The basic problem is that China has become the source of vast wealth and prestige for a large group of people at the top of industry, government, and former government officials or others who can make useful introductions. The problem has been fomenting since Nixon, took sharp shape during the Clinton administration, but in the last decade its advocates generated 'class consciousness' and began actively working to subjugate America as Athens was subjugated.
For decades, American policymakers and the corporate class said they saw China as a rival, but the elite that Friedman described saw enlightened Chinese autocracy as a friend and even as a model—which was not surprising, given that the Chinese Communist Party became their source of power, wealth, and prestige.... Trump’s incessant attacks on that elite gave them collective self-awareness as well as a powerful motive for solidarity. Together, they saw that they represented a nexus of public and private sector interests that shared not only the same prejudices and hatreds, cultural tastes and consumer habits but also the same center of gravity—the U.S.-China relationship. And so, the China Class was born.
Smith provides many useful examples, which makes it clear that the lines don't fall cleanly along our apparent party factions. Dick Gephardt turns out to be one of the good guys, arguing against trade with China because its use of slave labor will both undermine American workers -- who can't compete with slaves on wages -- and American honor. John McCain and Bill Clinton are aligned, but sadly (tragically) so is Jim Mattis.
The piece also chides Trump for failing to staff his administration with those who would fight for America, rather than find ways to backslide to Chinese wealth. In a way this is fair: the buck stops with the President, and the President was routinely undermined by his team -- leaks, impeachments based on leaks, outright betrayal and refusal to carry out his policies. In another way, though, who could do what Smith asks? You could find a few handfuls of people to put in the very top positions, but moving the whole ship of state requires a great deal of people. Who are the people who both understand the problem and are committed to solving it?
Don't answer that, because if you do they may well be destroyed before there's a chance to use them. Yet if you can't answer that question, how would you put together the staff?
Smith suggests the betrayal goes very deep indeed, in language that may be too strong. Some of you will think it is; but others of you will think it's just right. I could probably guess which of you will feel which way, but that's not important; the point is that both perspectives are present here.
[B]ecause it was true that China was the source of the China Class’ power, the novel coronavirus coming out of Wuhan became the platform for its coup de grace. So Americans became prey to an anti-democratic elite that used the coronavirus to demoralize them; lay waste to small businesses; leave them vulnerable to rioters who are free to steal, burn, and kill; keep their children from school and the dying from the last embrace of their loved ones; and desecrate American history, culture, and society; and defame the country as systemically racist in order to furnish the predicate for why ordinary Americans in fact deserved the hell that the elite’s private and public sector proxies had already prepared for them.For nearly a year, American officials have purposefully laid waste to our economy and society for the sole purpose of arrogating more power to themselves while the Chinese economy has gained on America’s....That Democratic officials intentionally destroyed lives and ended thousands of them by sending the ill to infect the elderly in nursing homes is irrelevant to America’s version of the Thirty Tyrants. The job was to boost coronavirus casualties in order to defeat Trump and they succeeded. As with Athens’ anti-democratic faction, America’s best and brightest long ago lost its way. At the head of the Thirty Tyrants was Critias, one of Socrates’ best students, a poet and dramatist. He may have helped save Socrates from the regime’s wrath, and yet the philosopher appears to have regretted that his method, to question everything, fed Critias’ sweeping disdain for tradition. Once in power, Critias turned his nihilism on Athens and destroyed the city.
That's an interesting proposition. Can you teach philosophy, which requires wrestling with the harderst questions, without encouraging nihilism? Many of the hardest questions end up having no certain answers. These hard questions without certain answers are often discovered at the foundation of all fields of knowledge, even mathematics. If there are unanswerable questions at the basis of these things we take to be certain, then nothing we know is really reliable. Finding that no one is right about anything, perhaps, it is easy to drift into nihilism, solipsism. and the like. Even Kant ends up conceding that we can't really know anything about the world as it actually is, the noumena; we can only discuss phenomena, the world as our brains give it to us.
(Or maybe we can: our brains give us a Euclidean world, but we have decided that gravity actually seems to create curves in spacetime. This is based on math and physics, which we performed inside our minds, based on observations that we had to understand with our minds in order to apply the tools. So perhaps we can get outside the world our mind presents to us to say something about the actual reality, even using the tools that depend on our mind. Or perhaps not; after all, every observation is itself a phenomenon, and our conclusions are themselves phenomena. Maybe there's no way to the real thing; and the fact that we can't be completely sure about that, either, is another of these hard questions at the root of our world.)
The Church taught philosophy for centuries without falling into nihilism, because it taught there was a final ground that had to be accepted on faith. This was also Socrates' answer: that not man, but a God, had to be the final root and the final measure. On the other hand, the fall of the Church from its central position was also brought about by philosophical enquiry that undermined some of its core teachings: having rooted them on God, the Church looked to be wrong about God when they were proven to be wrong about the basic nature of reality. Many lost faith as a result.
In any case, I've only taken you about a third of the way through Smith's piece, which you should read in full. It is an excellent treatment of our present problems, At minimum it offers you a model for knowing your enemies, their motivations, and many of their names.
Smith concludes:
What does history teach us about this moment? The bad news is that the Thirty Tyrants exiled notable Athenian democrats and confiscated their property while murdering an estimated 5% of the Athenian population. The good news is that their rule lasted less than a year.
I will add to the good news side of that ledger. In their wake came Plato's work, and Aristotle's, which advanced the human condition in ways from which we still profit today. Also to the bad news side: neither Plato nor Aristotle escaped unthreatened by tyranny in their lifetimes. Plato's Seventh Letter discusses a problem he has with a tyrant; Aristotle had to flee Athens to escape being put to death. In Aristotle's lifetime democracy vanished from the world for a time under the hand of his best student, his Critias, known to us as Alexander the Great.
This philosophy stuff is dangerous work.
