Posted on 11/08/2024 10:53:22 AM PST by E. Pluribus Unum
In December 2019, I traveled to Hong Kong, where a heavy unease hung in the air. For months, young people had taken to the streets to protest the encroachment of the Chinese Communist Party on what was supposed to be a self-governing, democratic system. On walls they’d scrawled: “Save Hong Kong! If we burn you burn with us!” All the protesters I spoke to knew their movement would fail; it was a last assertion of democratic identity before it was extinguished by a new order which saw democracy as the enemy within.
I met with a government official preparing to resign and told him I was writing a book about the rise of authoritarian nationalism. “The nationalism in the U.S. and Europe is somewhat different,” he told me. “Yours started with the financial crisis in 2008. That’s when liberalism started to lose its appeal, when people saw this wasn’t working. The narrative of liberalism and democracy collapsed. This spilled over into China, too. This is when China started to think — should we really follow a Western model?” We were sitting in a hotel lounge, the invisible forces he described surrounding us: capitalism, but not democracy; cultural elites cloistered away from the working class. “The nationalist movements in East and West were both a response to the collapse of the Western model,” he added.
Everything I’d experienced told me he was right. Eight years serving in the Obama White House after the financial crisis felt like swimming upstream, against the currents of global politics. A radicalized Republican Party rejected liberal democracy at home, mirroring far-right leaders like Prime Minister Viktor Orban of Hungary who spoke about installing “illiberal democracy” (a polite term for “blood and soil” nationalism) across Europe. In Russia, Vladimir Putin set out to undermine — if not...
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
Good post.
In addition DEI has turned the “technocrats” into blithering idiots.
It is not just the political appointees—many folks in the Senior Executive Service are just incompetent and cannot execute even the most basic tasks.
That darn Trump. Nobody likes him except the people.
Ben Rhodes is a hack.
I would sooner listen to a hobo at the bus station.
Rhodes studies without learning.
Yes. Intelligence. Puissance. Moral clarity. Heroism. Greatness. Those will do for a start.
“I Study”
Trying to study without respect for truth is like trying to drive a car without a steering wheel.
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