How Do We Push Back: Left, China, Germany?

I just saw a piece by Victor Davis Hanson, basically arguing that Germany was up to its old tricks. He quotes Angela Merkel:

She insisted that Germany views the democratic United States as not much different from autocratic Russia and Communist China: Urging Europe to present a united front in the face of Russia, China, and the U.S., she said, “They are forcing us, time and again, to find common positions.” And Merkel concluded that therefore Germany must find “political power” commensurate with its economic clout to forge a new independent European path.

Or China. Stephen Hayward wonders whether the cool way to stop China would be to ban its students from US universities, rather than by tariff wars. This would also hit elite Chinese who like to get capital out of China by getting their student children to buy expensive houses and cars in the US. Oh, and

This would have the added bonus of depriving many liberal universities of revenue, since they love Chinese students because they pay the full tuition sticker price.

 And what about the left? Funny, isn't it, how the left is everlastingly peaceful protesting all and sundry -- right now Trump in the UK -- yet yells "hate" and "white supremacy" when some rightist nobodies march with tiki torches around the statue of Robert E. Lee in Charlottesville.

Hey, lefties! How come you guys get to have "mostly peaceful protests" but the white nationalists are always rioting?

See today we are celebrating the 77th anniversary of the Battle of Midway, which the US won due to staggering luck and staggering initiative from a couple of flight leaders. And also the 75th anniversary of D-Day. And the 30th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacres. But I argue that the way to deal with today's frenemies like Germany and China probably should not include actual armed conflict.

Why? My argument is that the good old days of conquest, loot, and plunder are over, because laying waste to Germany and China doesn't help us. We can't loot the only thing that matters, which is the "intangible capital" in those countries, the capital that exists between the ears of the German and the Chinese people.

And the same thing applies to our frenemies here at home. Some people are proposing to end universities as we know them. Then there is the question of what to do about abortion. And really, what is the point of looting the market economy of 35 percent of GDP to fund old-age pensions and health care, something that average people should be doing for themselves? OK. But how do we push back against the lefty idiots?

Honestly, I don't know what we should do. But there is my maxim: there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. I take that to mean that the trouble with politics and government is that they are always mobilizing against enemies, because that is what political leaders are for. But all government action, in my view, is creating injustice, because government is force.

Now right now our Chinese friends imagine that they can dominate the world with Huawei dominating g5 and dominating Africa with port and infrastructure deals. The Germans are dominating Europe, because their alter ego, France, doesn't have a clue. And the left in the US is mounting a reign of terror and virtue against "hate" and "toxic masculinity"as their cultural revolution seems to be falling short of its promise.

I guess that my notion is that it is the injustice that the Chinese and the Germans and the left here at home deal out that creates the movement of rejection. And the more that they think that power is the answer the bigger movement of rejection they inspire.

The point is that in the interaction of power politics and market economics we have two opposing notions. Politics is all about domination and hegemony and loot and plunder. Economics is all about cooperation and trust and finding out how to serve the other guy with products and services.

Actually, they are not really opposites, in the sense that Hegel uses when talking about the opposition of the two poles of a magnet. Politics and economics are really orthogonal, operating at right angles. One says that there gotta be an enemy out there. The other says there gotta be a customer out there.

So I think the strategic thing to do is to highlight the monstrous injustice that, e.g., Germany, deals out in Europe; that China deals out to its people and its trading partners; that the left deals out in its domination of media, education, and culture.

But some people will have to go to jail or exile, courtesy of the ruling class, just like the Voltaires did in the waning days of the ancien régime. And in China, per the 30th anniversary of Tiananmen Square, there will probably have to be actual martyrs. That's just part of the experience of injustice.

Maybe there's a better way. But not yet.