question it faces right now. I guess India and South Africa are sinister revisionist powers. 1/ law360.com/lifesciences/a…
If we want to understand what’s going on in the world, the dominant US foreign policy framing dividing the world between democracies and autocracies is not very useful. As this episode illustrates, it’s the rich vs poor divide that is more often the salient distinction. 2/
The dominant ideology is so powerful and blinding that when someone in the US says “the democracies”, it’s almost always coterminous with the rich, former colonial countries. It’s frequently used in situations that obviously do not include most of the world’s democracies. 3/
Take this story, which is not about “democratic nations”—countries like India, Indonesia, Nigeria, México were not part of the survey. It’s about rich countries. 4/ nytimes.com/2020/10/06/wor…
Or consider this report on “China’s challenge to the free world”. China’s activities that supposedly challenge democracy are largely things that “the democracies”, i.e. the rich countries, themselves do regularly. 5/ atlanticcouncil.org/in-depth-resea…
The major exception is the developmental economic policies that pose no threat to most democratic countries—the vast majority of democracies, which are poor, would love to emulate them. These practices do, however, threaten the economic dominance of the rich countries. 6/
The erosion of political liberalism over the last decade *is* real and extremely dangerous. But it has affected most countries regardless of whether they qualify as formal democracies, and it’s deeply connected to the inequality and exclusion produced by economic liberalism. 7/
If we care about democracy—or even just human life—then we need to reject the political establishment’s use of “democracy” to distract from inequality. We need to start attacking the rich–poor divide both within and between countries. /8
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1. The main thing happening here is everyone dressing up their pet priorities in anti-China rhetoric because, as Douglas Holtz-Eakin says, “Hating China is a big bipartisan thing”. But underneath the opportunism there’s a very dangerous substantive issue. washingtonpost.com/us-policy/2021…
2. We should celebrate the breakdown of the neoliberal prohibition on setting economic priorities openly and democratically. But what’s emerging in its place is a bipartisan consensus around a nationalist industrial policy to hoard scarce global growth for the US.
3. Even those in the executive branch—the home of universal considerations—seem to have given up thinking about how the interests of the US could be aligned with the interests of the rest of the world, offering instead only scaremongering on China to try to bring others along.
Good news! Western commentators too often conflate Xi’s centralization with his reactionary politics. These need to be conceptually separated—in China and around the world—because progressive politics also requires overcoming fragmented politics, but for very different ends.
A big reason Western commentators interpret centralization under Xi as nothing but authoritarianism is that don’t really know anything about how the Chinese state has operated for the last forty years. So a crude stereotype of monolithic Oriental despotism fills in the gap. 2/
In fact the state became highly fractured among jurisdictions and within officials (their public duties at odds with their private interests). What Xi is attempting with the anti-corruption and Party discipline campaigns is to regain the center’s ability to impose priorities. 3/
Quite a troubling piece from János Kornai: life in China “had frozen under Mao”; Western liberals naïvely brought the spark of life (market reform), inadvertently causing “the resurrection of the Chinese monster”; the West must now destroy the monster. 1/ ft.com/content/f10ccb…
It's hard to read the Frankenstein metaphor as anything other than a claim about the racial or civilizational essence of China. What’s interesting is the tension within the piece between the remnant abstract universalism of liberalism, still the conscious commitment, and the 2/
emergent culturalism, which has now become the real (though still unconscious) substance of the thinking. That’s best seen here, where the disavowal of the obvious consequences of his point serves as a crude screening device to escape awareness of his betrayal of liberalism. 3/