Commentary

The United States (the West) cannot beat the Chinese communist regime at its game: centralization of money and power coupled to an industrial policy that floods the world with underpriced exports. Economic domination. For the West to match China, a nation with no history of human rights or democracy, which is China’s comparative advantage, the West would have to abandon its comparative advantage: social, political, and economic freedom.

Or, the West can conscientiously reinforce those freedoms by returning (at least in the United States) to its founding principles: citizens on their own, limited government.

When the West colonized Africa, Latin America, India, and East Asia, it abandoned its principles. Severely reprimanded when those nations threw off their colonizers, the West now has no desire to return—except that those nations today, realizing they can’t make it on their own, want the West to return.

Guess who’s filling the gap? The Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Silk-Road colonizers in the worst sense. Racist, classist; building roads, railroads, ports, mines—for China’s use, not theirs—and burying military supplies, like Hamas in Gaza, like the Germans in Africa in the 1930s under the pretext of anthropology. “Raiders of the Lost Ark.” Exploitation. Preparation for war.

The CCP supports “progressivism’s” hatred of the United States, “woke” cancelation of speech and classical studies, and progressives’ reversal of what the American Founding Fathers gave to the United States.

The Founding Fathers gave us freedom from government rather than freedom with government. They gave us maximum individual liberty in exchange for maximum individual responsibility; government so small citizens wouldn’t see it; society that develops without planning, spontaneously, as if led by an invisible hand (according to Adam Smith, this is organization better than anything man can do by design). Citizens were to be left on their own, with a Jeffersonian democracy.

Supporting the reversal of all this, the Chinese regime might win. Knowing we can’t go back, the CCP just needs to keep us confused—with hacking, spying, and fake news.

We can’t go back because there are no politicians willing to sacrifice their careers to do so. Before a joint session of Congress, President Joe Biden asked anyone willing to cut Social Security to please stand up. No one did. THERE IT WAS, before the whole nation, the whole world, the perfect moment for a leader to have stood up—the future president of the United States, the future leader of the free world.

With our comparative advantage, “citizens on their own,” a freedom worth fighting for, no one stood up. Someone should have, because the Chinese, not on their own, living under totalitarianism, their definition of freedom, may very well not be willing to fight. Let’s call their bluff!

Their Cultural Revolution, 1966 to 1976, in which Chinese communism brutally purged every last remnant of capitalism and tradition, is not so far in the past that no one remembers. Nor is the Tiananmen Square Massacre. Hoping the Chinese forget, pushing the United States to keep drifting toward European socialism, Chinese leader Xi Jinping is biding his time.

Half free, half slave, with only 36 percent of the nation proficient in reading and math (U.S. Department of Education statistics for the last 50 years), the United States is considered by Mr. Xi to be an easy target.

He encourages U.S. progressives to continue taking America’s freedoms for granted, mock the nation’s values, and support the nation’s teachers in their “cultural revolution,” the brainwashing of U.S. children to consider America’s radical activist Founding Fathers villains rather than heroes.

A 20-year-old American student once said: “People my age don’t really love America. And if you don’t love it, you can’t protect it.”

No other nation in the world focuses its teaching on its marginal members, encouraging them to unite and rise. France’s education minister (on television and in the news) continually warns France not to look at American multiculturalism. French education exists to unify and bond French citizens by focusing exclusively on the history and culture of France. For the United States, it should be to focus exclusively on the history and culture of British and American democracy.

Mr. Xi is also aware of American isolationism—George Washington’s Farewell Address warning the nation to avoid foreign entanglements, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s Farewell Address warning the nation to beware the military-industrial complex, to not let it push us into war.

Consider the War of 1812. Attacking Washington D.C., the British were astonished to discover that there was nothing to burn. U.S. patriots grabbed Betsy Ross’s flag and original copies of the Declaration of Independence, Constitution, and Bill of Rights, and ran. We were a Jeffersonian democracy. No government!

Influenced by Jefferson and Madison’s idea that “there is no need for government” except as a neutral third party to protect life, liberty, and property (in that “not all men are angels”), the Founding Fathers granted the federal government very little power. This is in the Constitution’s “enumerated powers clause,” Article 1, Section 8 (with a few elsewhere in the Constitution): a post office, a navy, a patent office, nothing that couldn’t be jobbed out to the private sector—to Amazon; to Underwriters Laboratories (UL), which monitors electrical appliances at a level of safety far stricter than any government agency; to a military run by private contractors, like the Taliban that defeated the United States in Afghanistan.

The United States today is not only overburdened with the size of government, but also with the political burden of having to achieve diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) in outcome and employment, a distraction guaranteed to achieve failure. As in the competitive private sector, firms that take total focus off production fail. Silicon Valley Bank. The nation’s public schools.

The California Department of Education (in the name of equity) proportionally distributes property tax revenue to every school district in the state. Collected from the state’s urban population, that tax is distributed to rural and suburban school districts so that they, too, have million-dollar schools, small class sizes, gymnasiums, and band instruments.

For whom? For students whose parents fled the crime and culture of the city for paradise in nature—when in fact urban schools, with their social workers, psychologists, counselors, art, music, physical education teachers, sport facilities, and students with learning disabilities, are suffering from a lack of funds. They are suffering also because they divert too much time and resources to DEI, which has the effect of lowering test scores.

For 63 cents (in the name of equity) the post office delivers a letter hundreds of miles from an urban center, when in fact the true cost of that delivery, $5, is subsidized by residents in urban centers who otherwise would be paying 5 cents a letter.

Is there an Achilles’ heel to the ugliness of autocracy? Yes. The governments of China, Russia, and Iran all fear political instability, revolution. Should their population realize that it is being abused, that it may die from pollution (Beijing), or lose what little economic freedom it has, or undergo another “cultural revolution,” there is risk of revolution.

Autocracies can stifle a single person, a small group, but not the entire population. As China and Russia send evil messages to the West, so too should the West flood autocracies with inspiring messages of freedom.

The Soviet Union infiltrated American labor unions in the 1930s and 1940s. It was ostensibly to promote higher wages and better working conditions and to embarrass the nation for its bad treatment of African Americans, but in reality the Soviet Union was simply using the nation’s discomfort from the Great Depression to try to bring an end to capitalism. It is why Franklin Roosevelt created the Works Progress Administration (WPA): to keep artists and intellectuals, most of whom were communist, fully employed. To keep their minds off revolution.

The West usually does not have megalomaniacal leaders, which is why it doesn’t recognize them until it’s too late. The emergence of German and Japanese fascism before World War II caught the West off guard.

This time, however, the world’s fascist leaders—Xi Jinping, Vladimir Putin, and Ali Khamenei—are moving so slowly the West doesn’t notice. Their hope: By the time the West does notice, it will be too late. Those autocracies will have too great a lead.

The future’s looking ugly.