A few months ago Jonathan Haidt made waves with a big think-piece in the Atlantic arguing that most of the ills of the 2010s can be traced back to the invention of the retweet button. I read the essay and disagreed with it vociferously. Today City Journal published my critique. You can read my counter essay here. Below I would like to add some additional thoughts on social media and American politics that could not fit into that piece.
Category Archives: Culture
A Guide Map for Reading the East Asian Canon
Readers may remember my stab at a global Great Books list. Recently a reader contacted me asking for guidance: they wanted to read through the books on the “East Asian” section of that list, but did not believe he had the proper historical knowledge to understand or contextualize what they were reading. What do I recommend they read to make sense of the list?
What follows will not make sense if you have not looked at that original post. Here is what I told him:
Why Chinese Culture Has Not Conquered Us All
Xi Jinping regularly exhorts Chinaâs diplomats, propagandists, journalists, writers, filmmakers, and cultural figures to âtell Chinaâs story well.âThe slogan flows naturally from the operating assumptions of Party state strategists: in their telling, a central pillar of any nationâs âcomprehensive national powerâ (çťźĺĺ˝ĺ) is what these Chinese have labeled âdiscourse powerâ (čŻčŻć).
Discourse power is the ability to mold the assumptions, conceptions, and values of foreign princes and peoples. The concept sits midway between Beltway talk of âsoft powerâ and the sort of influence leftists describe with the phrase âcultural hegemony.â Discourse mirrors the instrumentalism of the first termâdiscourse power is not just a set of static social relationships or societal norms, but a tool to be wieldedâbut is far less associated with happy-go-lucky rhetoric about admiration, emulation, and attraction so closely bound up in American conceptions of soft power.
Triumphant victors of the Cold War would conceptualize the issue in such terms: Â the victors of any given cultural conflict always believe they have won through the wide appeal of their vision and the free choice of those attracted to it.
Learning From Our Defeat: the Madrassas and the Modern
In all of my reading on Afghanistan, two books stand out. Both were highlighted in my list of the best 10 books I read in 2021: Carter Malkasianâs The American War in Afghanistan: A History and David Edwardsâ Caravan of Martyrs: Sacrifice and Suicide Bombing in Afghanistan. Both authors are fluent in Pashto. Both draw plentifully from Taliban primary sources. Both have had hundreds of conversations with Afghans of all classes. Together they provide a powerful picture of the way the war has changed Afghanâespecially Pashtunâsociety. The war in Afghanistan was first and foremost a war within that society. America chose to back one side of this civil war. These books lay out exactly what each side of this war was fighting for.
Or so I write in an essay published this weekend in Palladium. To understand the Talibanâs victory, I argue, you must understand what made the Taliban different from the wider Pashtun society from which they sprang.
The Rise and Fall of Civilizations: A Reader Course
A Scholarâs Stage forum member reports that he and a friend recently finished reading John Darwinâs After Tamerlane. Enraptured by Darwinâs account of flourish and fall, they ask what else they might read to understand the rise and decline of peoples and powers over the course of human history.
             In my mind there are four central parts to this tale:
On the Party and the Princelings
Desmund Shum is a red billionaire. Red Roulette is his memoir, a tell all expose of his familyâs climb to the summits of wealth and the foothills of power. The book describes how he and his ex-wife maneuvered to the topâand why they subsequently crashed back to earth. Their fall was as dramatic as their rise: Shum now lives in exile; his unfortunate ex now lives in prison. With nothing to lose, Shum lets loose: his memoir promises to hang Beijingâs dirty laundry for all to see. What a sight this laundry turns out to be! Read this book. Though Shum is unreliable narrator, his memoir is the best single introduction to elite Chinese life yet written.
Xi Jinping’s War on Spontaneous Order
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal published a letter I wrote to their editor in response to Kevin Rudd’s exposition on Xi Jinping’s “Common Prosperity” campaign:
As the Generations Churn: The Strategic Consequences of Cultural Change in Communist Russia… and China?
Vladislav M. Zubokâs A Failed Empire: The Soviet Union in the Cold War From Stalin to Gorbachev is a surprising counterpart to my essay, âCulture Wars are Long Wars.â That essay proposed a general theory of cultural change. Key to its thesis was the observation that most cultural change does not occur because people change their ideas, but because people with new ideas replace people with old ones. As most people form their essential political worldview by the time they are 30 and only adapt it on the edges to new circumstances, only the most earth shaking events have the power to fundamentally shift the frameworks and values that the majority filter their politics through. Large scale cultural shift is largely a story of generational churn.
While the focus of that piece was on American domestic politics, this is a general phenomena that applies across cultures and time periods. Vladislav Zubok understands this. The generational nature of political change is a recurring theme of Failed Empire, which chronicles the ups and downs of Soviet diplomacy from the end of World War II to the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991. While we often describe Soviet history in terms of the leader reigning at the top of the system, Zubok argues that shifts in Soviet strategic behavior reflected not only the differing leadership styles of the various CPSU General Secretaries, but broader transitions from one generation of leaders to another.
Culture Wars are Long Wars
We are told that we âlost the culture war.â I dissent from this view: we never waged a culture war. Conservatives certainly fought, there is no denying that. We fought with every bit of obstruction and scandal our operatives could muster. But this was not a culture war. Rather, Americaâs conservatives fought a political war over culture.
Understanding Taiwanese Nationalism: A Historical Primer in Bullet Points
Noah Smith has a recent substack note discussing Taiwan. In the comments section there are a number of heated arguments over whether Taiwanese language, history, politics, and so forth are enough to justify thinking of Taiwan the way Smith does: as its own âcivilization.â When reading through these debates I was struck by the […]