In the midst of an election season that has revealed a stunning chunk of the American electorate is attracted to quasi-fascistic rhetoric, Western elites are still asking why China's youth aren't inspired by the 1989 Tiananmen democracy movement which culminated in the June 4th massacre.
But the past 27 years of history scream out with an obvious answer: China has simply kicked us in the a** - that is, the West whose intellectual and political establishment still presumes to lecture it. Among other things, this is the harsh reality that the rise of Donald Trump openly acknowledges even as said establishment remains largely in denial of it: China has utterly killed us, so why are we even still fretting about it becoming just like us?
As with all things Trump, there's an inevitable hyperbolic effect, but we're going to find out between now and November whether his narrative of America's decline and the West's feckless weakness on account of emasculating neoliberal political and economic orthodoxy will hold sway with the general electorate, just as it resoundingly has in the GOP primaries.
Significantly, notwithstanding the impassioned rhetoric on both sides of this debate, even the mainstream global economic view is increasingly converging on Beijing's interpretation of the upheavals of 1989. The IMF, which is set in October to induct the Chinese yuan into its exclusive club of reserve currencies, the Special Drawing Right or SDR, is itself beginning to question this neoliberal consensus that has predominated as a virtual secular religion since the end of the Cold War. It's taken a while, but China's unique brand of state-directed capitalism - or market socialism, depending on which ideology you wish to emphasize - has ever so subtly gained greater grudging respect and traction in the rich world (notwithstanding its extraordinarily difficult transition which is the subject of this blog).
That's because, nearly eight years after the global financial crisis, the West's near-total dependence on extraordinary central bank monetary policy has reached its limits. It's finally creeping up in power centers from New York and Washington to London and Brussels that a purely private credit system driving a real economy dominated by private corporations whose sole aim is private shareholder value - not the greater public good - has failed too large a segment of the developed world's population.
That's bad enough; what makes it far more ominous is the only plausible alternative: neo-Keynesian fiscal stimulus with a new emphasis on large public works and infrastructure. Anathema!
That's what makes Mr. Trump such a prophet of the current times: we're sick of paper-shuffling investment "bankers" who are really running hedge funds effectively doing a feeble "financialist" imitation of communist-style central planning (i.e. without much tangible asset investment).
And if he wins in November, it'll be a resounding affirmation that he's telling the truth about China kicking the living cr*p out of us: it'd be because Hillary simply can't defeat what he represents - or conversely, she simply can't win because (despite concessions to the Sanders wing of the Democratic party) she's still the face of a defunct world order.
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