Decisive Decade
Great Power Competition between autocracy and democracy
On LinkedIn recently, I shared a very important read at a very important time. It underscored to me the idea that we live in a decisive decade for the near-term future of humanity.
Events of this decade will decide which of two key characteristics proliferates: individual liberty or centralized control.
Evan Osnos asks, in his New Yorker article: “Can Xi’s China still manage the pairing of autocracy and capitalism?”
I ask: do we want Xi to succeed in that pairing?
It has been called a new Cold War. However, today’s contest is more about political norms than economics. Rather than a contest between economic systems—communism versus capitalism—today’s Great Power Competition pits autocracy against democracy—a contest between political systems. Rule by all the people, with their conflicting priorities and beliefs, or rule by only the most powerful.
In the Cold War, the Soviet Union’s system of economic control lost to the west’s system of economic freedom. This decade pits western systems of political freedom against Chinese and Russian systems of political control.
Today’s Great Power Competition, as military leaders like to call it, raises interesting questions. For one, I often wonder: as technology proliferates, can a political unit hold together without centrally controlling the flow of information inundating its people? This decade will help decide.
For another: people hold the craziest beliefs; can a government survive if it protects each person’s right to believe complete falsehoods, if those falsehoods threaten the government’s hold on power itself? This decade will help decide.
The United States of America was formed by groups of people whose beliefs were not well tolerated by the existing government. Minority religious groups faced persecution for their beliefs. Furthermore, the majority of people found those minority’s beliefs off-putting. Mennonites, Jesuits, Salzburgers, Huguenots and others were considered outcasts, heathens, and apostates to the prevailing system of belief at the time.
The persecuted believers fled, and decided to dissolve the political bands which connected them to Great Britain. They eventually banded together just strongly enough to institute a new government, organizing its powers in such form as they thought best suited to effect their safety and happiness.
Today, groups of people whose beliefs are considered off-putting to the majority of their respective populations—Uighers in China and transgender ideologists in America, for example—are treated vastly differently in autocratic systems versus constitutional systems.
The autocratic government in control of the People’s Republic of China has the power to imprison Uighers and train them on “correct” beliefs in re-education camps.
Western governments, on the other hand, deliberately limit the power of government to exert such social control. For example, even if the majority of the people think it’s crazy for a male to believe he’s a woman, we don’t give our government the power to re-educate our transgender brothers, sisters, sons, and daughters. We love them for all their beauty as individual human beings, free to believe what experience has brought them to believe. We walk with them, as equally blind to the truth as they are, humbly seeking the grace to live with integrity as we stumble forward trying to love our neighbor as ourselves.
Nonetheless, the draw of autocracy is powerful. Indeed, even many freedom-loving Americans are enthralled at the lure of loyalty to outsized personalities over loyalty to the rule of law. Many—perhaps the majority—would welcome autocracy as long as “their” autocrat is at the helm, with the power to re-educate those who don’t hold the same beliefs they hold.
In this age of information abundance, can a constitutional system focused on individual freedom protect the sovereignty of individual human beings, with their panoply of sometimes outlandish beliefs? As technology helps believers propagate a bunch of “crazy” ideas, does the government need more power to decide what information we view and share? After all, we don’t choose our beliefs, but we do get to choose what information to engage with. We decide where to direct our attention.
Although powerful interest groups like corporations and media outlets exert massive influence over where we direct our attention, we still have the autonomy to disconnect from the flows of information they employ. We can quit using social media, attend a different church, go for a hike in the woods, change the channel, and more.
Choosing where to direct our attention is not always easy, though. The lurid, outrageous, cute, and disgusting draw us in. Do we deserve an autocracy that drives our attention to what most people believe? Do we deserve to be compelled toward “common sense”? Should we grant government the power to “disappear” minority beliefs, and direct our attention to more agreeable majority beliefs instead?
The decisive decade of Great Power Competition will help decide.
Whereas in China the professional military exists to serve a political party, secure that party’s hold on power, and enforce that party’s particular collection of beliefs, in the United States of America the professional military exists to serve a system that divides power equally among three branches of government, and lets those branches struggle amongst each other for what limited power is enumerated to them by the people, enshrined in the constitution.
Today it is as important as ever for the professional military to stay above party politics. It is a moral imperative to ensure western democratic forms of government prevail in the cold conflict against autocracy.