The Retreat of Western Liberalism

by Edward Luce

If I were a budding Mark Felt, I would leak my material to John McCain, the ornery senator from Arizona, or his fellow Arizonian Jeff Flake, or Lindsey Graham, the Republican from South Carolina. There are few who revile Trump more than the Republican hawks.

There is nothing to stop a US president from ignoring the courts. Pretending otherwise has been a civic duty of almost every US president, barring Nixon.

one journalist summarised the gap between the heartland view of Trump, and that of the liberal elites as follows: ‘the press take him literally, but not seriously; his supporters take him seriously, but not literally’.

Later, when I asked the mayor how he had got crime down so low, he said that local criminals had a taste for flying. One solution was to take them up in a helicopter and simply help them on their way. ‘They never fly again,’ he chuckled. I still get shivers when I think of how much laughter that provoked. The mayor’s name was Rodrigo Duterte. He is now president of the Philippines.

America’s loss has been relative: its share of world GDP has declined. It has also devalued its global credibility by prosecuting reckless wars in the false name of democracy. Europe’s geopolitical loss has been absolute. It is barely any longer capable of projecting power beyond its own borders. Indeed, the very openness of Europe’s borders presents a growing threat in itself. The world’s centre of gravity, meanwhile, is shifting inexorably towards the east.

Victorian Britain was the hegemon; Bismarck’s Germany the challenger. In 1880, Germany had barely a third of Britain’s manufacturing production. By 1913, Germany had overtaken it.6 The similarity to China and America today is unmissable. In 1970 China had just 3 per cent of global manufacturing. By the early 2000s it was producing more than the US.

America’s battle-carrier groups are no longer safe from China’s submarine and anti-ship missile threats. China is capable of preventing America’s continued military primacy in the Asia Pacific but it is not yet strong enough to supplant it. We are entering a period of radical uncertainty.

The coming years will pit Trump’s The Art of the Deal against Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. There can be little doubt which approach is wilier.

The chances that Trump will casually threaten China and get pulled into a dynamic he cannot control should be taken very seriously. Bismarck once said, ‘Preventive war is like committing suicide out of fear of death.’ It is conceivable Trump is possessed by some kind of morbid spirit.

What strikes Westerners (and I am no exception) as self-evidently a good thing sounds to Chinese ears just another example of missionary zeal.

I asked Eric Li, the Shanghai-based private equity investor, which two historic events he prized above others. The first was China’s detonation of the hydrogen bomb in October 1964. This proved the Chinese people had ‘stood up’, as Mao promised in 1949. ‘It was so extraordinary because the People’s Republic was just fifteen years old and very poor,’ said Li.13 The test also proved China was capable of catching up with Western technology. The second was Britain’s transfer of Hong Kong to China in 1997. The handover ‘closed the curtain on China’s “century of humiliation” at the hands of foreign invaders’. Both of Li’s examples show China’s deep-rooted desire to be treated with respect and dignity.

China’s incentive to maintain Hong Kong’s relative freedoms has less to do with honouring its obligations to Britain than with convincing Taiwan that its way of life would be secure under China’s rule.

As China’s growth slows, and the seventieth anniversary of its revolution looms, Xi Jinping will be tempted to shore up his support with nationalist diversions. He will probably also tighten his crackdown on internal dissent.

Just as America fears ideological competition, and Britain has historically dreaded a unified continent, so China is constantly paranoid about internal dissolution.

Trust is the glue of a successful free society; fear is the currency of the autocrat.

Surkov fashioned the tools Putin uses to divert attention, sow confusion and level the playing field between truth and lies. Surkov is something of an evil genius: he understands that human weaknesses – the capacity to be diverted and the yearning to be relieved from boredom – are putty in the hands of a technological maestro.

During one of the presidential debates, Trump made it clear that he had no idea what the nuclear triad meant (launch capabilities from air, land and sea). He is also the first US president to have openly speculated about using them. ‘Somebody hits us within Isis – you wouldn’t fight back with a nuke?’ he said in one campaign interview.

Cyber weapons are the ultimate in asymmetric warfare. Not only are they at the disposal of multiple players – countless players, if you include non-state actors – but it is often impossible to know who is hitting you. Was that a branch of the Kremlin, or a rogue Russian operative? Was that an outfit of the People’s Liberation Army or a bunch of nihilistic hackers? Was it Isis, or Iran? If you do not know who is attacking you, or who is likely to attack you next, how is it possible to deter them with the threat of retaliation? Even when you can identify your assailant, it is hard to know what kind of counter-attack is appropriate. Does a virtual attack merit a kinetic response?

Because] of the seamless worldwide network, the packets, and the Internet of Things, cyber war [will] involve not just soldiers, sailors, and pilots but, inexorably, the rest of us,’ says Fred Kaplan, author of Dark Territory: The Secret History of Cyber War.

Trump’s White House team has publicly told US diplomats to resign rather than express misgivings through the State Department’s long-standing dissent channel, which permits diplomats to voice concerns anonymously.

But where else can we look? When Merkel had to postpone her first meeting with Trump due to snow, Brookings’s Thomas Wright tweeted, ‘Meeting between the leader of the free world and the President of the United States postponed till Friday.’ He was only half-joking.

The link between an America that upheld its system at home and promoted it abroad was never broken, though often tarnished. Trump is inverting that link. The more scorn he pours on democratic traditions at home, the more he endangers them abroad.

The] Democratic Party had here broken in two before the eyes of a nation like Melville’s whale charging right out of the sea,’ wrote Mailer.

It included obligatory seats for women, ethnic minorities and young people – but left out working males altogether. ‘We aren’t going to let these Camelot Harvard-Berkeley types take over our party,’ said the head of the AFL-CIO, the largest American union federation.3 That is exactly what happened.

Starting with Reagan Democrats, and later Bush Republicans, blue-collar whites gradually moved over to the conservative banner. It took them a long time to feel buyer’s remorse.

If we write off half of society as deplorable we forfeit claims on their attention. We also endanger liberal democracy.

The retreat of the state has coincided with a revolution in the nature of work. More and more jobs are piecemeal, outsourced and temporary.

During past recessions, productivity typically fell as companies cut back the volume of work they required their employees to do. The alternative would have been to embark on a painful round of layoffs. Now they need only cut back the supply of temps, which is painless and invisible. That is why corporate productivity held up during the Great Recession. The risk had been shifted onto the individual.

When people lose trust that society is treating them fairly, they drift into a deeper culture of mistrust.

The public noticed that the Obama administration failed to push through a single criminal conviction for what was the grandest rip-off in US financial history. Under Trump, we must get reacquainted with hearing about the world in Old Testament terms, yet I have no doubt Wall Street will still be deemed worthy of New Testament forgiveness.

No matter what the challenge, cake and cheap diversion is the answer.

But the UBI model has a couple of big flaws. First, it would create a powerful new magnet attracting immigrants to the Western world. Stopping them from arriving, and screening out those who slip through from claiming the basic income, would require even more draconian security. Second, a UBI would sever the link between effort and reward. People like to feel valued. Work is not just about economic reward. It is also about purpose and self-respect. Idleness is a soul-destroyer.

It seems blindingly obvious that universal healthcare ought to be a basic shield against the vicissitudes of an increasingly volatile labour market. Humane immigration laws should be enforced, and the link between public benefits and citizenship restored. Ours is an age of lawyers and accountants. Micro-regulation of the workplace ought to be replaced with broad guidelines; free speech, in whatever form it takes, must be upheld on campuses and in the media; the tax system should be ruthlessly simplified; governments must tax bad things, such as carbon, rather than good things, like jobs; companies should be taxed where they conduct their business. Governments must launch Marshall Plans to retrain their middle classes. The nature of representative democracy should be re-imagined. Above all, money’s stranglehold on the legislative process has to be broken.

If only out of self-preservation, the rich need to emerge from their postmodern Versailles.