Note: This is an older article that I’ve finally gotten around to finishing.
I wanted to make a series where The Discourse starts taking positions on issues. It’s one thing to write analysis after analysis. But at some point, we also have to start saying what it all adds up to.
Foreign Policy: One Billion Americans
I think Matt Yglesias’ 2021 book is basically the correct analysis: China’s sheer size means that when they figure out how to raise their per-capita GDP, that scales their national GDP up to an astronomical level which America has no hope of ever competing with by simply trying to maintain our current advantage in per-capita GDP — which is the strategy we’ve been doing thus far. However, precisely because America already has a high per-capita GDP, when we create new Americans, they’re adding ~5x more to our GDP than the marginal new Chinese person adds to China’s. And as one of the lowest-population-density developed nations, America could easily accommodate 1 billion Americans without breaking a sweat; in effect, we can tolerate rapid population growth far better than the Chinese can, who are only just now emerging from their overpopulation crisis.
I genuinely believe this is the only way to “beat China”. If you take a step back and look at this from a 30-40 year horizon, it’s pretty clear we can’t win an economic war with the proverbial ‘army we have’ (IE the population we have) right now. But we can win a population war if we set our minds to it. It would be one of the concretely easiest wars Americans have ever fought — just start having more babies, building more houses, and welcoming more immigrants — if we didn’t have major constituencies dead-opposed to those policies.
Which is primarily what worries me. Just like America before entering WWII, we’ve got a lot of mental baggage keeping us from stepping up to the plate, even though we’re about as perfectly equipped to rise to the challenge as any other comer. But I honestly just don’t see a “Pearl Harbor Moment” on the horizon for us1. Do you? Before Ukraine, the closest analogue to great-power conflict in the age of nuclear hot-war obsolescence was the Undeclared Global Cyberwar, which I think we can now tentatively fold into Cold War II. Although CWII is still in the early phases (see footnote 1), we haven’t seen any strategic moves that would remotely hint at including a One Billion Americans agenda; the next-best strategy of “One Billion Westerners”, IE America relying on Europe to deliver the population counter to China, isn’t being discussed either.
The next best alternatives in my mind are both bad: India and Africa. India already has a population to challenge China’s, and they have no love lost for the Chinese, but their democracy is even more flawed than America’s right now. Perhaps, like America, there’s a lurking greatness there. But despite my genuine personal love for the Indian people, I just don’t see the same “sleeping giant” that was waiting for Japan in America. While the cultural parallels are certainly there — Jim Crow racism and the caste system/Islamophobia — the Indian subcontinent’s natural resource base is just very different from that of North America. You couldn’t, for instance, really see them waging a two-front war all on their own industrial power, let alone managing the sort of worldwide trade empire necessary to backfill their weaknesses. They’re not even trying to have a blue-water navy. Perhaps that’s all a bit of Western ignorance on my part, and I’ll happy own up to it and correct my ways if proven wrong. But it just seems like India’s got a long way to go.
Africa seems like an even longer shot on paper. No unified continent-wide government, not even a dominant one like Brazil in South America. Most countries still trapped in or emerging from the resource curse. Very little democracy — and ubiquitous enough corruption to be plenty susceptible to Chinese exploitation. Popular politics are generally antagonistic to the West, when they’re democratic or liberal at all.2 That said, Africa has already bridled under China’s attempted exploitation. It’s not exactly wokeism or contrarian to point out that Africans aren’t stupid, and they aren’t fans of China’s anti-imperialist-branded form of imperialism. Belt-and-Road backfired because the Chinese weren’t even bothering to pretend they weren’t offering horribly one-sided deals to Africa.
Moreover, Africa has some good fundamentals to build on. The African Union is one of the most effective continental supranational governments relative to the broad dysfunction seen in its member states. Nigeria is a bustling, populous power center that has established an island of stability which is helping stabilize its neighbors. The instability of the post-colonial period has given way to democratization and reductions in corruption, most notably throughout West Africa, that are being driven by internal virtuous cycles, not reliant on or impeded by Western paternalism. It’s fair to say that many Africans have decided that they want an African form of liberal democracy, unburdened by and yet under no illusions about the sins of the West; and that they appear to have reached a critical mass that the cause of liberal democracy on the continent cannot easily be snuffed out, and will be vigorously contested in the decades to come.
Much has been made of the need to Pivot To Asia, and that is certainly needed to steel against future crises in Taiwan and more. But if the West ignores Africa and India, or treats them as mere pawns instead of potential members of the “Alliance of Democracies” we will need to win Cold War II, then we will either lose that war, or our victory will come at much greater length and expense than it ought to.
Normal Domestic Policy: Progressive
Pro: Green New Deal, roughly.
Pro: Strong-Towns style housing reform. Anti: “Infrastructure”, ideologically. Pro: “Infrastructure”, politically. Briefly, those periodic shrill ASCE reports headlining trillions in infrastructure liabilities, aren’t an indication of a country that simply is too much of a deadbeat to pay for anything. Rather, they’re an indication of a country that has built too much auto infrastructure that inherently can’t pay for itself. We need to densify and desuburbanize.
The overall super-long-term policy goal should be to bring housing inflation below general inflation, and to keep it there for several generations — however long it takes for housing to be cheap and abundant, no more than 25% of the average household budget. And then we should keep it there. It’s intolerably, enragingly absurd that with all our modern construction technology, we actually have a shortage of something so low on Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs.
Unfortunately, this is an area where a lot of things are going to get broken. People will get hurt by the fluctuations in the market. Which means that the cause of housing reform will always be in peril. This isn’t a crisis that will just resolve in the next decade or so, and we can go back to whatever we were doing.Anti: Debating abortion. Morally speaking, I’m roughly “pro-life”, but it’s a utopian secular progressive vision, not a regressive religious one. I think there will come a time where we will have the technological, political, economic, and social means to provide for most viable conceived humans; and most people will look back on abortion as a barbaric practice akin to leeching and trepanation, and especially wondering why the hell it was considered so critical to what should have otherwise been an abundantly self-evident cause of feminism and global women’s liberation. But with that said, I think abortion as a political issue is most of all a tragedy, because it’s mostly served as a culture-war tool for the political right to obstruct the kind of progress that would get us to a zero-abortion society. Ending the debates on it would probably do concrete good for the world.
Pro: Either a market-based student loan reform from debt to an equity model, or just public higher education. Perhaps the optimal case is basic public higher ed, plus equity-based options for attending private higher ed. One neat thing here is that I figured out how to bail out the private student loan industry in such a way that eliminates/converts existing debts to equity, and gives the new industry the capital it needs to start signing incoming students to equity contracts.
Pro: Massively revamp the healthcare ed pipeline. Combine nursing and medicine into an up-to-eight-year professional track, no bachelor required, roughly alternating a year each of classroom and practical instruction, such that every two years there’s a degree offramp (associate’s, bachelor’s, master’s, doctorate), and giving current professionals at every level easy onramps back into the system. Replace residency with a national set of licensure requirements and exams that tie scope-of-practice to experience-in-practice. Establish a “National Medical University” system: An alliance of med schools that pledge to collectively ensure the national number of med school seats never again drop below staggered population growth numbers.
Pro: Abolish state higher-ed accreditation, which has been the primary vehicle for regulatory capture by higher ed. Replace it with tiered national accreditation standards, a cap on non-instruction costs, and a regulatory mandate that non-instruction functions cannot duplicate any function that is also the purview of a federal, state, or local agency: no university PDs, no student health centers when the local hospital is perfectly bleeping fine, etc. Adopt a “Missouri Plan” for the national accreditation commission: half of commissioners are to be recommended from a pool of actual teaching professors with no less than 10 years of ongoing active teaching experience, and the other half can be presidential political appointees.
We’ll probably get into more of these positions next time, but this is a good place to start for now.
Critical Domestic Policy: Democracy Reform
First, abolish the filibuster. Duh.
Second, after years of examining the problem, I think that national Ranked Choice Voting and a move towards Multi Member Districts in the House and state legislatures is the baseline path towards resolving our long crisis of polarization. There’s room for some tweaks to the plan — open primaries are gaining steam, Approval Voting and various other alternatives may be appropriate in some specific places — but I think there’s a solid case for RCV as the standard-bearer for the “Save our democracy” movement.
For starters, it’s the only alternative to FPTP that has practically any name-recognition among normie voters. This is huge, because normies are skeptical of anything they don’t recognize, and especially in America, most normies think that our voting systems are “fine as they are” and essentially inherently self-justifying. That is, even if they’re not stupid and may be hazily aware that other ways of counting votes exist, FPTP matches up with deeply-held “one person, one vote” ideals. If you ask an average normie American to describe a democratic election, they’ll reflexively give you FPTP rules without actually understanding why they’d pick those specific rules, and they’d be confused as hell if you did ask them to justify why they picked them — you’d get a response more or less like, “Well, duh, that’s what democracy is, ya eed-jit”.
Critics often like to point out that RCV ballots can be confusing, but on the continuum from Borda Count (confusing AF) to FPTP (simple AF), RCV’s definitely on the closer side to FPTP than almost any other alternative. RCV also, along with its name recognition, already has the most political momentum out of any FPTP alternative. It’s been adopted in Maine, Alaska, and NYC. Time will only tell whether RCV will breach the critical mass to be adopted across the rest of the country, but that inflection point is nearing, albeit slowly: we’ll know the answer after the next few elections, when the country has had enough time to see and judge results in Maine and Alaska against the broader backdrop of our political crisis.
Finally, RCV has the lowest legal hurdles to enactment. The Constitution lets the states decide their election formats; it doesn’t actually enshrine FPTP anywhere! Neither do most state constitutions, which are easier to amend than the federal one anyways. Most of this could be done by ballot initiative, as it was in Maine. Multi-member districts would have to be legalized by Congress, but like the expected-any-moment-now federal marijuana reclassification, it’s the sort of thing that will pass once a critical mass of states have adopted similar schemes. All of this means that the rest is mostly just a PR-and-organizing battle! And the good news is that the American public are so sick and fed up with the two-party system, they’re eager for alternatives, as long as those alternatives don’t smell too much like “socialism” or look like they’re giving too much power to “party insiders”. In an ideal world, we should probably adopt a parliamentary democracy with parallel voting, which is what we gave Germany and Japan after WWII. Short of that, RCV, MMD, and open primaries will probably destabilize the two-party death-grip enough over the next several decades that, hopefully, by the time I retire, we’ll either be discussing how to consolidate our multiparty transition, or discussing how to reconcile our old federal two-party paradigm with the new multiparty reality.
RCV (and open primaries, and whatever else) isn’t going to fix everything, even if we could magically pass the entire reform package in one go. The most valid point critics have is that politics isn’t just systems, it’s also culture. But the next level of this is to realize that systems and culture form each other. Changing our systems away from zero-sum will change immediate incentives in ways that cause less cultural damage, but the cultural damage has already been done. It will take decades for that system-driven shift to fully assert itself, and in that time, we’ll still need culture warriors — as much as I deride them! — to fight for the culture-driven shifts we need to both facilitate and accelerate depolarization.
Note: This sentence was written pre-Ukraine, but IMO it’s still valid. The advent of Cold War II heralded by the Russo-Ukraine War is still in the early phases, which are the critical time period to see what each side is actually bringing to the table. Thus far, although the West has certainly gotten the initial reaction more or less correct, we haven’t actually seen any concrete steps towards broader strategic organization oriented at winning Cold War II, let alone any acknowledgement outside of small slivers of the commentariat that Cold War II has even started.
Although it bears mentioning, I never really said the outcome had to favor the West particularly, just that it couldn’t feature China beating the West into submission. It’s an unacceptable outcome because it most likely means global autocracy wins.