Let Them Eat Empty Slogans!

The Weekly Standard unleashes an anti-Chinese yelp that concludes that "prosperity, while a great public good, is a meager substitute for the greater public good of natural rights such as the freedom to publicly oppose one’s government, to legitimate state authority through elections, and to worship God as one sees fit." I saw this via a somewhat appalled Kerry Howley and I'd like to associate myself with her remarks -- the improvement in human welfare associated with Chinese reforms and economic growth over the past 25 years has been simply enormous and to dismiss it like that purely in order to work oneself up into a greater fit of self-righteous fury at the PRC dictatorship is absurd.

Meanwhile, all this is pretty meaningless since I don't think China faces, in practice, a prosperity/democracy tradeoff and I also don't think the United States really has meaningful policy levers through which to impact the course of events in China.

Still, I think it's an interesting slice of the neoconnish mindset which is defined, in part, by the heroic conception of politics you see here. In this view, politics isn't just one activity among many where we can weigh, say, the right to vote against the ability to afford food and decent shelter and some people might decide, hey, subsistence farming sucks more than life under autocracy. This seems to me to be roughly parallel to the idea that the primary aim of our foreign policy should be to adopt the appropriate stance of indignation vis-a-vis foreign actors (China, North Korea, Russia, Iran, Saddam, Zimbabwe etc.) rather than to adopt policies that advance some kind of concrete goals. Normal people think, it seems to me, that political engagement or policy shifts are worthwhile just insofar as they actually deliver some kind of goods -- health care or freedom or lower bus fares or cleaner air -- not simply as a venue in which to show virtue and accumulate "higher public goods."