On March 27, the Burmese military massacred demonstrators, killing nearly 90 people, making it the bloodiest day since the country’s democratic protests in early February, which was condemned by Europe and the United States. Those who care about the situation in Burma are deeply concerned that Western pressure on China is likewise in a state of diminishing marginal effectiveness. On the issues of Burma and Xinjiang, China is not backing down at all, despite the constant international protests.
The answer to this reason was given at the March 18 meeting in Alaska: a change in the strength of both China and the United States, especially since China has determined that the soft power of the U.S. side has fallen sharply in 2020. When people like me, an expatriate in the United States, point out the decline of American politics, even if the facts are solid, there are always those who hear them who are not convinced. Now, finally, an institution and figure that even the left cannot ignore has come out to criticize it: Freedom House, an NGO founded in 1941 when totalitarianism was prevalent in the world, which has been responsible for promoting and monitoring democracy outwardly for years; the figure is Gerard Baker, former editor-in-chief of the Wall Street Journal.
In a special report released on March 22, Freedom House identified three major problems in the regression of American democracy: the unequal treatment experienced by people of color, the undue influence of money in politics, and partisan antagonism and extremism. The understanding of BLM issues is at the top of the leftist political correctness in the U.S., and Freedom House’s introspection falls into this category; but the latter two major problems are indeed the serious drawbacks of American politics at the moment. Several of the major improvements it proposes are clearly biased by political positions, such as the proposal to improve elections by legalizing the way vote harvesting is done in the H.R. 1 program implemented by the Democratic Party in 2020, which will only exacerbate the political conflicts within the United States.
American democracy is in crisis
I hope Freedom House will reflect on American democracy for two reasons. One is that the institution has funded a prestigious project on the “democratization of developing countries that have already democratized,” which culminated in the Life‘s work of Charles Tilly, a leading American political scientist and the “father of 21st century sociology. Democracy, Democratization, De-Democratization, and Their Interdependence. The book lists four hallmarks of de-democratization: first, the deterioration of free and fair elections and the emergence of rigged general elections; second, the erosion of the rights to freedom of speech, press, and association and the weakening of the ability of political opposition to challenge the government; third, the erosion of the rule of law as a judicial and bureaucratic restraint on government and the threat to judicial independence; and fourth, the creation or overemphasis of national security threats by the government to create a “sense of crisis.” All four of these characteristics are present in the United States today.
Second, the entire book is fully informed by the monitoring information of Freedom House over the years, and uses Freedom House’s criteria for judging civil political rights and civil liberties as the final evaluation of a country’s degree of democracy. In releasing its report this Time, Freedom House specifically states, “Don’t let authoritarian regimes use this to claim that their system is superior.” Indicating that the institution recognizes the crisis facing American democracy, but judging from its content, I believe the report fails to recognize America’s own problems as objectively as Tilly recognizes the problems of other countries.
On March 22, Gerard Baker published a commentary in the WSJ 〈The Western cultural elite is sending out what Lenin called a noose〉. The article addressed two events: the March 17 video conference in which U.S. Vice President He Jinli met with Irish Prime Minister Martin in which he strongly attacked the U.S. as a violent and racist country, and the March 18 U.S.-China Alaska talks. Since the full video of the talks was not shown in the United States at the time, it was only a few days later that Americans discovered that the United States had been thwarted and high-profile accusations of a faulty democracy were made by the other side. The article begins by asking, “How can a country win an ideological battle if its leaders believe its values are evil? The people who control America’s major cultural institutions, and now the U.S. government, have been eagerly producing ideological rope for the Chinese executioners, and they have accelerated production in the past year.” The entire article is a very pointed criticism of the identity politics of the American left, outright denouncing the looting BLM as street hooligans.
Freedom House and Gerard Baker’s reflections are at the left and right poles, the only thing both have in common is that they are aware that something is seriously wrong with American democracy. This serious split in the Perception of the root cause of the problem just shows that American democracy is in a state that is not easy to repair.
The serious decline in U.S. soft power has led to poor discourse in the international community. As Gerard says in his article, the U.S. cultural elite is “elevating victimhood as the primary symbol of modern American honor” – the U.S. is degenerating into a society characterized by Marxist identity politics, which is what Yang Jiechi said at the Alaska conference. This is where Yang Jiechi’s bottom line lies in the Alaska meeting.
Recent Comments