One of President Trump’s most common themes was that these United States were victimized by “stupid” trade deals. But their stupidity wasn’t a bug but a feature, says one writer. It’s no accident — it’s greed-driven malevolence.
Lee Smith sounds his alarm in a very sophisticated Tablet essay titled “The Thirty Tyrants.” This refers to an ancient Athenian government, established by rival city-state Sparta after 27 years of war, that was “disloyal to Athens’ laws and contemptuous of its traditions,” as Smith relates it.
The author opens writing that in “Chapter 5 of The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli describes three options for how a conquering power might best treat those it has defeated in war. The first is to ruin them; the second is to rule directly; the third is to create ‘therein a state of the few which might keep it friendly to you.’”
Every time and country has within it individuals feeling no loyalty to their nation, people who’d sell their countrymen out for money and/or power. We saw this not just in ancient Athens, but with Vichy France and Norway’s Vidkun Quisling as well. It’s always just a question of the degree to which these traitorous spirits are kept from the levers of power. In our time, they wield those levers firmly.
Joe Biden, promising recently to reverse Trump’s China policy, said we’d now instead abide by the “international rules of the road.” If he’d committed one of his infamous Freudian slip gaffes, he might have said “internationalist rules of the road.” For there’s a reason why both China and our power pseudo-elite wanted Trump ousted from office:
He was an impediment to their engorgement as they, like coyotes ravaging a deer, feast on a listing America while she’s still alive.
Smith says he’d recently spoken to liberal New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman, who a decade ago wrote a piece that “documents the exact moment when the American elite decided that democracy wasn’t working for them,” as Smith puts it. “Blaming the Republican Party for preventing them from running roughshod over the American public, they migrated to the Democratic Party in the hopes of strengthening the relationships that were making them rich.”
Ergo, the Democrats transitioned from the ostensible party of the little guy to the party that makes him littler.
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“A trade consultant told Friedman: ‘The need to compete in a globalized world has forced the meritocracy, the multinational corporate manager, the Eastern financier and the technology entrepreneur to reconsider what the Republican Party has to offer,” Smith continued. “In principle, they have left the party, leaving behind not a pragmatic coalition but a group of ideological naysayers.”
This helps explain, along with our “leftward” cultural shift, why corporate “America” is now firmly in the Democrat camp. The pseudo-elites in question are philanderers of nations. It’s not that they’re loyal to China as a culture, per se, but that they’re loyal to their relationship with Beijing — because it enriches them.
So our pseudo-elites sanctimoniously preach “globalism,” but only because it gives them “the freedom to structure commercial relationships and social enterprises without reference to the well-being of the particular society in which they happened to make their livings and raise their children,” as Smith puts it. In return, China gets to incrementally degrade its main rival, US, in its effort to dominate the world.
This toxic Sino/Pseudo-elite relationship began 50 years ago when President Richard Nixon and his secretary of state, Henry Kissinger, “opened” China up. Though Smith says that Kissinger’s Beijing connections made him a wealthy man, the ball didn’t really get rolling until President Bill Clinton decoupled trade status from human rights in 1994. This paved the way for China receiving most favored nation trade status in 2000 and its accession to the World Trade Organization the next year; this lead to it becoming a “cornerstone” of that body.
As to Clinton’s 1994 decision, it “sent a clear message, said then AFL-CIO President Lane Kirkland, ‘no matter what America says about democracy and human rights, in the final analysis profits, not people, matter most,’” Smith tells us.
You can say that again. In the past, I’ve reported on how China uses de facto bribes and/or market-access-denial threats to censor our movies, put its propaganda in our schools, and bully our businesses into doing its bidding. Yet Smith said on TV Monday evening that despite all this, even President “Trump didn’t have a clear sense of how extensive this [Sino/Pseudo-elite] network was.”
“Nearly every major American industry has a stake in China,” writes Smith, and our corporations now accept their complicity in human-rights abuses, Beijing’s technology theft, and the rape of America and her workers as a cost of doing business. Why, some American corporations “even lobbied against the Uyghur Forced Labor Prevention Act,” the writer shockingly relates, making them “complicit in genocide.” Copious cash can, clearly, salve corrupt consciences.
In fact, it’s “‘so pervasive, it’s better to ask who’s not tied into China,’ says former Trump administration official Gen. (Ret.) Robert Spalding,” Smith informs. Why even the Trump administration itself “was split between hawks and accommodationists, caustically referred to by the former as ‘Panda Huggers,’” the writer also tells us.
What’s more, Smith asserts that virtually all our incomprehensible policy (e.g., our open borders) is explainable by way of fealty to Beijing. As another example, consider our costly and curious foreign wars. While they don’t at all help Americans, Smith writes that
deploying Americans to provide security in Middle East killing fields has vastly benefited Beijing. Last month Chinese energy giant Zen Hua took advantage of a weak Iraqi economy when it paid $2 billion for a five-year oil supply of 130,000 barrels a day. Should prices go up, the deal permits China to resell the oil.
In Afghanistan, the large copper, metal, and minerals mines whose security American troops still ostensibly ensure are owned by Chinese companies. And because Afghanistan borders Xinjiang, Xi Jinping is worried that “after the United States pulls troops out of Afghanistan, terrorist organizations positioned on the frontiers of Afghanistan and Pakistan may quickly infiltrate into Central Asia.” In other words, American troops are deployed abroad in places like Afghanistan less to protect American interests than to provide security for China’s Belt and Road Initiative.
Smith may be overstating the Sino/Peudo-elite impact on our policy; then again, maybe he’s not. But none of this is surprising. Again, every time and place has its traitors, its sellouts. In our time and place, we now also have generations raised on hate-America-first ideology peddled via schools, media, and popular culture. So why wouldn’t many people now be more loyal to currency than country?
Many are and, tragically, have risen to positions of power. And their dominance helps explain another phenomenon, a fashionable prejudice.
While sociopaths are disproportionately represented among the power pseudo-elite, most do have consciences, warped though they may be. So a justification for destroying their working-class countrymen is necessary. Hence the appeal of “white privilege” theory, the notion of a white-supremacist America, and hatred of Trump voters. These people are fatally flawed, you see, disgusting, racist, and beyond redemption. They deserve whatever dark fate awaits them.
For more detail on the Sino-Pseudo-elite Pact, know that Lee Smith names names in his must-read essay. He also appeared on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday (video below).
Contrary to a once-stated goal, Western culture and republican ideas were never going to transform China. Instead, “the American establishment acquired a taste for Eastern techno-autocracy,” Smith notes. And why wouldn’t they, being people disconnected from Truth, tradition, nation, and people?
As the gaming and stopping evident in the GameStop situation showed, the people — the democratic will of the many — can be at odds with the power pseudo-elite. For occupying the pinnacle, the latter believe they’ll be above an autocracy’s rules and know that when the little guy has a voice, he can get some of what they’ve got. A Chinese system with a small ruling oligarchy suits them just fine.
