The Things We Lose By Winning
The Things We Lose By Winning
Notes on a bipartisan project
The 21st century began in a state of globalization. For better or worse, the world was a single economy, the United States was a benevolent hegemon, and the international order was rules-based. There were malcontents, to be sure, but the End of History had come and liberal capitalism was the end-state of the globe, according to Francis Fukuyama and Thomas Friedman, who knew everything, so no one paid attention to those silly people with objections.
On the left were the anarchists of the 1999 World Trade Organization protests, the same radicals who became the ‘black bloc’ of Occupy in 2011, then became the modern ‘antifa’ in 2016. On the right was the populist Reform Party of Ross Perot; Donald Trump briefly ran for president under its banner in 2000, though the party proved too dysfunctional to hold a primary. The leftist elements hated globalization for its success at lifting billions out of poverty through capitalist enterprise because they hated capitalism. The rightist elements hated globalization for its success at lifting billions out of poverty by offshoring American manufacturing jobs, with the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA, that Ross Perot referred to as “a giant sucking sound.”
Both these points of view were marginal to their own sides, at the time, because both parties were invested in the globalized paradigm of free capital. Clinton had opened corporate America up to Democrats; Republicans were still running on the idea that character matters. Goodbye to all that. Everything that was sacred is now sacrificed because in America, nothing is truly sacred. Everything is transactional.
And then there was Al Qaeda. Islamists wanted a whole new world, one in which the United States was either destroyed or brought to heel by jihadis. The world-system (“World Trade Center”) was a creation of US policy, therefore it had to be destroyed to make room for a new world-system designed by humans pretending to know God’s plan. We have seen this apocalyptic dream realized on a small scale by the Islamic State. Jihadis saw America as profane, the land of Mammon. Jonathan Rosen notes that the “essential religious relativism” of America is very Jewish, and therefore intolerable to fanatics of both cross and crescent. America wasted blood and treasure failing to impose the transactionalism of our politics on societies that are ill-suited for it, that actively resisted the offer of joining our way of life because they wanted to preserve what was sacred to them.
The nature of what is sacred in America has also changed. “Super progressive ideas around race seem more intent on balkanizing and fragmenting subsets of racial identity, eschewing older liberal ideals of integration or civic unity,” David Jager writes at Tablet. Offering a unique insight into Barack Obama, Jager notes that the once-flourishing ‘multiracial’ category has been deprecated in the era of intersectionality.
Since Obama’s presidency, for all its rootedness in the ideal of a postracial America, racial tensions have markedly intensified. The divisions that seemed to be easing into a new pluralism at the time Obama dated my sister have now been replaced with an increasingly tense polarization. The progressive left swears that this is solely the working of MAGA populism, which they frame as a sinister return of old school white racist nationalism, if not outright fascism. Trump and his followers are deplorable racists—their avowed big-tent colorblindness necessarily being the cover for neo-Nazis and other outright racists who seek to restore the Jim Crow laws of the Old South. Only the progressive wing’s increasingly fragile and splintering views on race and identity, which more than a few argue have spiralled into incoherence, holds out hope for our future.
There was not enough racism to meet market demand, so new racism had to be created. The advent of ‘identity politics’ and ‘anti-racism’ brought a new hierarchy based on oppression. Jager had witnessed Obama choose to be seen as ‘black’ rather than ‘multiracial’ during the 1980s. By the end of the Obama presidency, ‘progressive’ political discourse could no longer tolerate hybridity. The American dream of free people in a post-racial world is dead because skin color has been exalted over the content of our character. To say “but I am not racist” is to admit the crime of white privilege, because only a racist white person would ever say they are not racist. Racism is an immutable racial trait of the white race. A racial inheritance. See how that works?
Free speech used to be sacred. Today, the magic words “hate speech” and “misinformation” invalidate free speech because the Constitution is not a suicide pact and something something January 6th. Contrary to what Tim Walz says, the First Amendment does in fact protect both hate speech and misinformation. “Hate speech” is just speech that Walz hates, and anyone old enough to recall the silencing of debate around Covid’s origins will understand how frequently “misinformation” turns out to be fact.
Brazil was supposed to remain a satirical Terry Gilliam film about managerialism and not become a real country experimenting with Chinese-style public speech management. European bureaucrats dare to lecture Americans about their own First Amendment. The former free speech defenders of the Democratic Party are either silent, or else cheering on every experiment in totalitarian speech control, because they are afraid that they are losing control. They have a point: Americans are exhausted from self-censorship in a land of infinite new blasphemy codes. Our elites have decided that to mispronoun a man, or eject him from the women’s locker room, is actual murder. They condition us to repeat absurdities so that we will overlook their atrocities.
Democrats developed a deep distrust of democracy and open discourse during the trauma of the Trump years. Democrats are the party of the managerial state and liberal administration, high education, and the corporatized bureaucracy, which is how the ‘woke’ phenomenon took over all these institutions to ruin them. Now Trump’s reappearance on the ballot is triggering the very people with the most to lose under a new Trump administration. In his selection of J.D. Vance, whose program amounts to eviscerating the federal bureaucracy and returning to the spoils system in order to effect a broad counter-revolution, Trump has signaled that they are right to fear his vengeance. He has gotten where he is by appealing to the politics of resentment against American elites, starting with the effects of globalization.
Covid was the bookend event to 9/11. Like all great pandemics, it began in the Far East. Funny story, turns out that the virus was a lab-made hybrid, after all, contrary to years of denial from official Washington and endless TikTok propaganda blaming nature. Covid-19 was accidentally created by a program to hybridize the Chinese biotech industry with America’s most important public health agencies. Like every company and organization in China, the Wuhan lab was cutting corners and its standards were shoddy. When people got sick and died, the Chinese Communist Party followed its native instincts to cover up the whole affair and introduced harsh lockdown measures, keeping them in place longer than anywhere in the world. Only after riots began to outstrip the state’s ability to respond were lockdown rules relaxed, and then the Chinese economy had only a brief recovery. The days of China being the world’s factory are over.
In the United States, masks are now a political signifier. A minority of Americans relished the opportunity to enforce new, Chinese-style social restrictions on their fellow Americans as soon as the public health debate subsumed their partisan identity. The ideological agents of DEI saw an opportunity to remove conservative opinions from the workplace in the name of safety and diversity and a vaccine. Companies, organizations, and agencies allowed no exemptions from their vaccine mandates, pushing experienced professionals out the door. No one has been held responsible anywhere, at any level, for the absurd decision to shut down schools and destroy decades of educational progress. Dr. Fauci has not been held responsible for his lies. A whole lot of disillusioned people are still mad about this. Some day, Democrats will realize that their overreach has not been forgotten, or forgiven, by a number of former Democrats.
Like Al Gore, who found out only too late that Tipper’s campaign against rock and roll had alienated young voters, the party will eventually realize that its embrace of Chinese authoritarianism has done long-term damage to its brand. For now, however, shameless Democratic campaign messaging subtly blames Trump for Covid. Voters do remember his real failures at the time, while in the public mind, Harris carries little personal responsibility for Biden’s actions during the pandemic.
Because irony is dead, Harris also framed Trump as the pro-China candidate in Tuesday night’s debate, alleging the former president has “sold out” America by praising Xi Jinping. In fact Trump has always been a China-skeptic; his praise for the Chinese leader is about personal power, not state power. Trump sees himself as the negotiating partner in a potential grand bargain with Xi. During his time in office, China put great effort into convincing Trump that the CCP is as transactional as he is. Trump thinks he can bargain for things that China will never trade, such as Taiwan, or the South China Sea.
Trump and Vance do not represent a trend away from transactionalism. They genuinely believe that Vladimir Putin will agree to a permanent peace as part of some grand bargain to actually end the war in Ukraine. They see territory as the medium of exchange for this peace when in reality, the total destruction of Ukraine is sacred to Putin, a project that he will never give up. He wants Crimea so he can destroy Ukraine. He wants the Donbass and Kharhiv and Odessa and Kherson so he can destroy Ukraine. He wants a pause in the war, yes, but in order to re-arm for the destruction of Ukraine. This will not change until the vertical of power changes at the Kremlin. Sooner or later they will have to admit defeat in their strategy of denial.
The Republican ticket exhibits a deep suspicion of international governance and security institutions. Multilateralism — the participation of many countries in any given process — confuses and frustrates them because the exchange involved is unclear. Bilateral negotiations with one country at a time is Trump’s preferred mode of global deal-making because it registers as a transaction: this for that, with the gain for America denominated in dollars and sense rather than goodwill and zones of free exchange. Similar resentments led to Brexit in the UK.
Liberalism still dimly understands the importance of such arrangements and institutions as the infrastructure of American power. Most Democrats still understand that NATO keeps the peace of Europe to maintain American security and prosperity, and that Ukraine is the frontier of Europe. Transactionalism has reigned, however, in the Obama-Biden continuum of Iran policy, a story contained in the phrase “nuclear deal.” Under Ebrahim Raisi, Iran’s nuclear program was too sacred to trade away for anything.
Harris may still believe that she has a window of time in which to restore the deal with Iran’s new president, since she is not Donald Trump, who scuttled the deal when he learned how far advanced Iran’s nuclear program had gotten. She is almost certainly wrong. Destroying Israel is the sacred project of Tehran and its proxies across the Middle East. The Biden-Harris policy of conflict avoidance in the region is failing to deter Iran. The Trump-Vance policy of conflict avoidance in Ukraine will fail to deter China. Decoupling is mostly fine with Democrats now because it correlates with degrowth. (Let’s not get started on the deficits of the American defense industrial base that Washington does not seem inclined to address, or we will be here all day.)
No matter who wins in November, America can still lose. Freedom declines whenever crimes of state become normal. States of emergency are dangerous, for then crimes of state are deemed necessary. Our moment feels like a spiral of accountability and competence all around, for too much has gone unpunished for too long. We no longer seem to be the country that came together the day after 9/11. I am too much an historian to hold out very much hope that I am wrong, but I do hope that I am wrong.
