Hello everyone, welcome to the first Upheaval subscriber community thread. Thanks very much to all of you who have offered your generous support and already subscribed. Far more people chose the annual option than I’d anticipated, which is an inspiring vote of confidence that I truly appreciate.
People are still in the process of signing up (the 20% lifetime discount ends Monday: tell all your friends!), so I don’t know what the turnout will be for this thread. But I encourage you all to participate. I’m going to keep recommending readings in each of these threads, but that doesn’t mean you have to talk about them. You can recommend your own suggestions (I’m especially interested in seeing suggestions of other Substack writers’ work, including your own if it’s relevant). Offer any thoughts you may have on issues that you think are important or have gone unnoticed. Raise any questions or feedback you may have. I’ll be checking in now and then today and over the weekend to join in, and am genuinely interested in what you have to say.
Please be civil with each other. So far I haven’t engaged in any moderation, but I will step in if necessary if people cross the line in terms of personal attacks on others. You can always do that on Twitter.
Why the heck Douthat felt he had to frame this column around James Bond, I have no idea. I think he’s just really into movies, because this isn’t about 007. It’s about confused and uncertain views about China on the American political left and right that have emerged because “as it became clear that the opening to China was not leading to political liberalization, and as its socioeconomic costs to the American heartland became clear as well, there was an ideological scrambling that hasn’t ended yet.”
In his paragraphs on the right, he writes:
The right includes several tendencies as well. There’s a Cold War 2.0 mentality, which fears China as a sweeping ideological threat, a fusion of old-model Communism with 21st-century surveillance technology that promises to make totalitarianism great again. There’s a realist perspective that regards China as a traditional great-power rival and focuses on military containment. And there’s a view that sees China and the United States as actually converging in decadence — with similar problems, from declining birthrates to social inequalities to internet-mediated unhappiness.
But for some on the right, that last view comes with a wrinkle, where the Chinese state is almost admired for trying to act against this decadence — as in its attempt to wean young people off the “spiritual opium” of video gaming — in a way that liberal societies cannot.
That first link is to my essay in Palladium on Wang Huning, so let me clarify that I was not trying to be admiring of China, merely describe what they (or at least Wang) believe and are doing.
But I do think the American right is going to have to be prepared to face some awkward comparisons on China moving forward. Currently China is an easy threat for the right to automatically trumpet as the top foe to America. And there are plenty of valid reasons to be quite concerned about China’s rise and a potential future Chinese-dominated world (see Part 1 and Part 2 of my series on China). But at the same time – to oversimplify – China’s new political program is to go left on economic policy and right on culture. Meanwhile the American right’s post-Trump program is – again oversimplifying – to move left on economic policy and right on culture.
So I’d predict that the right will increasingly find themselves noticing instances in which they sympathize more with Beijing’s approach than (Biden) Washington’s approach, and then feeling a bit dirty about it. I mean, “meanwhile in China…” is alreadypractically a meme of the online right.
But as Douthat concludes, “Americans have never exactly excelled at understanding other societies,” and:
Behind all of these differences is a question: What kind of regime is China, really? A Marxist-Leninist state with capitalist trimmings? An authoritarian meritocracy? A fascist state with Maoist characteristics? A new form of digitized totalitarianism? A neo-Confucian order, channeling ancient conservatism through modern one-party rule? A dark-mirror version of internet-age America?
So I’d agree that, whether hawkish or dovish on China, everyone in the West would probably be better off with more overall knowledge about China and a more nuanced ability to think about how to deal with it.
More follow-up news relevant to my recent musings on cultural and economic despair in China:
About 44% of women respondents said they do not plan to marry, compared to nearly 25% of men. The survey was conducted by the Research Center of the Central Committee of the Communist Youth League and involved unmarried urbanites aged 18-26. As China seeks to boost birth rates, many of its young people have doubts about starting families. An estimated 8 million couples married in 2020, compared to 13 million in 2013, a 39% drop, according to official statistics.
…
When asked about their “willingness to fall in love,” 12.8% of respondents chose “not willing to fall in love” and 26.3% said “not sure.” About 25% said they were “not sure” about getting married, and 8.9% said they “will not get married,” which means 34% of youths no longer consider marriage as a matter of course. In addition, nearly 30% of the young people interviewed said they had never been in love.
…
In addition, 30.5% of young people said they “do not believe in marriage” due to their own negative experiences and the portrayal of toxic relationships in the media.
Interesting Economist piece on how online surveillance and censorship is spreading around the world as a new norm, including, as profiled here, in: Russia, the Philippines, India, Egypt, Turkey, the UAE, Thailand, Vietnam, Saudi Arabia, Myanmar, and Bangladesh. But I do find it odd that many other countries moving forward with increasingly robust joint public-private online censorship regimes were somehow excluded from this discussion…
Whenever the French huff that some unwished-for social development, from school shootings to “safe spaces” in universities, could “only happen in America” (or, more broadly “chez les Anglo-Saxons”), you can reliably bet on it reaching France within five years. And so it is with new intergenerational woke wars among the staff of liberal media institutions like Libération… or even — whisper it — in some departments of the venerable Le Monde.
Very interesting essay by Rutherford on the “Blue Labour” group trying, in part, to wake up the British left to what’s gone wrong and move it in a more productive and successful direction:
Progressive politics on both the left and right in England, in particular, has lost a conception of a meaningful life. It has lost the idea of a common good that can build bridges between different groups and classes through democratic politics. It communicates in the rationalist abstractions of equality, diversity and sustainability. Its predominant view is that human beings are social constructions. The human body is infinitely malleable and freedom is potentially unlimited. Any notion of “human nature” is considered a reactionary idea in which biology determines our destiny and so limits individual freedom.
…
The rise of the higher-educated middle classes and their counter cultures of liberation began in the 1960s. Hannah Arendt warned that to live without authority, and without an understanding that the source of authority lies not in power, and those who exercise it, but in tradition, is to be confronted with the “elementary problem of humans living together”. The left has no answers to this elementary problem. It turned its back on its own national traditions and, like a provincial cousin, looked to the United States for inspiration.
…
The Labour Party has lost its identity and its struggling leadership has pursued policies without politics, and tactics without strategy – what Sun Tzu calls “the noise before defeat”. Trapped by its conventionality and a culture that lacks intellectual curiosity, it has been engulfed in an ending whose meaning it cannot grasp. In the last decade, Labour has been beaten in four general elections, two European elections and a referendum; defeats symptomatic of a deeper malaise. Labour no longer possesses the intellectual and philosophical resources for a political renascence and it does not look beyond itself to acquire them. A new era is beginning and it is leaving progressive politics behind.
"What kind of a regime is China?" That is why I find your writing so invaluable--to attempt to come at this question from your unique ideological outlook (outside of the more traditional left or right paradigm).
Edward Snowden in his relatively recent book "Permanent Record" seems to endorse the dark-mirror surveillance version of U.S./China with his statement that "...there was simply no way for America (meaning specifically the NSA and CIA) to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without having done some of the very same things itself, and I had the sneaking sense that while I was looking through all this material that I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America."
Thanks! Yes, I increasingly find the left-right categorization mostly meaningless and useless for understanding politics today. Maybe I'll write something on this at some point.
Yes, we among the politically homeless would value your insight and clarity on this. My sense is that the legacy left/right framing is an increasingly lazy and unhelpful way to think about both domestic and international issues.
Having just read your Palladium article on Wang Huning, I browsed the rest of your work and felt the need to pay you immediately. I look forward to your engaging work Mr. Lyons. Thank you
I had the same reaction, I read the article went to the sub stack and read every article. I was unable to stop, finishing the same night at 4am. As soon as the ability to get a subscription appeared I got one year immediately. Even without any additional content I would consider it money well spent
Hello all. I'm a private citizen with an amateur interest in geopolitics and long-term societal and civilisational trends. I've found The Upheaval a fascinating read.
Thinkers that I've been exploring recently include Joseph Tainter, John Gray, and Paul Kingsnorth.
There's a fundamental difference between the upheavals in East and West, which I haven't seen discussed before. Birth rates and personal doomer-ism may be worse in East Asia, but the Western zeitgeist for cultural revolution is notably absent in Japan, Korea, or any Chinese-speaking society. Both civilizations have lost their traditional beliefs and social order, but only Westerners seem desperate for a replacement.
I think this difference has deep roots. Religious faith was always more important in Christendom than it was in East Asia, and Abrahamic faiths have been particularly brittle in the face of modernity. God died in the West, and Islamists are desperately trying to protect his wounded body. Buddha and Confucius, however, have simply faded into the background.
Come to think of it, I might turn this into a blog post. The subject is definitely worthy of a full essay.
Well, it looks like you have a lot more readers than commenters. This seems to be the case across substack. I was recently shocked to learn that Bari Weiss has about 15 times more subscribers than "likes" of any post. Is it really a minority habit to click the little heart? I guess so.
Anyway, my big question here is, who you are, Mr/Ms Lyons? Of course there is no real need to know, but I'm awfully curious.
Ha, that’s one question I won’t answer completely yet, though I may in the future. Mr. N.S. Lyons is a pen name, which I write under not for any nefarious conspiracy but simply to make it easier to write without self-censorship (this has been lovely so far, I really recommend it). I work in what you could call the broader U.S. foreign policy community, where nothing fun, interesting, or beautiful ever gets written. So I'm not anything so exciting as a Chinese agent, as a reporter from one national newspaper has already asked me directly, just tired of the eye-roll inducing tunnel-vision, historical ignorance, and general dullness of our national political and intellectual elite.
And yes, readers are quite timid about commenting. It’s at least an order of magnitude, between the number who read a post and hit like, and often another order of magnitude between that number and the number of those who comment. But never fear, the subscriber count it growing steadily, so I suspect the comment threads will grow more active and engaging in not too long a time.
I completely get that anonymity prevents self-censorship. I do appreciate knowing that you are part of the "broader US foreign policy community", which actually would have been my guess (he says, patting himself on the back). Perhaps at some point you could write about WHY "nothing fun" etc ever gets written from there. From the outside (I'm a STEM professor at a state university), it's all terribly opaque.
"What kind of a regime is China?" That is why I find your writing so invaluable--to attempt to come at this question from your unique ideological outlook (outside of the more traditional left or right paradigm).
Edward Snowden in his relatively recent book "Permanent Record" seems to endorse the dark-mirror surveillance version of U.S./China with his statement that "...there was simply no way for America (meaning specifically the NSA and CIA) to have so much information about what the Chinese were doing without having done some of the very same things itself, and I had the sneaking sense that while I was looking through all this material that I was looking at a mirror and seeing a reflection of America."
Thanks! Yes, I increasingly find the left-right categorization mostly meaningless and useless for understanding politics today. Maybe I'll write something on this at some point.
Yes, we among the politically homeless would value your insight and clarity on this. My sense is that the legacy left/right framing is an increasingly lazy and unhelpful way to think about both domestic and international issues.
Having just read your Palladium article on Wang Huning, I browsed the rest of your work and felt the need to pay you immediately. I look forward to your engaging work Mr. Lyons. Thank you
I had the same reaction, I read the article went to the sub stack and read every article. I was unable to stop, finishing the same night at 4am. As soon as the ability to get a subscription appeared I got one year immediately. Even without any additional content I would consider it money well spent
Hello all. I'm a private citizen with an amateur interest in geopolitics and long-term societal and civilisational trends. I've found The Upheaval a fascinating read.
Thinkers that I've been exploring recently include Joseph Tainter, John Gray, and Paul Kingsnorth.
There's a fundamental difference between the upheavals in East and West, which I haven't seen discussed before. Birth rates and personal doomer-ism may be worse in East Asia, but the Western zeitgeist for cultural revolution is notably absent in Japan, Korea, or any Chinese-speaking society. Both civilizations have lost their traditional beliefs and social order, but only Westerners seem desperate for a replacement.
I think this difference has deep roots. Religious faith was always more important in Christendom than it was in East Asia, and Abrahamic faiths have been particularly brittle in the face of modernity. God died in the West, and Islamists are desperately trying to protect his wounded body. Buddha and Confucius, however, have simply faded into the background.
Come to think of it, I might turn this into a blog post. The subject is definitely worthy of a full essay.
Please do, I'd be interested to read it!
Well, it looks like you have a lot more readers than commenters. This seems to be the case across substack. I was recently shocked to learn that Bari Weiss has about 15 times more subscribers than "likes" of any post. Is it really a minority habit to click the little heart? I guess so.
Anyway, my big question here is, who you are, Mr/Ms Lyons? Of course there is no real need to know, but I'm awfully curious.
Ha, that’s one question I won’t answer completely yet, though I may in the future. Mr. N.S. Lyons is a pen name, which I write under not for any nefarious conspiracy but simply to make it easier to write without self-censorship (this has been lovely so far, I really recommend it). I work in what you could call the broader U.S. foreign policy community, where nothing fun, interesting, or beautiful ever gets written. So I'm not anything so exciting as a Chinese agent, as a reporter from one national newspaper has already asked me directly, just tired of the eye-roll inducing tunnel-vision, historical ignorance, and general dullness of our national political and intellectual elite.
And yes, readers are quite timid about commenting. It’s at least an order of magnitude, between the number who read a post and hit like, and often another order of magnitude between that number and the number of those who comment. But never fear, the subscriber count it growing steadily, so I suspect the comment threads will grow more active and engaging in not too long a time.
I completely get that anonymity prevents self-censorship. I do appreciate knowing that you are part of the "broader US foreign policy community", which actually would have been my guess (he says, patting himself on the back). Perhaps at some point you could write about WHY "nothing fun" etc ever gets written from there. From the outside (I'm a STEM professor at a state university), it's all terribly opaque.