Posted by Kenneth Anderson:
Thomas Friedman, For One, Welcomes Our New Chinese Creditor Overlords:
http://volokh.com/archives/archive_2009_09_06-2009_09_12.shtml#1252509527
Because not only does China finance our deficit, it sets an Example of
Governance and Shows Our Decadent Democracy the Enlightened Autocratic
Way. In Friedman's hands, China is, dare one say it, nearly a City on
a Hill. This is [1]quite an op-ed, even for Thomas Friedman and even
by the historical apologetics of the New York Times:
One-party autocracy certainly has its drawbacks. But when it is led
by a reasonably enlightened group of people, as China is today, it
can also have great advantages. That one party can just impose the
politically difficult but critically important policies needed to
move a society forward in the 21st century.
Friedman does not mean this merely (merely?) in the sense that there
are better and worse autocrats and dictators. That point was
forcefully and correctly made by [2]Jeane Kirkpatrick back in
Dictators and Double-Standards in the 1980s. No, lest anyone
misunderstand him, Friedman is at pains to emphasize that he is not
doing a Double-Standards Dictators, Least Worst Alternative analysis
here. That would be important, as assessing tradeoffs usually is. On
the contrary, he is deliberately comparing autocracy and democracy,
and specifically China and the United States, and finding the latter
wanting by the admirably robust standards of the former. The impasse
of the American political class over reaching Friedman's
elite-preferences on everything from health care to climate change,
and his dismissal of the processes of democracy in favor of China's
autocratic rule, lead him to this remarkable thought:
There is only one thing worse than one-party autocracy, and that is
one-party democracy, which is what we have in America today ... Our
one-party democracy is worse.
It is characteristic of Thomas Friedman's thought to move from
particular issues of policy to sweeping conclusions about the Nature
of Man and God and the Universe, typically based around some
attractively packaged metaphor - flat earth, [3]hot earth, etc.
Rarely, however, has he been quite so clear about the directness of
the connections he sees between his preferred set of substantive
outcomes, his contempt for American democratic processes that have,
despite all, managed to hang in there for, I don't know, a few times
the length of time between the Cultural Revolution and today, and his
schoolgirl crush on autocratic elites because they are able to impose
from above.
Let me just say for the record that this is a monstrous column. When
faced with American public defection from elite preferences outcomes
on certain policy issues that involve many difficult tradeoffs of the
kind that democracies, with much jostling and argument, are supposed
to work out among many different groups, Friedman extols the example
of ... China's political system, because it's both enlightened and
autocratic? Who among us knew?
([4]show)
I happen to think, persuaded by [5]Sandy Levinson's arguments, that
the US democratic system has deep structural flaws. Most of them have
to do with the nature of Congress and its geographical representation;
I don't buy Sandy's radical solutions in the form of constitutional
conventions, etc., but I agree with the fundamental diagnosis.
Congress is the broken institution of American governance. Its
failures are what put such great pressures on the other branches of
government. Far too great an emphasis is put on the office of
president, and its electoral process, precisely because Congress has
lost its responsiveness. Same for the judiciary, the Supreme Court
most of all. My own view is that an inherently imperfect
constitutional structure went from difficult to disastrous with the
acceptance of Congressional gerrymandering that created a legislature
of essentially safe seats and a concomittant lack of turnover and
competitive races.
But note: that diagnosis is a diagnosis about the political class and
what is wrong with it, not an indictment of large groups in the public
who, for good reasons or bad, take the diminishing mechanisms by which
citizens can make their Elite Public Managers hear, if not respond, to
their concerns. Friedman is saying something very different, something
about the nature of elites and their prerogatives to manage, rather
than lead, and it is a message that, I sorrow to say, is increasingly
associated with the Obama administration and its elites - drawn from
the ranks of intellectuals, professors, think-tankers, etc., few of
whom have much experience running things save their mouths and few of
whom have much interest in democracy except when public sentiment runs
their way - whose message is, get out of the way so that we can govern
in peace. There are sound reasons why people like, well, me should not
be in charge of too much government.
Friedman brings to mind, too, Bertolt Brecht's famous, ironic remark,
re Stalin:
The people have lost the confidence of the government; the
government has decided to dissolve the people and appoint a new
one.
Not quite "here the people rule," is it? And if you are going to go
about praising the Chinese autocrats over American democracy, no,
frankly I don't think a comparison to praising Stalin is out of line.
There is something deeply wrong and (far too much indulged by the
American political class), actually dangerous about finding every
conceivable way to tell China, its leadership and its people, that
they are both on the cusp of history and, as a matter of the kind of
Whig History to which Friedman is attached, on the correct and just
side of it. And that the United States is in decline and in any case
receiving its much deserved historical comeuppance. To the extent that
[6]American decline is true, one might put some amount of the blame -
not all, by any means, but like it or not, it's now Obama's
once-and-future deficits - on budgetary policies that require the
collective savings of a still not-rich China.
The single most striking trope of Obama administration foreign policy
to date, after all, is the seemingly complete non-issue of human
rights issues involving China (Hillary Clinton's snappish speech early
on about not bugging China about human rights; she might as well have
said, we're their debtor, get used to it) or even China's commercial
interests abroad (Sudan? Burma?)
But it is way more than policy. I teach many law students from China -
they are lovely, intelligent, studious, and I like them very much ...
and so far as I can tell, very little in their education in the United
States, remarkably, does anything other than reinforce their already
strong sense of general cultural, political, and social superiority
over past-sell-by nation-states like the United States. These are the
children of the nomenklatura, and they do not rock boats; but at the
same time, talking with them, they are choosy about the ideas they
take and don't take in. But they have, very politely expressed, a
general sense that they are the future and the United States is the
past; we bend over backwards, from an excess of political
self-abnegation and desire never to give offense, not to raise any
critical points of view. Among a significant number of them, there is
a polite but unmistakeable chauvinism, a nationalism for which there
is absolutely no apology - it is just assumed that they are entitled
to it and the same professors who condemn out of hand expressions of
American national identity freely confirm these students' nationalism.
A certain level of homage is taken to be natural, in its own soft way.
Or to put it another way. A couple of years ago I was in a hotel in
Manhattan, owned by a Chinese corporation. It had some corporate
policy then of bringing over Chinese nationals to serve as maids and
staff. I overheard in an elevator an attempt by a well-meaning,
well-to-do out of town couple, in Manhattan on business and see some
theatre, to converse with some of the hotel maids. The woman said
something like, "It is so wonderful you are here. It is so good for
Americans to be exposed to people from China ... you are doing such
amazing things in your country. It is too bad that we can't be more
like you. Maybe we can learn from you while you are here. We're on our
way down and you're on your way up." She was not referring the
elevator.
But the issue within the United States - the rising issue, the one
that needs to be addressed on terms both political as well as
intellectual, for each political party in slightly different ways - is
the relationship of elites to the public. In my own terms of
intellectual reference, the question is about the so-called New Class,
the not-so-new professional classes, and its relationship to
'management' over 'leadership', and the relationship of management of
the public to what, back in the 1990s, I referred to as therapeutic
authoritarianism, [7]the fusion of the coercive power of law with the
'for your own good' anti-libertarianism of the culture of the
therapeutic.
I tentatively raised this back in the Sarah Palin debates, looking to
the conservative side of the fence, and got very little indication of
interest in taking up that discussion. I have raised in the context of
the Obama administration, which is [8]particularly partial to the
authoritarian- therapeutic model of New Class management, and again,
with little traction. We're wrong to ignore it: it is time to have
some serious discussions with respect to each political party and its
model of elites and public.
In the meantime, some kind of metaphorical chemical castration of
Friedman's bellowing bull-in-heat for China's autocracy would seem to
me in good order.
([9]hide)
References
1. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/09/opinion/09friedman.html?_r=1
2.
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/viewarticle.cfm/dictatorships--double-standards-6189
3.
http://www.google.com/imgres?imgurl=http://www.lesjones.com/www/images/posts/1044fd39d6904b807190305cac30b608.jpg&imgrefurl=http://www.lesjones.com/2009/07/28/lifestyles-of-the-rich-and-enivronmentalist-thomas-friedman/&h=318&w=550&sz=66&tbnid=VQbrj5xHomSBqM:&tbnh=77&tbnw=133&prev=/images%3Fq%3Dthomas%2Bfriedman%2Bhouse%2Bphoto&usg=__vjzzqHaxfSS7JWR7mFuNOngDud4=&ei=1cOnSqLnGoKlnQeF1ryuBw&sa=X&oi=image_result&resnum=4&ct=image
4. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/volokh/posts/1252509527.html
5.
http://www.amazon.com/Our-Undemocratic-Constitution-People-Correct/dp/0195365577/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1252506104&sr=8-1
6. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1421999
7. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=897087
8. http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=935782
9. file://localhost/var/www/powerblogs/volokh/posts/1252509527.html
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