This is a reprinting form my Substack, found here.
Less Freedom, Less Abundance
I’m back from a two-week trip to China and will be writing about it in due time. The short version? My lefty friends were right: I’m a fascist! I’ve accepted it. If it takes fascism and rigorously enforced rules of civil behavior to create what I saw in China, then yes, I’m interested.
Speaking of fascism, NS Lyons recently delivered a boffo speech in Canada, where he traced the impulse within the classical West to limit freedom and block any effort to make European nations great again. As it turns out, China isn’t the only country that uses force to maintain power. For those struggling to understand where a “barbarian” like JD Vance comes from, consider this: NATO was created to defend freedom from the totalitarian East—yet now…
In France, where the ruling government maintains power despite being the most widely hated in decades, the most popular candidate of the most popular political party has been barred from challenging that government in upcoming elections, on legal grounds that are openly political.
In Romania, when the “wrong” outsider candidate appeared poised to win an election, authorities simply canceled the election outright and then had him arrested, the unelected national security state inventing entirely unsupported excuses about foreign meddling to justify their coup d’état against the democratic process.
In Germany, the state has now begun the process of banning the country’s most popular party, supported by more than a quarter of the voting population, in order to avoid facing any real political opposition. “We did it in Romania, and we will obviously have to do it in Germany, if necessary,” is how a former European Commissioner confidently foreshadowed events on live television a few months ago.
France, Romania, and Germany claim that their restrictions on political parties are safety measures—meant to protect the public from voting for so-called “far-right” candidates. And that’s the problem. What exactly is “right”? What danger does the far right represent? And what if the electorate is far right? These same nations have championed democracy in some of the most religiously conservative far right societies on Earth—the Middle East—but that standard doesn’t seem to apply at home. As far-right parties gain a growing share of the vote, so too grow the legal restrictions and institutional attacks against them.
In France, the far-right party is the National Front—rebranded as the National Rally, or Rassemblement National as they call it. Founded in 1972, the party has evolved over the years and now represents roughly a third of the electorate. It’s hard to summarize its platform in terms familiar to American politics but suffice it to say: it is not the French equivalent of the Republican Party. Like most French parties, it favors a large role for government in society. But it is not a classic socialist party, it doesn’t support cradle-to-grave welfare, and—most importantly—it believes that France, an ancient nation steeped in Christianity, should neither legally accept millions of immigrants nor allow them to stay illegally. That, in today’s Europe, is “far right.”
Germany, meanwhile, remains the object of global projection—forever tethered to its Nazi past. Right now, that means doing whatever it takes to prevent the rise of its version of the National Rally: Alternative für Deutschland, or AfD. Formed in 2013, the AfD has grown in sophistication and support. Like France’s far right, its core message is simple: end immigration, and preserve Germany as it has been known—Christian, German-speaking, and distinctly German. The current German government openly surveils the AfD and uses state power to hinder its growth. Yet despite this, the party holds seats at every level of government, dominates in the former East Germany, and represents at least 25% of the national vote.
And then there is Britain—the home of the Magna Carta, the mother of parliaments, the wellspring of American constitutional government. Lyons again:
In the United Kingdom, more than 12,000 people per year (that’s 33 per day on average) — are now arrested for speech- and literal thought-crimes, including silent prayer. UK jails now hold hundreds of political prisoners, more than anywhere else in Europe outside of Russia and Belarus. These are people persecuted for, essentially, voicing dissent over their government’s catastrophic policies. Recently, for instance, a British woman with no criminal history was jailed for more than two years for a single Facebook post criticizing the state’s willful failure to stop illegal migration.
Much ink has been spilled about China’s “social credit” system—and it sounds abhorrent to me. A Chinese friend told me that if he used bad language on WeChat, the app would shut down for a few hours to punish what the state deems anti-social behavior. But I have to ask: is the UK really any better, if they jail people for what they post on Facebook?
Think that’s an exaggeration? Here’s one of many videos showing police arresting citizens over Facebook posts:
So, what has happened here? Lyons offers his own description of what has become a widely discussed phenomenon in both the U.S. and Europe. In the American political context, it’s often called the “Deep State” or “The Swamp,” but Lyons frames it as a society-wide managerial phenomenon—one that transcends political boundaries and infiltrates every level of our lives.
What really ails our democracies? Not populism, but a regime type inimical to the essence of democracy itself. What we are witnessing around the world is a growing struggle between an entrenched technocratic elite class bent on exercising ever greater control, and common people in revolt against the tightening grip of their distant, opaque, uncaring, and unaccountable form of political regime.
The structure of this regime can be difficult for us to recognize and describe, because it is something relatively new to us, not matching the simple political categories we are taught to think within. It is neither democratic nor autocratic; power rests neither with the people nor with some dictatorial executive. Instead, real power is diffused across faceless bureaucracies, nameless processes, and numberless so-called “non-governmental” institutions, obfuscated by a façade of empty public rituals and the meaningless rhetoric of legalism.
The next time someone on Fox News or MSNBC talks about a “constitutional crisis,” “our democracy,” or “the rule of law,” the phrase meaningless rhetoric of legalism should be inserted in its place. The real drivers of our lives in “the West”—if that’s still what we want to call it—no longer reside in the constitutions or even the laws.
So, how did we get here? The same way they did in China, ancient Rome, and everywhere else: complex societies evolve this way.
The story begins with the managerial revolution, a phenomenon that followed on the heels of the industrial revolution. In government, in business, in education, and in almost every other sphere of life, new methods and techniques of organization emerged to manage the growing complexities of mass and scale produced by industrialization: the mass bureaucratic state, the mass standing army, the mass corporation, mass media, mass public education, and so on. Soon no major enterprise could function without employing a new kind of person: the manager, who possessed the highly technical and specialized cognitive knowledge, including new techniques of planning and procedure, necessary to make the organizational machine go.
This managerial impulse continues without limit, blending with economic motivations, capitalist incentives, and the occasional connection of an individual or family to the real ruling class—to form what amounts to the actual government. Lyons points to employment data showing the growing number of people in managerial roles, or in jobs so heavily regulated that the individual is no longer making real choices or engaging in any meaningful form of free enterprise. In the U.S., this includes education, healthcare, the legal system, and the military. For every job we shipped to China, we created at least one domestic job tethered to the regulatory state. How’s that for irony? The world’s preeminent democracy outsourced its free enterprise manufacturing model to a communist country—and now both nations have bloated public sectors stuffed with largely unaccountable managers.
The further irony? It wasn’t supposed to turn out this way. Lyons describes the original technocratic impulse: to depoliticize everything by putting experts in charge, trusting their knowledge to produce outcomes so effective that democracy would simply follow along. In many ways, this plan worked. But it also transferred moral authority to the experts. Values weren’t up for debate anymore—because the expert, by virtue of their credentials, held a monopoly on what was deemed valuable. Lyons, on what that meant:
Doing so would, however, require ensuring the rule of what Hegel once described as the “universal class”: the all-knowing, all-beneficent cadre of expert “civil servants.” Using their superior brains to operate on universal principles derived from pure reason, this class would, he thought, be uniquely equipped to determine and act in the universal interests of society with far more accuracy and objectivity than the ignorant and irrational masses.
Managerialism, what we can say is the de facto belief system of the managerial class, has therefore from the very beginning carried with it a markedly moralistic project of political and social transformation. Especially after the horrors of the two world wars, the West’s managerial elite elevated this project to a central position in their self-conception, coming to see themselves as the saviors and guardians of all humanitarian peace and progress on earth.
So they were—and still are—a sort of priestly class that does not permit the heresy of dissent. But what exactly do they believe in? What order are they upholding?
They include technocratic scientism, the belief that everything, including society and human nature, can and should be fully understood and controlled through scientific and technical means.
Next, clearly a hedonistic materialism, the belief that this world is all there is, and that complete human happiness and well-being fundamentally is achievable through the fulfillment of a sufficient number of material needs and psychological desires alone.
And a utopian progressivism, the belief that a perfect society is possible through the perfect application of scientific and technical knowledge. That the machine can ultimately be optimized to run flawlessly. This state of perfection is taken to be the telos, or pre-destined end point, of human development. This creates the idea of progress, or of moving closer to this final end. History then has a teleology: it bends towards utopia. Therefore the future is necessarily always better than the past, as it is closer to utopia. History thus takes on moral valence; top-down change is progress; progress is moral; to “go backwards” is immoral.
This leads, in turn, to a homogenizing cosmopolitan universalism: The belief that: a) all human beings are fundamentally interchangeable units and members of a single universal community; b) that the systemic “best practices” discovered by scientific management are universally applicable in all places and for all people in all times, and that therefore the same optimal system should rationally prevail everywhere; c) that, while perhaps quaint and entertaining, any non-superficial particularity or diversity of place, culture, custom, nation, or government structure anywhere is evidence of an inefficient failure to successfully converge on the ideal managerial system; and d) that any form of localism or particularism is therefore not only inefficient and backwards but an obstacle to human progress, and so also both dangerous and immoral. Progress will always naturally entail consolidation and homogenization.
Seen through this system of beliefs and values, it becomes much easier to understand why the managerial class in Europe, Britain, and America seeks to limit the National Rally, the AfD, British border hawks, Trump, the GOP, rowdy young men, MAGA, Putin (for believing in Russian exceptionalism), Jews (for clinging to their God), and any means of communication that expresses dissent or attempts to organize against what is, in effect, a form of religious rule.
Which brings me back to my original reflection about identifying as a “fascist.” China is an openly authoritarian state—but it delivers rigorous order. In its major cities, there’s little visible crime, a sense of safety, clean streets, and no homeless drunks passed out in broad daylight. What we have now in the West is a hidden authoritarianism—one that refuses to deliver order to the people who still want it, even as it strips away their freedom. That’s where I find myself: I want freedom, but I also want public order, open markets, sound money, and beautiful cities. What we’ve got instead are the worst elites in the world—offering neither freedom nor order.
And, as Lyons describes it, it’s our own damn fault. We got here through the slow withering of our culture, as we demanded that technocrats smooth out the rough edges of life. Self-governance—once the ideal—requires that we actually govern ourselves, which many Americans are manifestly not doing. Our forebears were a far hardier lot, and we’ve called in more managers to carry the burden we no longer carry ourselves. We can’t manage our food intake—or, often, our most basic emotions and impulses. So now, there has to be a law for things that never required one before—because no one in the past was doing so many ridiculous things.
Lyons explains this in his own way, and I in mine. I harp on culture because to me, it represents the collective result of individual choices. And at least part of what I saw in China was cultural. They have fewer freedoms—but better impulse control. Maybe they’re emerging from a totalitarian past into a new cultural phase where things can get done without obvious coercion.
That shouldn’t mean we need to pass through a totalitarian phase to recover our culture and sense of governance. There is a better way. Lyons quotes the German war hero and literary figure Ernst Jünger, who called on individuals to display true character—not to have it imposed on them by the state.
The German war hero and anti-Nazi philosopher Ernst Jünger, who experienced totalitarianism first hand, concluded that its emergence was the product of a societal dynamic arching between two poles: at one end, the managerial Leviathan’s hunger for “imperial expansion and perfect security;” at the other, “the individual, suffering and defenseless, and in an equally perfect state of insecurity.” The desperate search for perfect security produced catastrophe.
Our collective retreat into mechanistic thinking and our subsequent surrender to total control is the product of our own cowardice and passivity. Confident and vital peoples do not submit to the temptations of totalitarian false certainty. Hence why Jünger insisted that the emergence of widespread atomization and fear in society was “a clearer omen of downfall” for a nation “than any physical danger.”
More than anything else, it is the dull stupidity of fear that truly ails our democracies today. We must be bolder.
So, in the end, it’s on us—the citizens of these countries—to resist the numbing effect of the managerial state, take responsibility for ourselves, do hard things, harden our minds and bodies, and defend our civilization from the weak, the timid, the unhealthy, the dishonest, the self-serving, and the foolish. That’s a tall order—but then, freedom is a tall order. The Chinese have found their way to obvious prosperity after decades of brutal hardship. We don’t have to follow the same path, but we can no longer rely on experts or elites to lead us to a better place. One virtuous step at a time, we have to get there ourselves.
The full text of the speech is here
The British and American Stages of Grief
Buried in my memory is a great film called All That Jazz, a semi-autobiographical story about choreographer Bob Fosse. Fosse was a true original, a product of an era of stellar American creativity. I would argue that era has passed, and we’re now stuck in a doom loop of derivative, subpar art—but that’s another story.
In All That Jazz, Fosse is played by Roy Scheider—a man so memorable as Chief Brody in Jaws that it’s hard to picture him as anyone other than the guy trying to save the town from a killer shark. But Scheider was a remarkably talented actor, and All That Jazz stands as a landmark film of artistic achievement. It even introduced us to Jessica Lange, for example.
That movie was also the first place I encountered the Kübler-Ross five stages of grief, depicted powerfully in a clip from All That Jazz.
Over at Quillette, Andrew Ross uses this same cycle to describe the decline and fall of the British Empire—and states, in clear, sobering, and unequivocal terms, that the United States is following the same path as China rises. Here is the introduction:
The via dolorosa presently stretched before the United States will likely encompass the replacement of the dollar as the global currency of last resort, the recognition that the South China Seas are no longer navigable by the US Navy, the understanding that Africa has been effectively colonized by China, and the possible swallowing of Ukraine by Russia and Taiwan by China. If the United States maintains its present course, Americans should prepare themselves for a century of humiliating retreats.
It doesn’t get much clearer than that. Roberts takes the reader through a concise history of the sad decline of the British Empire after the end of World War II, highlighting five key stages along the way.
The first was denial—over the loss of the crown jewel of the Empire, India, in 1947. It was said that India would remain in the Commonwealth and that nothing had truly changed. But it had.
The second stage was anger, exemplified by the Suez Crisis of 1956. British, French, and Israeli forces attempted to retake the canal zone from Egypt, but American opposition forced a British retreat. The weakness of the British position was exposed for all to see. From that point on, it was clear that America ruled the Western world.
In the 1960s, the British entered a phase of negotiation and clung desperately to their relationship with the United States. They supported the Americans during the Cuban Missile Crisis and the Berlin Airlift, but notably stayed out of the Vietnam War. The British avoided the hottest theaters of the Cold War, relying on their American counterparts to carry the burden. Perhaps, in their minds, they were still part of the world’s power structure—but they were not.
The 1970s marked a period of depression. Britain sank into economic despondency, with trade unions paralyzing the country and earning it the label “the sick man of Europe.” It was during this era that Britain came to terms with its decline, acknowledging the loss of power and prestige, and grappling with the fading identity of a nation that once proudly sang Rule, Britannia! Britannia rules the waves! Britannia ruled nothing—and would go on to not even rule Britannia.
The 1980s brought acceptance. Margaret Thatcher aligned closely with Ronald Reagan, serving as a staunch ally and advisor. But even she could not reverse the tide. The British seemed to have finally accepted that their greatness was gone, and that a once-mighty empire had shriveled into a nation of eccentrics. Cool Britannia, as brought forth by Mick Jagger, was a poor substitute for Rule, Britannia.
And so, the long era of British excellence—the exemplary civil service, the principled rule of law, the restraint on government power, the global advancement of liberty, Christian human rights, and industrial scientific progress—came to an end. The greatness of Britain is finished. The only question that remains is: will America follow? And will the Chinese take our place?
Mr. Ross states clearly that he believes the United States is following the same trajectory—and that the outcome is inevitable unless the nation can recover its vigor and spirit. This, of course, brings us back to culture. Here is how he sums up his prognosis:
Is all this inevitable? Not if the United States can grasp the leadership of the West once more instead of wallowing in self-destructive and profoundly decadent obsessions with its own faults, real and imagined. The United States ought to heed the words of Winston Churchill during the Munich Debate of October 5th, 1938. The people, he said, should be told that “we have sustained a defeat without a war, the consequences of which will travel far with us along our road; they should know that we have passed an awful milestone in our history … And do not suppose that this is the end. This is only the beginning of the reckoning. This is only the first sip, the first foretaste of a bitter cup which will be proffered to us year by year unless by a supreme recovery of moral health and martial vigour, we arise again and take our stand for freedom as in the olden time.”
I love my country, and I’m glad to be home—where I can listen to country music, eat steak, and dance the two-step. But when I look around, I see a society that is not ready for what’s coming. The Chinese aren’t kidding—they’re serious about achievement, and their youth don’t hate China, nor are they being raised to.
I haven’t resigned myself to the inevitability of American decline, even as I acknowledge and admire China’s rise. I genuinely liked the people there. I want our two nations to live in cooperative peace.
But if this becomes a contest of power, the United States—at least in its current weakened state—will lose. We need to break out of the grief cycle and get back to kicking ass. We’re not dead yet, and we don’t have to die.
But die we might. Bob Fosse died unrepentant—and met a beautiful angel at the end. Endings are rarely that lovely, and I don’t see any angels in America’s future—only the ugly work of facing the truth and dealing with it.
Here is the end of All That Jazz, which I claim is yet another example of the excellence once possible within the American cultural sphere. Fosse, dying of heart disease, stages the show in his mind as he confronts death—and the wreckage of the lives he’s damaged along the way.
Show me a film from the past thirty years with that kind of breadth and creativity.
The Ross article can be found here:
OK, Am I A Fascist?
A few months ago, I listened to an interview on Honestly, Bari Weiss’s journalism project, where she spoke with two Democrats—Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson—about the state of the Democratic Party and their new book on “abundance.” I took in as much as I could stand, but to me, these two—and much of the Democratic establishment—are completely out of touch with what motivates a truly exotic species such as myself. They shrink people like me down to the simplistic label of “Trump voter,” and gloss over fundamental prerequisites for abundance, like law enforcement. At a certain point, I just throw up my hands and move on. I don’t see the future of abundance coming from the American left.
That said, Klein and Thompson recently appeared on the ChinaTalk Substack, where they spoke with a gentleman named Dan Wang. And Wang said something that really made me perk up:
Dan Wang: China is very messy. That is always my first proposition about China — it is very big, and many things are true about China all at the same time. They are a country that claims to be pursuing “socialism with Chinese characteristics,” which is still one of the most wonderful political science terms ever.
What sort of socialism is this? In my view, this is one of the most right-wing regimes in the world. A country that would make any American conservative salivate in terms of its immigration restrictions, its incredible amount of manufacturing prowess, and its enforcement of very traditional gender roles in which men have to be very macho and women have to bear children.
China is all of these things. It is also a place where there are really wonderful bike paths, specifically in Shanghai. This year, Shanghai has completed around 500 parks. By 2030, they want to create 500 more parks. It is a country that is getting better and getting worse all at the same time.
I was in Shanghai, and I saw those parks. Here’s a photo I took in People’s Park—a homeless-free, beautifully manicured space in the heart of a remarkably clean city that still retains many of the characteristics introduced by the Europeans.
Much of the discussion that follows echoes the internal conversation I’ve been having about what real strengths the U.S. brings to the table, what freedom is for and what it’s worth, and what the Chinese have managed to do by combining a capitalist economic model with an authoritarian political system. In this wide-ranging conversation, Klein and Thompson attempt to use the Chinese example to further support their vision of abundance.
Abundance liberalism is our answer to these new problems. It tries to synthesize the best of the New Deal order and the neoliberal order. The New Deal order taught us about the power of government to intervene and see what markets themselves cannot see. The neoliberal order recognized that government bureaucracy can sometimes get in its own way. We’re trying to advance a theory of progressive governance that sees how government creates rules for itself that make it harder to achieve outcomes.
Abundance liberalism finds a way to advance a muscular theory of government that says we can build houses, clean energy, and do extraordinary things with technology. But this requires identifying how we’ve written rules that get in our own way.
When I read about “abundance liberalism,” I’m reminded of the Lyons speech mentioned above. The new managerial class will be put in charge of abundance, and it will end up looking a lot like China—except with dirty streets, homeless encampments in public parks, graffiti everywhere, and “activists” blocking any real abundance from actually taking place.
My theory of abundance is that it grows from a culture that values getting things done, and from a set of principles that revere order, politeness, and living in harmony. American freedom was never meant to be the freedom to fail endlessly at public expense, to be obnoxious, to obstruct progress, or to ruin the enjoyment of everyday life for normal people trying to do normal things.
Do Klein or Thompson offer any real answers to the social dysfunction that plagues us? As far as I can tell, they do not. And China is not a leftist Communist country anymore. They are a capitalist country with an authoritarian framework that is ‘far right’ in every meaningful sense, and their system is working.
The full interview—well worth reading—is here
Finally, your music video of the week. Annie Lennox was a truly unique voice back in the day and her work with the Eurythmics was stellar, but her solo work was awesome as well. This gem was not a particularly big hit but it showcases her voice, which stood out in a era when Whitney Houston and Aretha Franklin were both active and on the radio.
TomRoushOnline 