This is what people refuse to get: the West has already lost. It’s over. It’s done. There’ll be some shooting, but it doesn’t matter.
China has the world’s largest economy by all statistics that matter. It has by far and away the most manufacturing. It has way more shipbuilding capacity than the entire West.
China is the premier trade power. Most of the global “South” would rather trade with it: it gives better deals and it interferes less with internal politics. This will continue. Western analysts are already talking about the coming semiconductor flood, as China catches up there. In ten years or so they’ll have more reliable planes at better prices than Boeing. They lead in about two-thirds of all major tech areas and surging in the rest. They are crushing it in the auto-industry and soon will produce better cars for cheaper, if they don’t already.
They have a real economy: “China speed” is a phrase. They get things done, and fast.
Russia is now the world’s fifth largest economy and over-took Germany, which is crashing out due to high energy prices with the cut-off from Russia oil and gas. Europe barely registers on new patents. They have advanced weaponry, their economy is booming thanks to sanctions forcing them to invest in their own country, they have plenty of food, resources and water and they’re on of the few countries who will benefit for the early to mid parts of climate change and global warming.
Changes in weapon systems have made cheap weapons much more effective, especially drones and missiles. The tech has spread widely, to the point where a backwards country like Yemen has enough to shut down a key trade route. The US military can’t meet its enlistment goals, and US weapons are much more expensive and far slower to produce than their enemies. The West can’t even supply Ukraine with enough artillery shells, drones and ammunition: but China, North Korea, Iran and Russia together have been able to keep Russia armed to the teet.
The US navy still has the largest tonnage, but can’t fully man all its ships, and as noted early, China has far more shipbuilding capacity, and it now has as many ships as the US. They are pushing in on technology which will allow them to detect submarines at great distances.
The US no longer has bigfoot capacity: it can’t easily occupy foreign countries any more and it can’t hit them while not being hit in return, as the multiple strikes on US bases and the closing of the Red Sea show.
It’s over. The world economy is re-orienting to China. They will have first dibs on resources because they offer a better deal on almost everything. Soon there will be nothing important one can’t buy from China or Russia, and for less than the West can sell it for.
The US and Europe need the global south—they need those resources, but the South will have little reason to sell to us, and will prefer China and Russia and so on. (France is being kicked out Africa, right now, in exchange for Russia and China.)
Military might will continue to tend to China and Russia, it is a lagging indicator on industrial power and technological lead, and we have already lost both of those.
It’s over. We lost without most of us even realizing we’d lost. When we decided to send our industry to China in exchange for some of our elites getting richer faster for three decades, we decided to give up our centuries old hegemony.
This isn’t to say all is woe, or that Western countries who are smart can’t maintain good standards of living. But we can only do so if we stop pretending we’re #1, the hegemonic civilization and everyone else has to kiss our asses or else.
The Euro-American centuries are OVER. We had a good run, but all runs end. We could have eked it out for a few more generations, but decay always begins at home. We gave our lead away, deliberately and as policy.
And a lot of countries, with good reason, hate our guts. They will get their kicks in as we go down.
We’d better learn humbleness, contrition and cooperation, we’re going to need them. And our elites need to be defenestrated as a class if the rest of us are to have any chance at decent lives.
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By Bruce Wilder
Sometimes a comment is better than the post which inspired. This is one of those cases . — Ian
The New Deal created a balanced system of countervailing power on variations of the theory that the political power of citizens working together could oppose and balance the power of the wealthy and business corporations. Labor unions. Public utility regulation. Savings & Loans and credit unions and local banks to oppose the money center giants. Farmers’ cooperatives. A complex system of agricultural supports to limit the power of food processors. Antitrust. Securities and financial markets regulation.
Yes, the rich kept fighting their corner.
When ordinary people had it good by the 1960s, they stopped caring. Or maybe their children never started caring, having never experienced the worst oppressions the wealthy could dole out. Friedman’s message was a simple, deceptive one: the economy ran itself. Government was irrelevant, the problem not a solution. Consumers had sovereignty over business in “the market”. The New Deal as political project ran out of steam as politicians stopped thinking that “fighting for” the common man, the general welfare, the public interest was a genuine vocation or a vote-getter. The rhetoric continued to be used by Democrats to the turn of the century, but the meaning had drained away with emergence of left neoliberalism in Carter’s Administration.
Friedman had an apparently persuasive theory of the case that he made align with people’s desires and illusions.
The institutional base of the liberal classes eroded away. The intellectual basis faded rapidly. FDR’s agricultural policy was one the most successful industrial policies ever enacted. I have never encountered a reputable economist, even a supposed specialist in agriculture, who could even outline its main features. Most take the Chicago line that it was all smoke and mirrors, an illusionist’s trick — that the tremendous shift in resources and growth in productivity was “a natural” emergence that would happen anyway despite gov’t policy. Nixon subverted the whole scheme, helping to make the whole population sick and fat. Nothing to see here. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.
The disastrous deregulation of banking and finance was a far more public spectacle than the dismantling of agriculture, but it has never provoked any sustained political movement in favor of even the simplest reforms, let alone a theory of financial reform. Watching “It’s a Wonderful Life” at Thanksgiving is as close as most come to the intellectual outlook of the New Deal.
I have heard it as the theory of 500. Societies of more than 500 or so require institutions of collective government to prevent the worst sort dominating everyone else and the worst usually manage to subvert government to their own ends any way, making the state an agent of oppression. FDR managed to pull together a wildly disparate coalition to create a government that succeeded for a time in constraining the worst impulses of the wealthiest and the business corporations.
It has failed in large part because the many could not remain even minimally organized or informed, free to even a small degree from cheap manipulation of impulse and prejudice.
And From Purple Library Guy:
And this is the fundamental problem with social democracy in general. While they’re in power they can make a nice system, but since it’s predicated on allowing people who want to trash that system to still control most of the wealth, it will inevitably die fairly soon.
I’m just finishing up reading Ed Broadbent’s book “Seeking Social Democracy”, and I found myself impressed by his decency, his erudition, some of his takes on practical politics . . . he was a good man, a very good man. But, he didn’t really grapple with this fundamental issue which in my opinion dooms his project.