Last week I spotted a piece in the Washington Post, a worldwide poll which indicated a growing disenchantment with democracy as an effective form of government. The negative response was more pronounced amongst millennials than any other age cohort. There was also a rising preference for strong leadership instead of elections. It was slight in the UK, pronounced in Germany and strong in Spain, South Africa and Russia.
This is surprising given a conversation I’d been having a few days earlier about how in my youth in the 1960s there’d been a global rebellion against the establishment. From the music revolution in the UK to the Paris riots to Woodstock to the Washington anti- Vietnam War protests in Washington to the more extreme Baader-Meinhof terrorists in Germany. Millennials were seemingly all into free love, flower power and revolution.
The words of Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” linger in my mind recalling that world which was finding its voice and swinging leftwards:
“We are stardust
We are golden
And we've got to get ourselves
Back to the garden”
We believed we were golden as the old order crumbled.
(All shades of red above and getting redder as authoritarianism strengthens.)
Like it or not we’ve recently been swinging towards totalitarianism
Trump is not an aberration. He’s a sign of the times and of things to come. There are reactions of course like BLM and environmental activists like Greta Thunberg but they are ultimately being drowned out. People are frightened and when that happens they veer right. They’re frightened that things seem out of control.
The second conversation was with someone who’s lived and worked in China for 20 years. He described a country where Covid is now over (no more face masks) and where the economy is booming. The rules to contain the pandemic were and are still rigorous. Anyone – Chinese or foreign - entering the country or returning to the country is quarantined for two weeks, isolated in a hotel room near the airport…quite a nice hotel but, nonetheless, a prison. In China no one breaks out of their bio-secure bubble; everyone obeys the guidelines and the law. One shudders to imagine how the Chinese authorities would have treated those rugby players, the Barbarians’ twelve, who evaded their security guards to have dinner together at an Italian Restaurant on Thursday night breaking the Covid code of conduct to which they’d agreed.
It’s behaviour like that that inspires so many people to say they want a more strict enforcement of rules and a more widespread lockdown.
China is a country without compromise when it comes to law enforcement and although the liberal in me shrinks it’s seemed to work. Interestingly within China there seems to be a widespread acknowledgement that they’d “been eating the US lunch for years” and that the election of Donald Trump was of a US President that China deserved.
But look at China today and you see the second biggest global economy emerging relatively unscathed from the pandemic that’s wrecked the rest of the global economy.
(Jan. 2019 – Aug. 2020)
China unlike most other nations has a long term strategy to achieve stability and growth. They seem intent on avoiding unnecessary trouble. When I asked about Hong Kong my friend looked puzzled – “well that’s all over now. China is in charge. Stability is the winner once again.”
How curious to regard China as a role model. We don’t want to know about what happens to those who step out of line. So much has happened that we want to ignore like Tiananmen Square massacre in the past, like the repression of the Uighurs now. But the fact that China has 61 self-made women billionaires (2/3 of all those in the world) and that they have a new generation of aspiring, linguistically adept and smart young people is rather impressive.
Many are wondering if “benevolent” dictatorship works. “Benevolent”? Just let me think about that.
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