China is where the USA was in the 1950s; lots of industrial growth but lots of pollutions, a population happy about all the new wealth and not willing to protest.
It will most likely become a totally different cyberpunk society, with modern cities and massive surveillance coexist, instead of being another US.
I think western people are just more complacent, and so protests are viewed as fundamentally non threatening by authority figures.
In China, however, the people are much less complacent and so authority figures fear more widespread uprising.
In the US, we are taught to view this sort of thing through the lens of authoritarian excess, but to do so requires Saddam-ifying the Chinese government.
A more rational view is to suppose that all governments operate from the same playbook and use whatever tactics are necessary to keep the people at bay.
The American people embody a unique blend of cowardice and complacency that most governments would be quite pleased to foster in their own populations. The image of the "Tank Man" was so compelling in the US because that kind of courage against authoritarian power is utterly foreign to Americans.
In the US, the people with "Tank Man" level courage (Chelsea Manning, Ed Snowden, etc.) are vilified and most Americans follow the lead of authority figures and despise them.
You make progress in the West by winning over your naysayers by memetic warfare, and ideally by grassroots sentiment/political engineering.
In recent decades, there have been issues with the system as a whole that have made it difficult for the system to self-correct. Namely, the obsession with never revisiting laws on the books to simplify the act of legislating, the dismantling of the legislative branch as the ultimate source of law through delegation to the Executive branch and dissolution of vital apparatuses like the Office of Technological Assessment, and overreliance on an overloaded Judiciary as a relief valve for legislation largely driven by donor/special interest organizations.
Resistance in the United States, and the West in general was never intended to be "buy the vote" but rather the end result of pushes to modify public sentiment through bottom up pressure, with laws being passed at the lowest level possible such that each State was free to run itself as it saw fit with minimal undue influence from other State, with a Federal body of jurisdiction to mediate cross-State issues.
At no point was the U.S. Government ever expected or desired to be able to control the populace. That was specifically avoided and straight up poisoned through various Constitutional Amendments, as well as quite elegantly rejected in the Declaration of Independence; which while not a document with legal force, remains an elegant expression that I still believe it safe to say expresses the essence of American culture. The Government is there to serve the populace. Not suppress, dominate, or terrorize them.
Any contest of wills in the States is fundamentally a difference of opinion between people; not a challenge to the superiority of the State. Whether in current times the establishment has started to waiver from the rails is anyone's guess, but currently there is a generational changing of the guard as it were going on.
Hope this is enlightening or at least provides food for thought.
I appreciate the thoughtful response. I'll try to rebut in case you can help clarify things for me further.
> You make progress in the West by winning over your naysayers by memetic warfare, and ideally by grassroots sentiment/political engineering.
I think this is another way of saying that leaders do not have absolute power and there must be some level of consent of the governed behind what the leaders do.
The word progress entails views that could be described as "politically progressive". While I agree that what you describe (grassroots efforts, awareness, shifts in public opinion) have characterized progressive movements in the US, I think those represent only a subset of the relevant political trends to consider in our analysis, such as right wing movements that have been remarkably retrogressive.
> In recent decades, there have been issues with the system as a whole that have made it difficult for the system to self-correct. Namely, the obsession with never revisiting laws on the books to simplify the act of legislating, the dismantling of the legislative branch as the ultimate source of law through delegation to the Executive branch and dissolution of vital apparatuses like the Office of Technological Assessment, and overreliance on an overloaded Judiciary as a relief valve for legislation largely driven by donor/special interest organizations.
I would characterize the items you mention as (broadly) institutionalized corruption. As powerful interests obtain greater advantage, they allow the system to evolve in ways that protects their power. There has not been any significant public movement to alter the course of this trend.
> Resistance in the United States, and the West in general was never intended to be "buy the vote" but rather the end result of pushes to modify public sentiment through bottom up pressure, with laws being passed at the lowest level possible such that each State was free to run itself as it saw fit with minimal undue influence from other State, with a Federal body of jurisdiction to mediate cross-State issues.
This was indeed the intent at the outset, but we have seen a massive growth in the size and reach of the Federal government, both in terms of size/scope of the government itself and also in terms of the percentage of lobbying dollars spent at the Federal level. For lobbying interests, it's easier/cheaper to focus on one target than 50.
> At no point was the U.S. Government ever expected or desired to be able to control the populace. That was specifically avoided and straight up poisoned through various Constitutional Amendments, as well as quite elegantly rejected in the Declaration of Independence
We have seen in recent decades a substantial weakening of the bill of rights, which is, to your point, the most concrete embodiment of the initial importance of protecting the people from government:
1st amendment: We've seen the past several administrations conduct a war on whistleblowers, as well as prosecute journalists under the espionage act.
2nd amendment: Many Americans support the total repeal of this one.
4th amendment: Immigration oriented laws remove 4th amendment protections against unlawful search and seizure within 100 miles of the US border. 80% of the US population lives within 100 miles of a US border.
5th amendment: Courts have been convicting child pornographers in ways that are troubling for broader 5th amendment protections against self incrimination.
The notable thing here is not that the protections against government have been reduced, it's that they have been reduced and nobody cares.
> The Government is there to serve the populace. Not suppress, dominate, or terrorize them.
What government has in its constitution the idea that it would do anything else?
> Any contest of wills in the States is fundamentally a difference of opinion between people; not a challenge to the superiority of the State.
This is only due to the selective focus on in-fighting between political groups, such as the abortion debate. I'd argue that the state should not have been allowed to get away with the following abuses of authoritarian power (and big budget, state actor scale PR efforts):
- Sloppy accounting of the GSEs that led to the financial crisis in 2008
- Dishonest accounting of social welfare systems and their sustainability (Social Security, Medicare)
- Dishonest leaks of intelligence information (or deliberate leaks of fake info (Hersch)) leading to the costly Iraq war, along with dishonest cost projections.
- Inappropriate classification of information about the Iraq and Afghan wars (Wikileaks)
- The attacks on press freedom mentioned above
- The attacks on urban black populations that occurred during the 1970s (Chicago) and were aided by Federal law enforcement.
- The negligent handling of water pollution (Flint) which is actually happening in many US cities. Lead and contamination tests are often performed improperly, leading people to think their water is clean.
The above are predominantly akin to theft, but some are graft and some are obstruction to prevent accountability. Generally speaking, all would be highly criminal if done by a private firm.
That Americans do not mind these things illustrates that there is total compliance with authoritarian excesses and criminal behavior. The distraction from these issues and focus on partisan tit for tat issues is generally just what it looks like when the population is complacent about its authoritarian overlords.
I'd be curious to read your responses. I think we agree on the conceptual (idealistic) objectives of the US form of government, and we agree that the current instantiation has problems. My take is that we can measure authoritarianism by looking at how much it is challenged by the democratic process... more authoritarian means there will be fewer challenges, which is our status quo in the US.
>I think this is another way of saying that leaders do not have absolute power and there must be some level of consent of the governed behind what the leaders do.
Absolutely spot on.
>The word progress entails views that could be described as "politically progressive". While I agree that what you describe (grassroots efforts, awareness, shifts in public opinion) have characterized progressive movements in the US, I think those represent only a subset of the relevant political trends to consider in our analysis, such as right wing movements that have been remarkably retrogressive
Careful there, you're mixing up senses of the word "progress". I was originally using it to communicate the sense of gaining headway toward facilitating a particular change, without respect to who or what that change is associated with. I.e. we have progressed toward our goal. Any side can and does make progress in winning over the majority mindshare.
In American politics however, there is the label of being a Progressive, which is generally used to describe more centrist voters on the left right spectrum with maybe some more willingness to accept that label in recent times on the Right. That is a totally different sense of the word I tried and failed to avoid.
>I would characterize the items you mention as (broadly) institutionalized corruption. As powerful interests obtain greater advantage, they allow the system to evolve in ways that protects their power. There has not been any significant public movement to alter the course of this trend.
I vehemently agree. The delegation of matters of administrative lawmaking in particular to the Executive branch being one of the most troubling. The far more concerning though, is the usurpation of the process of actually writing legislation by entrenched special interest, combined with playing extraordinarily fast and loose with what gets legislated and passed, without initial review for Constitutionality, combined with reconciling the corner cases of the Common Law system with the Constitution. An unconstitutional law can be passed, enforced, and allowed to stand for many years before the environment is right for an attempt at judicial strike down, and there is little to no stomach for periodically repealing/revisiting legislation to keep the books clean as it were. Many of these failings come from overreliance on lobbyists supplying verbatim bill text, but there is also a lot of misunderstanding in terms of just people writing bills badly, or writing bills on topics they don't understand without getting input by an impartial group beholden to the tax payer. This was made all the more frequent through dissolution of legislative research arms like the OTA, which was killed by ideologues back in the 90's, likely because they were often at odds with entrenched industry interests. It has gotten to the point where legislation is becoming more reliant on party-line towing, or trying to engineer party majorities rather than being based on a best faith effort to doing what is best for the nation as a whole. Which requires concession on both sides, and a willingness to understand there are just some things that will not get through and maybe shouldn't even be attempted at the Federal level.
>This was indeed the intent at the outset, but we have seen a massive growth in the size and reach of the Federal government, both in terms of size/scope of the government itself and also in terms of the percentage of lobbying dollars spent at the Federal level. For lobbying interests, it's easier/cheaper to focus on one target than 50.
Faster information propagation and the rise of the national media has played a hand in that, as well as a change in the apparent philosophy of representation. The classical idea of a representative is an agent who operates as a sort of floating average of the populace. The combination of first-past-the-post voting system, faster feedback loops via the national media/polling, and campaign finance laws have disrupted the way the Congress should work based on views the Founders had in mind. The idea they laid out was to have level headed people making the best calls on their own merit, and worked well given a relatively small base of laws to sift through. Now though, most legislators come in with an agenda, run into the wall of old business still stuck in the legislative cycle, have to react to new business in ways consistent with maintaining polling numbers, and need to filter through or delegate the filtering of frankly ridiculous levels of information. My primary concern is that legislators seem to have become chess pieces for professional social engineers instead of well-versed in the material on which they will be acting. An undesirable course of events if one takes into account the fact that part of the Library of Congress mission is to make available the breadth of knowledge required to allow legislators to effectively legislate. Instead, they are essentially hounded by people who shape their career around getting what their employer wants instead of presenting things in a manner not instantly discernable as biased and cherrypicked.
>W.R.T. The Bill of Rights
Many of the attacks on the Bill of Rights have been enabled by the Common Law system. This is either a bug, or a feature depending on who you ask, and is exacerbated by the fact that the layperson is ill-equipped to understand the mire of complexity that is our adversarial legal framework.
The corpus of precedent, and its constantly shifting nature makes a true reconciliation of the historical output of the legal system difficult because the very meaning of straightforward statements written on paper can be twisted in ways disconnected from plain-English grammars as long as recognizably valid legal reasoning is employed; combine that with a reticence of judges to regularly challenge precedent, and you run into legal drift over time.
The adversarial nature of the institution of the Judiciary also renders it vulnerable to a form of Social Engineering where strategic priming, jury/venue/judge engineering perpetuates various patterns of systemic abuse that do not quite seem to have effective countermeasures.
Working as designed, many would say, but I'm not sure that it's really possible to reconcile the fact that the barrister/solicitor occupation is locked behind significant financial barriers to entry, and there being such a disparity what types of outcomes that are generated given different financial resources to expend; even if that may be a somewhat inevitable outcome of the free market system. What I mean by this disparity is the inability of the justice system to act as a sufficient tempering force for white collar/corporate malfeasance compared to relatively straightforward outcomes in non-corporate/white collar cases.
I don't think there is any willful aspiration on most actors in the system's part, but there is definitely a problem of equal access to quality representation in our system that I think could be remedied by a system whereby private practices are delegated some quota of public defense case load in return for the privilege of practicing.
W.R.T. malfeasance by the government.
The Office of the Inspector General needs teeth, and to be separate from the Executive, but tasked and empowered with full jurisdiction to cut through Executive privilege and national security concerns if need be. The whistleblowers/watchdogs of the Executive branch cannot afford to be beholden to a President directly. Who they should be I am not sure, but clearly, they do not seem to have any oomph in regards to curtailing malfeasant behavior under their current operating model.
Again, sorry for the delay, but I wanted a chance to get in some good thinking on things. It's still not the most carefully thought out bit, but I'd feel remiss putting it off any longer.
I've still got a lot of cogitation to do before I'll be satisfied with my articulation, I'm sure.
Shared sentencing was common, but I believe there's nuance between European feudal kingdoms and eastern empires.
In Machiavelli's Price, he compared the French kingdom and the Ottoman empire. The former was based on the traditional feudal model - Nobels are powerful. And the latter was based on province model, there are officers but they don't own things, and can be replaced by the Sultan or the Emporer without any problems.
I found for empires like China, Ottoman, people usually respect authoritarian more. My guess people might fear their local lords because they are cruel, but that's not consistent for every place and every decade in Europe because it's too divided. But for China, this continuously goes on for thousands of years.
PS: I believe the shared sentencing is much more important than other cruel sentencings on this topic. Because it's not because it affects the criminal by his sense of responsibility for families. But instead, it's because other family members will first stop him, if they failed to stop him they will report directly.
When I was a kid every time I tried to say something about politics everyone else's response was "stop that, don't ask for trouble".
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nine_familial_exterminations
The two countries are absolutely incomparable on these particular points. Prosperity alone does not quell protests, most protests in the U.S. are decidedly bourgeois.
Exactly. The US population is a model of complacency, so the US Government does not have to project much authoritarian force domestically.
The narrative that there is a culture of dissent in the US is false and gets more false every day.
But they entered the public awareness in 1963 with the March on Washington, and haven't let up since.
My concern is that if, Heaven forbid, there is ever again something worth protesting to that degree, no one will pay attention. Regular Americans, rather than being swayed, will look on and say, "Oh look honey, the kids are protesting again."
I don't think they are as "enshrined" as you think they are.
Survivorship bias ensures that history only remembers the protests that were meaningful, making it seem like protests were historically more effective and more meaningful.
Or one could observe that it has completely let up and now most Americans are cynical about protests and cheer on authoritarian figures from both parties.
Women protested in the 1910s for the right to votes.
My guess is it’s an industrial revolution side effect, but would be love to learn of earlier roots.
but probably what you are referring to is post world war 2, which mostly started in the 1960s caused by the vietnam war and civil rights movements brought about by myriad causes (middle class affluence, mass communications, overextending of the govt overseas (and at home with the draft etc))
wikipedia, but it’s as god a place to start as any[1]
I'd love to hear other perspectives.
The CR made the party fear chaos above all else. HK actually learned the same lesson under the British during the same timeframe (Maoist protesters almost tore the city apart). Not that it justifies their behavior, it just explains it.