Thread by @AliceAvizandum

If you take power without actually having an ideology the safest move might be to import one

https://twitter.com/gpeyrol16/status/1416327598980968448

Think the best description of Xi Jinping Thought is also Big Featureless Cube of Ideology Marked ‘Ideology’ That You Can Slot Into The Ideology-Shaped Hole

It’s more useful because it says nothing in a way that provides for the government doing stuff, as opposed to Joe Biden Thought, which says nothing in a way that doesn’t

Part of why it’s so funny to me to see western pundits tie themselves in knots trying to analyse Xi’s ideology as if there’s some distinctly Chinese mystery to it - there’s nothing distinctly *anything* to it

Catch me in the Washington Post or Foreign Policy explaining the ancient Confucian principle of ‘doing whatever seems expedient to keep you and your friends in charge,’ or 机会主义

You want leftism? You want rightism? You want technocracy? You want nostalgia? It’s all here, in t h e c u b e

And again this isn’t a new invention. Peronism was like this. The modern british Conservative Party haven’t felt the need to include the leftism part yet but are heading towards the same mould

There’s a natural party of government forever (me and my friends) and we will do some of the stuff that you want and in exchange we will let you pretend that we share your values or beliefs, that’s the deal that we are making with you

The US, UK, EU, China and Russia broadly share this ideology and the only differences are the competence with which they’re pulling it off, how hard internal politics are trying to pull each one apart, and mutual petty beefs between elites

You get aberrations in this, which have to be crushed back down again, when an ideology becomes popular external to that core power group, like Corbyn, or when a guy who’s in it can’t triangulate, like Trump

Trump didn’t believe anything either, but he was personally more spiteful and racist and also bet the house on being both of those things, so all he could do, even if he had wanted otherwise, was reaction and brutality

Thus all the talk about America going rogue, and conversely of normalcy being restored as Biden did all of the same things but more nicely

Ideology-Shaped Cube has been tremendously successful across the world and has weathered these challenges from within and without but it must be destroyed to save the planet