Musk’s Twitter Teaches America How to Avoid Chinese Hegemony
The post-WWII American-led international order is over. The Chinese model combining relative economic freedom and tight social controls is gaining. Only an architecture of openness can defeat it.
It’s time to tie together some of the ideas we’ve developed over the past year or so. In particular, let’s consider the interplay among the “new world order,” China’s rise, the collapse of America’s traditions, and Elon Musk’s takeover of Twitter.
World Orders
First, consider the notion of the “new world order.” As ominous as some might like to make the term sound, it’s pretty straightforward. There is and always has been a world order. The moment we humans learned to form tribes, we developed a set of rules and expectations about inter-tribal relations. Those rules and expectations define the world order.
A new world order arises whenever the rules and expectations change. That’s happened many times throughout history, usually happens following a series of wars in which the constellation of major powers changes. The resulting world order reflects the cultures, the relative power, and the negotiating prowess of those major powers. Once the big players have decided how they want to relate to each other and what they expect from the lesser players, they then download and impose their new rule set. Voila! A new world order is born. Its implementation may be aspirational, but everyone is required to mouth the pieties and pay homage to its glory even as they breach its rules with abandon.
At the end of WWII, the U.S. emerged as by far the world’s dominant player. The resulting world order mimicked important American cultural norms of the time. The UN was designed to impersonate a bicameral legislature. Its charter embraces the concept of innate human rights emanating from natural law. The world’s monetary and commercial systems vested complex rule systems in allegedly meritocratic, unbiased bureaucrats. Rule-based treaties and protocols abounded. Granted, most of it was illusory—but it was also aspirational. Even the world’s worst dictators held occasional “elections” to establish their legitimacy—a clear bow to American cultural sensibilities.
That world order had a good run but it died while no one was looking. George W. Bush presided over a grossly incompetent overextension of American hegemony. Barack Obama declared America’s withdrawal from global leadership, preferring to think of the U.S. as merely an influential voice among many co-equals. Donald Trump tried to redefine and redirect American leadership but found few allies willing to sign on to his agenda. Joe Biden’s approach to the world has been so incoherent that few could follow his lead if they wanted to do so.
The China Model
The net result is that the quasi-American “liberal international order” of the post-WWII era has already ended. The next world order is already coming into view—though it is unlikely to unfold fully until a new set of wars render the new global power structure indisputable.
China will be the dominant cultural player defining the new world order. China has already demonstrated a wildly popular governance model combining significant economic freedom with considerable social control.
Though I’m far from a China scholar, the work I’ve read from sources I respect have made a compelling case that this model aligns beautifully with thousands of years of Chinese cultural history. The basic idea is that China has always had the flavor of a massive engineering project. Powerful central leaders undertook the taming of China’s river system to manage flooding, natural disasters, irrigation, navigation, agriculture, and trade.
The people have historically revered their leaders—as long as they delivered basic safety, a sense of predictability, and relative prosperity. When the leaders have failed to deliver on those promises, the people have turned on them—but not on their model of governance. One set of revered centralized leaders falls, a different set of revered centralized leaders rises, the Chinese social contract remains the same.
It’s not hard to see how a culture honed on this model would fall comfortably into a government-run social credit system ensuring that every individual’s selfish desires are subverted to ensure the common good. Nor is it hard to see that economic growth and prosperity are central to maintaining social cohesion. With that historic bargain in place, much of today’s China makes eminent sense.
Conceit of the Elite
It's also easy to see why this model is popular among global elites. Like the Chinese Mandarins of old, they too believe that they can conquer and tame nature—fix the environment, eradicate a virus, redefine biology, etc. They too believe that if only the unruly masses would let them, they could bestow unrivaled prosperity while achieving these masterful tasks. Much of today’s “globalist” elite wants nothing more than to emulate China. They see little to fear and much to gain from the imposition of Chinese cultural norms upon a new world order.
Once again then, much of what we’ve seen unfold in Western society over the past decade makes eminent sense. The climate crisis, Covid authoritarianism, media controls, morality inversions, deconstruction of basic terms of political discourse, fabrications designed to forward the narrative, and outright projections are all critical parts of the project.
While the flaws in this plan are manifest to those of us who prefer American cultural norms of individual freedom, personal responsibility, openness, tolerance, and Biblical morality, the plan also contains a flaw that should concern the all-too-eager global elite: In a world order emanating from Chinese culture, China will necessarily dominate.
Defense & Counterattack
That’s where Elon Musk’s Twitter takeover comes into play. Over the past decade or so, leading American and Western institutions have moved sharply against a free society of free individuals accepting responsibility for their own freely made decisions towards a controlled society oriented around a collectivist common good. The most important technological advances of the past decade have involved monitoring, filtering, surveilling, predicting, and redirecting human behavior.
The primary weapons in the wars to determine the next world order’s contours involve surveillance and behavior modification. The U.S. and its Western allies cannot possibly hope to win such a war.
Chinese deployment and implementation of such weapons systems will continue to flow easily and naturally. The tens of millions of Chinese dissidents who chafe beneath their yoke will be dismissed and dispatched easily as a selfish minority operating against the common good.
Western deployments will never flow as easily. Opposing cultural norms are too strong. Dissident voices will not represent a small minority but rather a sizable swathe of the population. Though the powerful may eventually subjugate and eliminate the objectors, they will not do so with the ease and comfort available to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP). What the Chinese can command and implement in months will take the U.S. years. Even the notoriously compliant Canadians are demonstrating pushback at levels inconceivable in China.
What hope does an American-led West have? The answer is obvious to anyone who understands that we’re at war. If we can’t compete on the deployment of offensive weaponry, we must develop weaponry appropriate to defense and counterattack.
If the offensive weaponry of our era involves surveillance, monitoring, social controls and behavioral modification, defensive weaponry must rest upon an architecture of openness.
Fortunately, openness plays as central role in America’s relatively short history as centralized reverence plays in China’s much longer one. To date, only one member of America’s technological elite seems to have grasped that reality: Elon Musk.
Architecture of Openness
What Musk is doing at Twitter is more than merely freeing speech or leveling the playing field. Musk is laying the groundwork for an architecture of freedom and openness. If he prevails, it will become far, far harder for “globalist” Western leaders to emulate the Chinese model. Moreover, just as China has infiltrated and undermined American traditions with clever exports like Tik Tok, an open American-led architecture can infiltrate China, support its dissidents, and complicate its internal social controls. From the perspective of warfare, such an infiltration would force China to divert resources from external dominance towards maintaining internal dominance.
The battle lines for cultural dominance of the next world order become clearer with each passing year. China and a Western globalist elite stand on one side, American tradition and many of the West’s non-elite classes on the other. The de facto Chinese/globalist alliance argues that social controls directed towards common-good solutions to the challenges of nature will benefit society at large. The American-inspired opposition argues that robust competition among free people and free ideas will continue to elevate all throughout the information age—much as it did throughout the industrial age.
While some Western political leaders understand the nature of the problem, only one man has pointed the way towards a solution. Elon Musk’s reorientation of Twitter is the central battle in the struggle to define the next world order. Let’s all hope he succeeds.
For more information about Bruce D. Abramson & American Restorationism, visit: www.BruceDAbramson.com
To learn more about how America’s elites destroyed the republic, see: The New Civil War: Exposing Elites, Fighting Utopian Leftism, and Restoring America (RealClear Publishing, 2021).
To learn more about the ideology driving today’s anti-American leftism, see: American Restoration: Winning America’s Second Civil War (Kindle, 2019).
To learn more about our work at the American Coalition for Education and Knowledge, visit us at https://coalition4america.com/.
To learn more about how I turn the ideas I discuss here into concrete projects that serve the interests of my clients, donors, and society at large, please e-mail me at bdabramson@pm.me.