If you’d like to see an excellent exercise in sophistry, you could do a lot worse than reading Keyu Jin’s essay at Project Syndicate which seeks to explain to us why Western concern over Xi Jinping’s effectively being named president for life is so misplaced and it is actually democratic reform. Also war is peace, freedom is slavery, and ignorance is strength.
In rebuttal I’ll only make one point. Over the period of the last two hundred years the United States has had one government. Over the same period China has had five (by some reckonings six or even more). One of the reasons for our relative stability and persistent success is that our system takes human nature into account. Without structural checks power will always seek more power.
It’s worth noting that after Tiananmen Square was far enough in the rear-view mirror that no one thought it would recur, there were serious people in the west who were almost afraid that China had effectively found a way to short-circuit the liberal model: China was reforming enough to develop a market-ish economy that could generate solid economic growth without liberalizing its politics, and now had a political system that allowed for enough reform and change within the Communist party to avoid (or at least, severely delay) a Brezhnev-style decay of the political class.
The fear was that’d make any meaningful reforms towards democracy impossible, since there’d be no to few sources of pressure for reform. (Amongst other things, it’s a lot harder to have a poster boy for political change if the leader on the poster keeps changing.) So those analysts must be pretty happy now, right?
Sophistry is an underused word in the English language.
The long term stability of dictatorships like Xi’s and authoritarian regimes like Putin’s allows those countries to pursue and achieve plans and goals that are impossible to democratic governments and their often chaotic, ad hoc policies that are driven by ephemeral trivia.
After the collapse of the Soviet Union, which happened because the Soviet Ruling Class lost the faith, Russia was saved by Putin, himself a product of the Soviet system. Putin is slowly rebuilding Russian power, despite the delusional analysis posted over at the Belmont Club. And Deng, averted the collapse of Chinese so-called “communism” by his reforms. Deng’s reforms, by the way, lifted over 300 million people from abject poverty to near Western levels of income, and brought 600 million people from near subsistence farming to an urban, industrial economy. That has to be the greatest economic achievement in history, and Deng has to be the most successful leader and economic theorist of all time.
Meanwhile the West is in utter disarray. It suffers from actual invasions (think end of western Roman Empire) by intensely hostile and alien races and incompetent, delusional and disgustingly corrupt (fiscally, sexually, violently, debauched) Rulers. Right now the Rulers are in open warfare with almost half of the Western population. We must be in the opening stages of a new French Revolution and Terror.