America Against America: the Chinese de Tocqueville | Locklin on science

Imagine if a hyper-intelligent and perceptive communistic space alien landed in America of 1988, and wrote an account of his impressions of the country.  The book America against America, published in 1992, is such an account. The author, Wang Huning is one of the most important people in China today; China’s “grey cardinal.” You’d think the meteoric success of China, and the ridiculously precipitous decay of America, incidentally predicted in every detail by this book would make America against America a widely studied book by US intelligentsia, but it’s so forgotten there isn’t even a wiki entry for it for me to link to. It isn’t available on Amazon (have a look at what Amazon thinks you’re looking for and despair), nobody talks about it, and you have to be resourceful to find it. People do know about Wang Huning; I had read something about him before the recent Palladium article in WSJ and Foreign Affairs, but somehow his seminal book remains un-commented upon and presumably largely completely unread. A book telling us what the Chinese elite think about their greatest geopolitical rival; seems somewhat relevant to current year.

I assume the legendary American incuriosity is partly at fault here; modern “political scientists” will have better careers catering to baizuo obsessions, like how to get people to eat more insects. Such gibbering ninnyhammers labor under the delusion that the Chinese are merely a variety of technological and industrial serfs; inconsequential exotic looking peasants who make their nerd dildoes, rather than a 3000 year old civilization with the world’s largest economy, and poised to overthrow the world hegemon if it wants to. Hell, the baizuo don’t even think much of Chinese-Americans, considering the efforts they go through to keep Asians out of their schools. Having more court eunuchs and persecuting uppity American peasants seems to be of more pressing concern to American alleged “political scientists” than the view of America presented by one of the most powerful men in China. I assume if contemporary political scientists actually read his book, a model of perceptive clear thinking, they’d mostly wrinkle up their noses at it. Perceptiveness and clear thinking are anathema to our modern mandiranate, who revel in red herrings, nebulosity, complicating simple problems and the fumes of hypocritical moral preening; preferably preening about progressively more grotesque causes detached from physical reality and offensive to neurotypicals. Read the Grey Cardinal’s book on America? Naaaah. The task falls to an obscure barbarian bit twiddler writing in his underpants.

Contradictions

Mr. Wang goggles at the material prosperity of America from the perspective of a 1980s Chinese. Kids these days are no longer familiar with the phrase “starving children in China,” but it was a phrase still in current use in the  United States of the 1980s. China’s 1988 GDP per capita in current year dollars was less than $700/year. The idea that every American house would have multiple telephones, automobiles; even the concept that the average American had his own house was heady stuff to the young representative of the Middle Kingdom. The idea that one could get these wonderful things without ration cards (and the wonderful magnetic strip ration cards Americans use) seemed utterly bewildering to young Mr. Wang. Mr. Wang also wondered at the productivity of the American farmer; he describes one man with 800 acres and 2000 pigs, and foresaw that the individual farmer, would give way to some form of collectivization, which it very rapidly mostly did. America of 1988 was already past its historical apex, which I peg as somewhere around 1965, but the outline of the actual triumphant America was still present, and the contrast to $700GDP/cap-year China will probably never be so enormous.

Young Mr. Wang then contrasts the mainstream and prosperous American with phenomena like the Amish (or the Amana, who I never heard of beyond their microwave ovens). People in the most industrialized country on earth chose of their own accord to live like Chinese peasants without the blessings of electricity and automobiles. This is extremely weird to a person from a third world country (remember, sub $700 year GDP/capita), but he recognized the Amish and other such religious groups are an important part of America’s cultural DNA.

National character

Mr. Wang saw most Americans as being relatively culturally conservative, though open to the world and cultural and technological change. He praises our inventiveness, wonders at the horror of modern architectural atrocities, weird fashion and punk rock haircuts. He also thought we have a particular talent for demystification. Most people with souls are  mystified by the sky, the ocean and nature; Americans mostly aren’t. We’re the children of the scientific (or at least scientistic) method in ways that no other culture is. Nothing is holy to the American; leaders aren’t particularly respected, and even scary stuff like ghosts are demystified by the American ritual of Halloween: a holiday which turns the terror of the supernatural into something fun for kids. This gets at something really deep in the American character compared to normal people. Especially when combined with his observations about the solemnity of workaday events like elections and sporting events, and the sacralization of insipid oafs like football players, newscasters and other celebrities. I guess he saw the religious impulse being used in strange ways in America; it really is pretty strange.

Mr. Wang viewed working Americans (he disdained those who refused to work) as generally in possession of good work ethic and diligence; almost wondrously so. He correctly identified the old protestant work ethic, and wondered that it had persisted well past the sell-by date of Protestantism. He noticed that a lot of people worked hard for Maslowian self-satisfaction, and judged this a useful system for getting people to work harder. The phrase “work hard, play hard” was illustrative of an attitude which is almost uniquely American. Making fun of people who forget to play hard is also something American:

The Japanese have a famous saying, “work until your pee is red”. Many people in the United States also work hard, but there is a difference between them and the Japanese.Americans have a special word to describe this kind of people, called Workaholics, directly translated as “alcoholic workers”, consisting of the words “work” and “alcoholism.”

Mr. Wang attempted to come to grips with American and general Western sexual ethics, and compared the skimpy ethics of 1988 to those of  Westerners from 100 years previous. He noted there was a broad spectrum of private opinions on porn, gay rights and non-marital sex, but that the sexual revolution gave all such opinions sort of equal cultural standing. He did not approve of liberal views on sexuality. I assume $700/year 1988 China didn’t have time, wealth or public health resources for the kind of antics Americans get up to, as they were too busy working in the fields. I wonder what he makes of current year Chinese sexual ethics? Many of the Asian strongmen decided it was pretty useful for social control: “muh dick” types don’t tend to make effective revolutionaries, and they make decent enforcers of the existing order when you tell them dissidents want to take their cummies away.  He also saw the side effects of social atomization, divorce and promiscuity; a lonely, alienated people: America has always been a lonesome place.   He also discusses a group of problems with socialization and introversion he probably didn’t realize were fairly unique to WEIRD college types -before the Chinese came up with the splendid baizuo sobriquet. A few of his anecdotes of upper middle class WEIRDos are too precious to not relate:

A delegation from the Japanese business community came to speak at a university, representing some of Japan’s major corporations and important academic institutions. The Japanese are rich and already known to the world. At the reception, many Americans treated the Japanese representatives with respect and looked for things to say. One woman official from the local government held the hand of a Japanese man for several minutes, smiling all over and saying straight out that the Japanese man had a beautiful tie. I felt uncomfortable looking at her. In fact, she was trying to get some Japanese investment for the local area. Americans mostly despise Japanese, but their attitude towards Japanese and what they think inside is different.

I’m with Mr. Wang; I’d have to look away in horror as well.

Social regulation

Mr. Wang was from a country with central planning, so the idea of using basic Keynesian fiscal and taxation controls to organize society was probably particularly foreign, and the way he pulls it all apart gives hints as to how the Chinese would eventually accomplish this themselves. Other subtle forms of governance which seemed noteworthy to him: for example, private sector accreditation.  His observation that pervasive technology of all kinds was a form of social regulation was insightful. Most American political scientists treat technology as a sort of external thing that happens, rather than a force for social regulation that both fit and shape the broad outlines of the culture. People become accustomed to their place in the vast machinery of society; becoming rather machine-like themselves. He had some interesting thoughts on regulatory capture, which is one of the major problems afflicting the US today (arguably not so much in China). Also worth mentioning: though he didn’t reference the thinker, he described Sam Francis’ idea of “anarcho-tyranny” where ordinary law-abiding people are regulated to the smallest detail, and criminals are allowed to run wild. Essentially the current year situation in America where inhuman monsters terrorize the ordinary law abiding citizen from above and below. He laughed at our tax code which is ridiculously complicated and causes absurd amounts of lost productivity. He did seem fond of the totalitarian possibilities for social control opened up by the fearsome IRS’s fancy-pants databases and national ID number which allowed for total control of the productive part of the population. Again, you can see the future Grey Cardinal rubbing his hands together over database technology; prelude to what was coming in China.

Generally Mr. Wang wasn’t a fan of the detailed regulations Americans have inflicted on themselves; he blames individualism for this. He might very well be right; a nation of individualists gives very little thought to social harmony unless there are laws requiring it. One of the wittiest bits of his book is his listing of animal control regulations; he just gave the broadest outline of the insanity of dog and cat laws, while the actual laws are considerably more detailed and absurd, working himself up to the following:

With a little more discussion, one can feel that American society is not so “free” and not as free as one might think to do whatever one wants. Even dogs and cats are not free, and those who have cats and dogs are bound by them, and in my opinion, by choice. Although some people love dogs like life itself, and the dog and cat industry is thriving, dog houses, dog cars, dog clothes, dog food, everything. But dogs and cats are very restricted. If dogs and cats had any sense, they would have gone to Washington to demonstrate and demand “dog rights” and “cat rights”.

Political Forces

Wang nails it early in this chapter: the two parties are a uniparty of the ruling class. Classic communist theory, which in this case happens to be a good description of reality. That’s why we can’t have nice things, and why outsiders breaking into the system caused an all-hands freak-out after the 2016 election. He arguably idealized the system too much stating, “The policy ideas that both parties talk about actually summarize voters’ problems, and then propose solutions.” I mean, it might have been true in 1988, it certainly wasn’t true from the 1990s through now. On the other hand, the CCP more or less does this today, from the block captain level on up. I’m guessing at least partially inspired by Wang’s experiences in the still mostly functioning US. People are easier to manage when they’re basically happy with how things are going, with their everyday concerns taken care of; something the budding totalitarians in our ruling caste of human soybeans would do well to recall. If it costs you a few hundred workers worth of effort to make the peasants happy, it’s a lot cheaper than paying for a policeman for every 10 people to keep them under control. He describes something bizarre that Americans accept as being the normal state of affairs in divvying up post-election political spoils with appointments; he names names, goes into details, something the incurious numskulls in the American media basically stopped doing almost 100 years ago in the FDR administration.

Special interest groups and lobbyists, he sees as an inevitable consequence of capitalism. He takes a sort of “schoolhouse rock” idealistic view of lobbying and special interest groups, but he immediately realizes the problem with it: the powerful group gets its way, and the regular people pretty much have no say in the matter of concern to special interests. He also called out the ridiculous Pentagon to Lockheed dynamic that makes much of American politics around military procurement so ridiculously corrupt. Obvious problem to a visitor who was only in America for 6 months; somehow nobody who lives in the place in current year considers it a serious issue, despite all the cost overruns and technological turkeys we’re afflicted with from the military industrial complex.

Soft governance

Wang had an amusing adventure getting an American ID card, I think in Iowa. The idea some insignificant local state-level bureaucrat rather than a policeman or the Federal government would issue identity documents is pretty objectively weird to most people on Earth. He attributes this to the American love of freedom, which is probably how it got that way, along with the fact that the state-level institutions existed before the invention of things like ID cards. He was also fascinated by the database system backing it all up, and the idea that people could feel freer by not visiting a bunch of intimidating armed ogres at the police station, despite the ogres having total access to all the information. Obviously the roots of the social credit system happened somewhere here. Wang Huning really liked American databases.

Mr. Wang saw the coercive and totalitarian possibilities of business; after all, a lot of conformity and soft power in the US is enforced by employers; from ever more byzantine “civil rights” enforcement (generally compliance serves business since it invents new reasons to fire people; keeping the uppity peasants in line) to vaccine passports: none of which actually increase the rights and power of American labor. He thought the American system of management was pretty tough on labor, and figured it would never fly in China; even on a social level. It was probably too close to the time of Mao for that, though for all I know there is still some kind of social informality between Chinese employer and employee which we don’t have in the US.

His adventure examining a county human services agency is illustrative; he was interested in the fact that this agency was designed to resolve some of the inherent contradictions of capitalism (of course, young Wang Huning was an orthodox Marxist). As a good political scientist studying a very foreign culture, he was intrigued by the management chain of command, and the various social problems, such as “Americans are known to beat their wives.” You can imagine the conversations that led to that conclusion. He wonders at the vast sums spent on this, and whether it can be maintained in the long term. He also traces the social services tradition back to old England in the 1500s, which was something new to me.

No visit to America would be complete without a visit to the Coca-Cola company. Seemed like mostly a wash; gawking at the beautiful investment grade art in the inconspicuous building. Also the fact that they donate ridiculous amounts of money to thinktanks and pressure groups to get political favors so they can sell more caffeinated diabetes juice. He’s a political scientist rather than a businessman, so he’s most interested in power relations. He’s too polite to call this what it actually is; a byzantine form of bribery, but he’s probably thinking it.

Like Coca Cola, Christmas is an American tradition, and he helpfully includes information (presumably for his mostly Chinese audience) on the origin and actual celebration of the institution. He also wonders at the ugliness of most of the churches, and the modernist and desacralized way the American Christian religion perpetuated itself via radio, TV, modern music and various good works. He takes the marxist sociological view of the function of religion in our society, and seems to think it’s over all a pretty good influence on American culture, with valuable social cohesion effects and few downsides. He doesn’t think Americans are particularly superstitious, as I suppose is the orthodox Marxian view of religion, and he argued that Americans of 1988 take a pragmatic approach to religion much as we used to with technology and virtually everything else. He mentions the downsides in the form of the various goofy televangelist scandals which were happening at the time. You’d need a petrified diaphragm to avoid laughing at the antics of Bakker and Swaggert and the rest in the late 80s and early 90s; Mr. Wang had a good laugh as well.

Educational institutions

Mr Wang mostly admired US educational institutions; I assume the Chinese ones of his day were a mess, and the US ones were still pretty impressive back then. Some of the social observations are interesting; the idea that education was a collaborative experience, and that the universities had tremendous soft power in spreading American influence abroad -these are things most Americans take for granted to the extent we’re unaware of them. He also examined government training institutions like the Kennedy and Maxwell Schools. I take it from his comments that many  80s era ChiCom functionaries were not so well educated, and were often fairly ineffective. He thought the military academies were of supreme importance, as was the political indoctrination which took place in these schools. He recognized the powerful cultural influence of football and what it revealed about the American national character; Americans respect honor, strength and are very outspoken; all characteristics on display at a humble football match. I hate football, but his account of the game was oddly touching and innocent.

Wang esteemed the various policy setting think tanks in existence at the time. These are institutions he eventually reproduced back home in China. He considered them to be a different form of postgraduate educational institution, which in the best case is what they actually are; albeit one with a particular ideological bent. He also marveled at the intricacies of the inter library loan system; something that didn’t exist in China of 1988.

Decay

Now the good stuff; the overt undercurrents of decay. The first thing he observed was how bizarre American families had become. He thought the decline of the family was a result of …. liberalism and individualism, which of course is exactly correct. Americans are individualists even down to child rearing practices: Americans isolate children from family from early ages, to cultivate individualism and sense of self. This is probably crazy-making for many -at least it seemed so to a 1988 Chinese man. The lack of care for family members was bizarre and disgusting to Wang, and the atomization into pure individualism caused him to ask questions which resonate with thoughtful people today such as,

Is human nature adapted to living a life with or without family emotions?

What kind of emotions should human society maintain in addition to sexuality?

Wang commented fairly extensively on the extreme ignorance and utter barbarity of the television generation, and the failure of primary schools to educate citizens to basic levels of human competence. He was shocked at the re-wilding of teenagers, the numerous runaways and juvenile criminals. I suppose the latter social problems aren’t as bad as they were in the 80s. I assume the lower testosterone levels of kids these days keeps them from running off and knocking each other up as they were when I was a kid. Kids are now raised by their telephones instead of the television, and are mostly too physically broken and mentally unwell to try to run off and make it on their own. He didn’t understand how America could continue to be American without basic civilizing of children and educating them to the culture of America:

If the transmission of basic knowledge is problematic, how can the basic values and beliefs of society be transmitted? How can they be socialized? This is the greatest challenge not only to American society and economy, but also to American politics.

Drugs were a problem in 1988; this problem has metastasized to being all-pervasive with  giant tent cities of discarded half-human madmen and druggies. The very fiber of Americanism resists doing anything about it; we’re the country of freedumb after all. Why not let people be crazy and do all the drugs they want?  He saw the nefarious machinations of various drug gangs being a huge potential threat to both civil society, the social order and the government itself. The Sackler family hadn’t blessed us with their entrepreneurial ventures yet in ’88, but I’m certain Wang would have recognized them for what they are: evil drug dealers who subverted both American government and sowed chaos in American civilization.

Drugs are encroaching on the United States with a force that, I fear, exceeds the various forces that have impacted the country throughout history.

Black lives mattering: Wang saw relations between blacks and whites as one of the most obvious and threatening social fractures. He observed the social and legal progress of the black community; still fairly recent in 1988. He also couldn’t help but notice the hypocrisies of white people, the fact that most of the bums and beggars were black, and that the ghettos were horrific and dangerous. He was horrified at the violence of blacks against Chinese-American people who obviously had nothing to do with black problems; something which persists to this day. He saw the cycle of black poverty for what it was; a social dysfunction of weak families that is passed on from generation to generation. Oddly, Wang talked a lot more sympathetically about the plight of the half a million American Indians than black people; probably because he was less likely to be sparechanged or mugged by an Indian. Both sets of racial problems seemed not remotely solvable to Wang. I wonder what he thinks of the racial situation now, with another 70 million or so people from all corners of the globe added to the population.

Spiritual crisis: Mr. Wang was very concerned that even elite university students knew little to nothing about the history and culture of the society to which they belonged. His heart was at least somewhat with the neocons of the day; mentioning Alan Bloom and his best selling 1987 jeremiad against the ignorance of contemporary university students. Mind you: the morons described by Bloom and Wang are now professors in the universities and high officials in government. They’re still ignorant pustules, now responsible for creating ever more callow gelded toads to infest the crumbling halls of American power. He identified the cultural nihilism of the baizuo all the way back in 1988; the upcoming tribe of people who would run the country into the ditch didn’t understand it, and didn’t much care for most of its inhabitants either. Dr. Professor Wang was/is a communist, so he understands that without some kind of ideological didactics or indoctrination, you can’t perpetuate your society. Without basic common values, you don’t share a common culture or society.

if society is left to develop naturally, traditional values will be difficult to preserve, and the trend of social development will always be to constantly eliminate the past, the new generation will inevitably have no concept of the past, and without education there will be no continuity. ….  Who, then, will perform this social function? Everyone who thinks about social stability and development, I am afraid, must first think about this issue.

Japan: OK, of course this was written in the 1980s, and it really looked like the Japanese were taking over back then. Since then, they sort of mutated from terrifying threat into a benign country of autistes who make reliable products and don’t reproduce. Whatever he says about Japanese hegemony in those days goes triple for China today, except somehow most contemporary people don’t recognize it as a commercial and cultural threat the way we feared Japan in the 80s. The problems of affluenza in the US eventually hit Japan, and is now a problem the Chinese elite are dealing with. Notice how they’re now limiting video game use, celebrities, reigning in their oligarchs and banning overt cultural subversion? All the people doing these things probably read this book, and saw the dangers of following America into such minefields. They understand the American cultural disease can spread to their own population and are trying to prevent it from ruining the heroic gains they’ve meticulously built up over the last 30 years.

A thoroughly enjoyable read; I learned much about my own society by viewing it through the eyes of a perceptive stranger who visited 34 years ago. I’ve always liked Chinese people for their frankness and open nature. Wang Huning had that quality in spades; a curious and pleasant, but very foreign guide to peak America and a diagnosis of its illnesses. It’s difficult to relate to current year people how much of an outsider Mr. Wang was when he visited. He was merely from another culture, but the effect was as if he was from another planet. I don’t even know if it’s possible to be that foreign any more now that we have internets. Mr. Wang is a sort of communist Chinese Virgil guiding the reader through the outer circles of American hell. Even if you don’t give a shit about the rise of China,  Americans will learn more about their own society from reading this than anything  published in America in the last 50 years.

This book should also tell you that America is probably going to lose in any serious confrontation with China, if that weren’t obvious enough from current events. Consider the China/Alaska summit in the early days of the Biden administration. Classic baizuo diplomacy; new administration, first meeting with Chinese counterparts, what do you do? Apparently someone thought it was a good idea to bring some ridiculous “broken branch” purple haired freakazoid, then harangue the Chinese about their internal affairs, and generally engage in unhelpful moralistic preening and grandstanding, as if the US were morally or physically capable of lecturing them about anything. It’s like the nose-ring twitter activist who lives in their parents basement insisting society change completely to suit their neuroses. This is pretty standard fare for the self-regarding bozos presently running things. Bringing someone that offends the diplomatic counterpart you’re dealing with, then lecturing them why they’re horrible people is a pretty major flex; sort of like Caligula’s horse. This might have worked in the past, or with weaker countries, but this time the Chinese were not impressed, and gave us a good foretaste of what an assertive China will look like, and how it will deal with the pathetic dorks in the American diplomatic corps.

While Mr. Wang gets some small details wrong in his book, or interprets the facts in a weird way because of his own cultural orientation; in general he’s dead right about everything. He and people like him are calling the shots over there. The American managerial class actively works to prevent accurate understanding of …. pretty much everything. At this point, you can’t join this social class of managerial parasites without overtly denying reality a half dozen times before morning coffee. That can be a useful social sorting mechanism when you have a bunch of over-educated grubinses knifing each other to get the good seats; but that only works when the corner office doesn’t confer any responsibility with real world consequences. You don’t get to remain the world hegemon when you don’t even vaguely understand your own society, let alone that of your geopolitical rivals. People with normally functioning nervous systems understand that baizuo-run America isn’t even worth living in, let alone fighting for. Good luck trying to recruit competent soldiers to fight for the rights of Taiwanese people to go to a gay bar or whatever it is I’m supposed to care about in baizuo-America’s ridiculous, unnecessary and completely ham-handed confrontation with China.

If you want to understand the problems we have in America as a technocrat, or even how American actually functions as a political society, consider the book of comrade Mr. Dr. Professor Wang Huning; our potential new overlord.  He’ll also shed some insight onto the successes of China. I hope he’s  laughing his ass off how unutterably stupid the leaders of the US became in one generation.

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