China-Bashing: Branded Information Designed to Distract and Confuse

Economist Edward Glaeser, in a recent commentary, noted that

President Obama celebrated the Year of the Dragon by “announcing the creation of a Trade Enforcement Unit that will be charged with investigating unfair trading policies in countries like China.” Mitt Romney wants to begin his presidency “by designating China as the currency manipulator it is.”

It is not at all uncommon in an election year to see US leaders ‘China Bash.’ This is one tool for displacing conflict…shifting the attentions of key publics away from trade and budget deficits to focus on another aspect of these conflicts (Chinese currency manipulation this time around)…which just happens to reframe the conflict to refocus our attentions from the failures of our own elites to blaming China for our problems. Glaeser continues,

We couldn’t impose our will on Beijing when Douglas MacArthur led an army toward the Yalu River, and we have far less power today. American consumers will pay the price for trade sanctions on China, and intemperate action will ensure Chinese opposition in other vital areas, such as containing Iranian nuclear ambitions.

Glaeser focuses on the pragmatic.  While emotionally satisfying…while it feels good to get angry at China, as Glaeser shows very clearly, responses that start with anger will hurt us more…they will not work.

The emotional energy here is focusing us on more trivial aspects of these conflicts in order to distract us and to absolve our own leaders—public and private—of responsibility…and to arouse our anger in a way that is designed to mislead and mis-use popular sovereignty, designed to get us angry so we will be less rational and more readily be mobilized by whatever (unworkable) policy idea is proposed to ‘punish China.’ Glaeser continues,

Would-be presidents have been twisting the dragon’s tail since 1950, when Robert Taft accused the Truman administration of “building up” the Chinese Communists. As candidates, Presidents Kennedy, Nixon, Reagan, Clinton, and George W. Bush all wanted tougher China policies. Fortunately, pragmatism usually won out, and cooperation ensued. Nixon’s rapprochement with Beijing created a potent partnership against the Soviet Union. China is now America’s second-largest trading partner (after Canada), and the largest holder of U.S. government debt.... I wish more freedom and stronger property rights for all nations, [but] imposing tough trade sanctions on China is likely to create more cost than benefit for the United States.

Glaeser shows that the most common arguments for why we should punish China will not work. Even as blaming China feels satisfying, feels like we are actually doing something to fix the situation…upon closer examination the only benefit is likely to be the temporary emotional satisfaction we get from feeling self-righteous anger, because punishing China will not result in the outcomes we seek.

Usually, we only realize this after the election when we notice that President Romney or Obama is not following through on punishing China. Glaeser continues,

Accepting that America has limited options on China may feel unsatisfying to many voters. But punitive trade policies are particularly dangerous because the world’s second-most powerful nation can easily strike back. Chinese purchases of vast amounts of American debt — part of the country’s alleged currency manipulation— help keep our interest rates low. If China dumped U.S. securities, the federal government’s fiscal situation would go from bad to dire.

Besides, without Chinese help, we have little hope of using nonmilitary options, like trade embargoes, to force change in Iran and North Korea. And as long as China buys its oil, Iran doesn’t need the United States or the European Union. A U.S.-China trade war practically guarantees a nuclear-armed Iran.

Politicians may enjoy appealing to popular anti-China sentiment, but America’s interests demand cooperation, not conflict....

Here ‘enjoy’ means it may help public sector elites win elections (or private sector elites win more taxpayer subsidies or derail consumer protections), it may be sound political strategy in the elections or public relations games…but it is not a useful resource in the policy game.

In fact, expressively satisfying but instrumentally suspect anger-driven decision making is a policy game weakness that previous presidents have wisely tossed aside after soaking up all the support they could muster from key audiences who can easily be distracted and persuaded that what they seek is an elite-exonerating but emotionally satisfying non-response to the very real conflicts we are facing. 

More important, it is not only a recipe for bad policy, the dynamic described here threatens to undermine the communicative conditions and deliberation skills required to make democracy both possible and desirable.

One place to find the Glaeser article:
http://www.ohio.com/editorial/edward-l-glaeser-sanctions-and-sabre-rattling-will-fail-with-china-1.257391

It was only a moment, and it has already been over analyzed by many in the media, but I remain deeply disturbed by the fact that a South Carolina audience booed Ron Paul when he suggested that the Golden Rule be applied to our enemies.  Part of me was surprised, because the reaction was instantaneous and I guess I expected at least a moments hesitation.  After all, this is a part of the world that proudly Tebows the centrality of this sentiment as a guiding principle in their lives and one would think that Paul pointing out an apparant contradiction would cause one to pause.  But there was no pause.

This moment also played out in a context where the audience cheered heartily for Gingrich's angry non-response to a question about the disjuncture between his frequent invocation of family values to criticize democrats and his own inability to love his own family or respect the women in his life.  An audience also cheered Gingrich when he, again angrily, performed his ritualistic parry of another question like this into an attack on the medium itself, an attack on the idea that ideas and consistency matter.  This question concerned his suggestion that the challenges facing African Americans today are rooted in their laziness and not in racism or a wealth gap that is a concrete legacy of slavery, Jim Crow, and the first GI Bill. 

What these all have in common seems to be anger.  The audiences cheered one speaker because he was articulating, indeed performing and affirming, their own deep seated anger.  Anger rooted in communities left behind as globalization and commercialization colonize our living rooms and devasted our neighborhoods.  Real, if in this case misdirected, anger and frustration. 

And the audience booed angrily itself when another speaker suggested that love, not anger, would be the Christian response.  In one phrase Ron Paul ran into the background consensus built by peddlers of the prosperity gospel, such that what ought to have been a common sense notion, poking each of us to think a bit more deeply about ourselves, was transformed into an irrational and even unchristian and antiamerican insult...justifying an angry response constructed to feel like it was in defense of family and community, though upon reflection it appears to be exactly the opposite.  Not sure these reflections make sense, but this seems to be why I remain so deeply disturbed by that one moment in South Carolina.

Democracy in America
Check out this very smart blogger at The Atlantic commenting on the classic political and cultural analysis of DeTocqueville in Democracy in America.  This book has always been a worthy read (thus, the label classic and timeless).  But it may be even more worth our time today, because it speaks to the specific challenges we face.  DeTocqueville also reminds us of powerful perspectives, attitudes, and analytical tools deeply embedded within our own traditions that we might more productively utilize in our current problem solving efforts.  But even if you do not read, or re-read the book, check out this blogger.

Distorted Debates Benefit Elites Selling Branded Information
Some are criticizing President Obama's attempt to consolidate six departments that work on trade, trying to frame it as more Obama big government. This make no sense, or does it? Cap n' trade is now routinely dismissed by some as part of an Obama plan for American socialism, despite the fact that this idea was made law and passed by the first President Bush and, at that time, supported by Gingrich. It was also included in McCain's 2008 platform. 

But once President Obama reaches across the aisle to embrace their own idea, once the president demonstrates a willingness to work together to solve problems, then what started as their own idea becomes socialism.

One of the most divisive issues today, and likely in the upcoming election, the individual mandate, has now also incited frame flopping. Before President Obama agreed to withdraw his opposition to this idea in order to secure a compromise...before that, this idea was supported by Bob Dole, the Heritage Foundation, Newt Gingrich, and Mitt Romney, among others. Now it is socialism and unconstitutional. 

The individual mandate emerged in response to private sector demands. It is an effort to save our world’s most privatized health insurance system, which is about the furthest thing from socialism that can be imagined in the current context, since it only makes sense as policy if we start from the premise that a single-payer system will not work. In that context, if we want insurance companies to cover pre-existing conditions then they want to require everyone to be in the pool.

If we reframe this as a debate about how unfair (and financially unsound) it is to have an insurance system that does not cover the sick until after they are very sick, we can have a reasonable debate about how to address this conflict. But instead, we have to retrench and fight against the putatively unAmerican notion that believing in a role for government is socialism. And we never seem to get back to the problem solving debate about caring for the sick, supporting family values, and enabling resilient communities.

One friend agreed, saying he was disgusted by politicians just taking the position, whatever it is, that is in opposition to the other guy. But this type of distortion is more insidious than oppositionalism and deeper than what another friend highlighted: a poorly informed electorate. What we observe here is systematic bullshitting, intentionally misrepresenting one’s own and other’s intentions for a purpose, crafting messages designed to frustrate, mislead, and divide communities and constituencies. 

Seeing the power of branded information focuses our attentions on leadership and those with the resources to saturate communications channels with their interested messages. An irony of democracy is it depends on leadership, and dissipating public energies by focusing our attentions on less important or misleadingly framed issues is exactly the opposite of the type of leader needed if we want to make democracy both possible and desirable.