Fear of China runs deep in the American psyche, as particularly evident during the recent 19th Party Congress. The New York Times declared with typical American hubris, ‘Seven Men Now Run China’ and ‘China Enshrines ‘Xi Jinping Thought,’ Elevating Leader to Mao-like status.’ These sensationalist headlines obscure a worrying truth: China now functions better politically than America.
Continue reading “The Rise of China and America’s Demo-Crisis”
Liberals have descended into a simplistic sensationalism. To many Stanford students, Trump’s rise meant no less than the apocalypse and even created a whole new vocabulary of post-truth, PC culture and fake-news. But, to make matters worse, this was far from an American apocalypse. In fact, Trump’s election caused a wave of Western democracies to fall to the disastrous forces of populism like dominos. This ‘apocalypse’ stretched across the European continent with far right-wing parties and movements espousing nationalistic, anti-immigration rhetoric making great progress in France, Britain, Finland, Hungary, Latvia, Lithuania, Norway, Switzerland and even Austria just a couple of weeks ago. Slightly more sophisticated and level-headed accounts do not hold Trump himself responsible for the trend, but implicate greater forces of discontent associated with globalization. From this perspective, Trump was one of the first figures to vocalize the piling grievances of ‘globalization’s losers.’
Stanford Sphere 