What's kind of depressing about this moment in general is that there isn't really a 'shining beacon on the hill'. If you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the US. Europe is good in a lot of ways, but kind of muddling along in others - and won't even policy democratic backsliders like Hungary.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. Kinda like the adult equivalent of learning that Santa isn’t real or finding out your parents are getting a divorce. I believe that we put too much faith in our “bedrock institutions” because we were taught to. Now, the facade is gone, and we’re left to figure things out as best we can. I don’t have a clue where the future will take us (nobody does). But, there’s usually some good that comes with the bad, and I do have the feeling that we’re living through history, much more so than I ever thought we’d get to. If we are truly witnessing the downfall of the United States, well… it’s going to be very interesting to say the least.
It's certainly not like it was perfect here in the past or that the mythology reflected reality, but it felt like there was a fairly long arc of 'getting better in fits and starts' The cold war was over and we stopped supporting heinous dictators. Everyone could vote. Gay people got the right to marry. Things weren't perfect, but we had the means to work hard to make them better.
Yeah, it felt like the U.S. was stumbling towards a more just and equitable future, and media and popular culture perpetuated a narrative that we were MUCH further along as a country and culture than we actually were. To the point of just representing a false reality. Then, all of the sudden, reality came crashing down, and it became pretty evident that a huge chunk of the country doesn't give a damn about any of that stuff, nor can they be bothered to waste a minute worrying about the consequences of re-electing a felon, etc. They just want cheap eggs, which they're still not getting, but they are getting an entirely new type of governance, which looks pretty darn authoritarian, but who am I to say...?
>If you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the US.
as a European who frequently travels to both, in recent history it was at an American airport, not China that I was being asked for my social media profiles and had a 30 minute discussion because they didn't believe me when I told them that I don't actively maintain a social media presence.
Of course China has no free discourse as such, but at least there is a gentleman's agreement in the sense that if I don't stage a protest they'll not bother me, whereas the US now increasingly looks like Latin America, where you need to be afraid of being harangued by some goon squad of people hired off the streets at the behest of some kleptocrat
That sounds like "managing your expectations", as in the US is not supposed to be like China, but is becoming more like it. There's still a ways to fall though.
it isn't though, that's the point. It's already more disorderly, arbitrary and unpredictable, the point is you have no expectation when you go to the US these days. You're not getting Prussian/Chinese autocracy in America, it lacks the people for it. You're going straight to Turkmenistan with the leader building himself golden statues of his favorite horses on the taxpayers dime, not the shiny trains
> If you don't like autocracy, China is way worse than the US
The US only has one additional political party beyond China has, and arguably both US parties are simply 'wings' of a larger party owned by the actual ruling class, something neither party wishes to acknowledge. When viewed through this lens the US and China aren't that different politically, and at the same time China is far more meritocratic and promotes leaders on a much more results-oriented basis.
It's like a household where the voters are the kids and the leaders are the parents. In China the parents are happily married and communicate with each other. Kids can't really manipulate the parents, but the parents are reasonable and the household is demonstrably a successful one. In the US the parents are bitterly divorced, bickering, and are easily played against each other by the kids. The household is a disaster, in constant disarray and the kids are going to end up dropping out of high school. However, at the end of the day both of these households are overseen by the same leadership system: the parents.
I think there's an important material difference between the two. China's single party is authoritarian and uncontested. America's two major parties are mildly authoritarian on different axes, but average out to a mostly liberal status quo in practice. The relative chaos and transparency of America's system are what they are, but it isn't an autocracy at this point.
There's also a significant growing political push to transition away from FPTP voting in the US, which would dismantle the current duopoly.
> The relative chaos and transparency of America's system are what they are, but it isn't an autocracy at this point.
You can get locked up with a 2 million dollar bond for posting a facebook meme in the US, as demonstrated by a recent case[1]. I don't know what value the transparency holds here? It's certainly already crossed the Rubicon into overt authoritarianism in the past year.
Thanks for sharing, that is really bad. I did say "mostly", though. A bizarre anomaly that will most likely get thrown out in court is still pretty different from comparable practices in e.g. the UK that are standard procedure.
The transparency I referred to was primarily to the American political system's airing of its dirty laundry out in the open, which is inherently going to look more chaotic than disputes between internal factions of a single party because so much of it is performative.
I imagine that analogy won't go over well with some, but at the very least I think it's an insightful look at how someone who was pro-CCP might look at the contrast.
Yeah, when Trump was in the news for having said in another world him and Biden would have been friends, it was celebrated, but to me it was just one more indicator that they have more in common with each other than with the people who put their faith in the one or other. Their lifestyles seem similar, the people around them are similar ...
Even when criticizing and mocking the people running things doesn't have any effect? The point of free speech was supposed to be that you'd be able to make material changes in your living conditions and government policies by convincing people that they should be made. That's not really true anymore for anyone in the US except the very, very wealthy. But don't take my word for it: https://archive.org/details/gilens_and_page_2014_-testing_th...
What would happen if we took a more consequentialist look at democracy rather than caring mainly about the forms?
As a Canadian... Canada is weak, poor, and corrupted by the same plague that has lead America to where it sits.
The rule of law is holding on a bit tighter, and quality of life isn't as bleak as the States, but Canada needs some serious reforms to break the hold of the elite class.
Seriously, look at how the temporary foreign worker program enriched the elites and then is used by their centralized media machines to radicalize the population against immigrants. It's a bad joke, and this exact regulatory capture runs deep and wide.
Also, the fact power is distributed among three levels of government that are rarely in alignment translates into severe dysfunction. Just like the US, Canada has lost the ability to build.
