It is bizarre to me that so many on the American Right think that we need to invent something completely different to overcome our current problems. We do not need enlightened dictators like in Singapore or a monarchy or a right-wing federal government. Lee Kuan Yew‘s achievements are amazing, but they do not offer a model for the US. One brilliant leader can be succeeded by many incompetent and corrupt leaders.
No, we just need to get back to what once worked. The principles of federalism and checks/ balances embedded in the US Constitution worked great, but in more recent times we vastly centralized power in the federal government and particularly in the bureaucracy.
We don’t need perfect government. We just need to avoid the worst government across the 50 states, and let the rest of American society solve problems.
The problems is that ‘what once worked’ only worked with a white hyper majority and the US no longer has that. They bring up Lee Kuan Yew because his system was designed to balance multiple distinct racial and religious groups which is closer to the US now than the US back then.
There is no evidence that federalism and checks/ balances requires a “hyper-white majority.” Believing that a political strongman like Lee Kuan Yew can balance “multiple distinct racial and religious groups” in America is naive.
You also neglect the ethnic and religious diversity of the US in the 18th and 19th Century.
The entire point of the Constitution according to James Madison was to ensure that no minority group nor the majority can override individual rights. That is a much better model than dreaming up some alternative that has never worked before.
John Adams phrased it best: “But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
We are well past the point of America being full of the necessary people he described and the country is reaping the bitter fruit.
Lol…….”What we need is to repeat what got us into this mess”…um no we don’t need to repeat the mistakes of the past. Unfortunately, these idealist principals only work within a western ethnostate. They cannot work with the demographics of today.
What you once were led you here so it obviously didn't work.
Singapore is not a liberal democracy and as LKY said: in multiracial societies, people vote along racial and religious lines, not according to economics and policy. They maintain very strict law and order even verging on authoritarianism and stable demographics. It was born out of Lee Kuan Yew’s pragmatism, making the best of extant demographics - but Lee said he could have made Singapore even better if it were more homogenous.
“I have said openly that if we were 100% Chinese we would do better” LKY
The USA was very much founded as an ethnostate..see the NaturalisationAct of 1790. Despite the popular multicultural lie, the USA was created for White people of European descent. The Supreme Court found in 1923 that even high-caste Indians were not White under the terms of the 1790 Naturalization Act and therefore could not be citizens. Right up until the Hart Cellar act in 1965. So your wrong
So to use your own logic, the supposed American ethnology-state that you claimed once existed failed, so your supposed solution “obviously didn’t work” either.
That is why your “logic” goes nowhere.
You have no solution. You have only whining and complaining rationalized by bad history.
It failed precisely because it stopped being a country for ethnic europeans. Immigration from incompatible 3rd world countries is literally the problem. Just as LKY discovered in Singapore, these people need a very firm hand to maintain their behavior. Blank slate idealists are in denial about reality. You can’t train a donkey into a racehorse. Liberalism is in its death throes.
I am not a “blank slate idealist” nor was the US Constitution based on blank slate idealism. Nor am I trying to “train a donkey into a racehorse.”
Even if you deported everyone whose ancestry derives from “incompatible 3rd world countries,” we would still have the same problem. The reality is that the vast majority of Leftists are white.
And thinking that a “very firm hand” is going to solve the problem is extraordinarily naive.
If you prefer China or Russia or Singapore, please move there. My guess is that you will lose your enthusiasm for living under a “very firm hand.”
Fact is, the repudiation of liberal democracy by leftoids and rightoids alike is what caused the problems of the modern West.
And MAGA Xinnie simps like you want nothing but power: the ability to lord everyone over for your own twisted pleasure.
And the Naturalization act was implemented 14 years after the US’s founding, and it has been revised multiple times to the point that race was removed from the naturalisation criteria even before Hart Celler, not to mention the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.
And the US has been in decline since then. this has rapidly accelerated since Hart Celler and the Civil rights act. People are not interchangeable cogs in a machine. Liberalism is on its last legs…. It’s over…you guys killed it.
Have you not paid any attention for San Francisco the last few years. The great leftist experiment without limits, including cancelling law enforcement.
Yes, I have. That is a good example of exactly what not to do.
What remains of Federalism contains the terrible policies of San Francisco to San Francisco.
It was the over-centralization of government that has enabled it to leak out. If we do not rediscover the Federalism of the constitution, then those terrible policies will be imposed even more on the rest of the nation.
>"What is striking with most illiberal thinkers, whether alienated Americans or anti-American Europeans, is their total lack of engagement with the U.S. political tradition."
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.—George Santayana
"What is striking with most illiberal thinkers, whether alienated Americans or anti-American Europeans, is their total lack of engagement with the U.S. political tradition."
What Indeed I've always found amusing about modern American far right is they are as much as esterophile as the far left. While I can understand the far left fantasizing about making the US in best case a Nordic style Social Democracy and in worst case a Democratic Socialist Venezuela, right wingers looking for to apply foreign models to US reality is such weird and absurd, since they are implicitly declaring left wing cultural relativism is on point.
They are so immersed in their larping that they are completely unaware of the aims of what once was called "conservative revolution". It is not just about setting up a dictatorship (why not a Sunni Monarchy like Saudi Arabia, then?) , but to restore founding values of the nation. In the case of the United States, these values are found in Anglo-Saxon Protestantism: limited government, private property, personal responsability, and yes also a not so very welcoming attitude in face of foreigners. But to my surprise, when I tried to point this out some people answered me <<protestantism is gay and catholicism is "based">>. Do I have to remind them what their ancestors thought about Catholicism?
Personal responsibility lol, from the same puritans who sponged off the natives until it was time to dispossess them. Protestant propaganda on this subject is laughable in the extreme.
"I actually don’t think we even needed Christianity in that respect: northern European societies and their offshoots all seem to tend pretty strongly towards a moralistic “niceness” once prosperity and safety have eliminated the apparent need to be tough on others."
-I'm not so sure about that, I think that Christianity had an enormous impact on cultural virtues, in a way that was probably very positive. Machiavelli also hated Christianity, he thought that the old Roman gods encouraged people to be virtuous (by which he meant strong and powerful, braggadocious) while the new Christian virtues (humility, forgiveness) taught people simply to tolerate their slavery. But I think the new Christian virtues promoted a culture where people could trust each other and collaborate more easily, a necessary component of industrialization where progress depends on large groups breaking a task down to small parts and then combining them back together.
Great article, I agree with you on most everything. Even if you could have a benevolent dictatorship (which obviously isn't Trump), regression to the mean will always give us corrupt fools in the end. Singapore is a fascinating subject (and I'm currently reading How Nation's Fail). I just recently learned that 80% of Singaporeans live in public housing, which is ironic since the Heritage Foundation calls them the economy with the greatest freedom in the world.
Under the pagan gods, the official philosophy/ethics of the Roman empire tended towards Stoicism, which has a lot of parallels with Christian ethics, such as universal brotherhood, altruism, self-abnegation, and so on. Nietzsche hated Stoicism too.
The regimes in Russia and China just declare all their political enemies to be corrupt and purge them. It is about consolidating power, not reducing corruption.
The “intent” is irrelevant. The West is in a state of societal decline. Russia and China are on the rise. Your wailing about intent is what got us into this mess
Yes, I agree that the purpose of the Russian and Chinese system is to declare all their political enemies to be corrupt and purge them. Glad that we agree.
I never used the word “intent”, nor am I “wailing.”
Russia and China will collapse just like every other totalitarian regime.
The Russians and Chinese peoples standards of living have rapidly advanced and government approval from its citizens are at all time highs. Unlike the US and so called liberal west.
So nobody cares what you think or what labels you put on them. The purpose of a system is what it does.
The west degrades its citizens standard of living and increasingly takes away their rights.
Any comparison made between the U.S. with a stable, homogeneous country, especially a Chinese one, should never be considered beyond a superficial level. You may as well say on Mars, it's done this way.
You were SO close to the answer, and then veered off into weakly handwaving about why America is different and why we can't replicate LKY's accomplishments.
The big problem with "benign tyrannies" is succession - the benign tyrant's successors are either corrupt or much less capable. But modern technology has solved this problem, permanently.
We've been able to clone primates for at least 30 years. The technology is already there, we don't even need to dedicate "space race" level funding and brains to it, just a moderate level of years and a few millions of dollars.
As you say, LKY is the ONLY leader who was able to build a profoundly functional, non-corrupt government from the ground up with prosperity for all, while solving all the hard problems post WWII nations face. He's also the only proven leader with a verifiably amazing track record we can fully sequence.
The solution is simple, and has been the root of my single-issue politics for the last ten years: clone LKY 200 times and install him as dictator for life in EVERY country:
People look at the political status quo and relevant demographics and conclude that reform impossible. They are probably right. Our current situation really is very different than past challenges.
What other options one has after realizing this are an entirely different matter.
This is an excuse for dictatorship in the West because we don't have a culture of benevolent ruler and meritocracy. The oligarchs like Thiel cares for the people??? He doesn't pay his fair shares of taxes. Trump has no morality except for green. This is the ultimate fox guarding the hen house.
It's about the policies: Investments in human capital, infrastructures, and R&D. Stop relying on consumer consumptions. Consumer consumption is the result of good economic policy not quick monetary gimmicks. Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower gave us our economic strength. Each of these people contributed to the economic foundation of the country not some gimmick monetary policies.
It is bizarre to me that so many on the American Right think that we need to invent something completely different to overcome our current problems. We do not need enlightened dictators like in Singapore or a monarchy or a right-wing federal government. Lee Kuan Yew‘s achievements are amazing, but they do not offer a model for the US. One brilliant leader can be succeeded by many incompetent and corrupt leaders.
No, we just need to get back to what once worked. The principles of federalism and checks/ balances embedded in the US Constitution worked great, but in more recent times we vastly centralized power in the federal government and particularly in the bureaucracy.
We don’t need perfect government. We just need to avoid the worst government across the 50 states, and let the rest of American society solve problems.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/one-radical-reform-to-solve-all-our
The problems is that ‘what once worked’ only worked with a white hyper majority and the US no longer has that. They bring up Lee Kuan Yew because his system was designed to balance multiple distinct racial and religious groups which is closer to the US now than the US back then.
There is no evidence that federalism and checks/ balances requires a “hyper-white majority.” Believing that a political strongman like Lee Kuan Yew can balance “multiple distinct racial and religious groups” in America is naive.
You also neglect the ethnic and religious diversity of the US in the 18th and 19th Century.
https://frompovertytoprogress.substack.com/p/the-great-realignment-in-american
The entire point of the Constitution according to James Madison was to ensure that no minority group nor the majority can override individual rights. That is a much better model than dreaming up some alternative that has never worked before.
The US Constitution went out the window with the amendments muchless all the more controversial bits (Civil War 1.0, income tax, etc).
That does not undermine my main point at all.
John Adams phrased it best: “But should the people of America once become capable of that deep simulation towards one another, and towards foreign nations, which assumes the language of justice and moderation while it is practising iniquity and extravagance, and displays in the most captivating manner the charming pictures of candor, frankness, and sincerity while it is rioting in rapine and insolence, this country will be the most miserable habitation in the world. Because we have no government armed with power capable of contending with human passions unbridled by morality and religion. Avarice, ambition, revenge, or gallantry, would break the strongest cords of our Constitution as a whale goes through a net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.”
We are well past the point of America being full of the necessary people he described and the country is reaping the bitter fruit.
That quote does not mention “ white hyper majority” at all, nor does it imply it.
If you want to give up on America or wait for the second-coming of Lee Kuan Yew go ahead, but I will not!
Lol…….”What we need is to repeat what got us into this mess”…um no we don’t need to repeat the mistakes of the past. Unfortunately, these idealist principals only work within a western ethnostate. They cannot work with the demographics of today.
Sorry, but you misquoted me. I wrote: “we just need to get back to what once worked.”
There is no evidence that federalism and checks/ balances embedded in the US Constitution was a mistake.
The US and Singapore never have been ethno-states, nor is either likely to ever be one. No ethno-state in existence has been as successful as the USA.
What you once were led you here so it obviously didn't work.
Singapore is not a liberal democracy and as LKY said: in multiracial societies, people vote along racial and religious lines, not according to economics and policy. They maintain very strict law and order even verging on authoritarianism and stable demographics. It was born out of Lee Kuan Yew’s pragmatism, making the best of extant demographics - but Lee said he could have made Singapore even better if it were more homogenous.
“I have said openly that if we were 100% Chinese we would do better” LKY
The USA was very much founded as an ethnostate..see the NaturalisationAct of 1790. Despite the popular multicultural lie, the USA was created for White people of European descent. The Supreme Court found in 1923 that even high-caste Indians were not White under the terms of the 1790 Naturalization Act and therefore could not be citizens. Right up until the Hart Cellar act in 1965. So your wrong
So to use your own logic, the supposed American ethnology-state that you claimed once existed failed, so your supposed solution “obviously didn’t work” either.
That is why your “logic” goes nowhere.
You have no solution. You have only whining and complaining rationalized by bad history.
It failed precisely because it stopped being a country for ethnic europeans. Immigration from incompatible 3rd world countries is literally the problem. Just as LKY discovered in Singapore, these people need a very firm hand to maintain their behavior. Blank slate idealists are in denial about reality. You can’t train a donkey into a racehorse. Liberalism is in its death throes.
I am not a “blank slate idealist” nor was the US Constitution based on blank slate idealism. Nor am I trying to “train a donkey into a racehorse.”
Even if you deported everyone whose ancestry derives from “incompatible 3rd world countries,” we would still have the same problem. The reality is that the vast majority of Leftists are white.
And thinking that a “very firm hand” is going to solve the problem is extraordinarily naive.
If you prefer China or Russia or Singapore, please move there. My guess is that you will lose your enthusiasm for living under a “very firm hand.”
Fact is, the repudiation of liberal democracy by leftoids and rightoids alike is what caused the problems of the modern West.
And MAGA Xinnie simps like you want nothing but power: the ability to lord everyone over for your own twisted pleasure.
And the Naturalization act was implemented 14 years after the US’s founding, and it has been revised multiple times to the point that race was removed from the naturalisation criteria even before Hart Celler, not to mention the 14th Amendment and birthright citizenship.
And the US has been in decline since then. this has rapidly accelerated since Hart Celler and the Civil rights act. People are not interchangeable cogs in a machine. Liberalism is on its last legs…. It’s over…you guys killed it.
Like a declining murder rate?
Or the repeal of segregation?
As if one excess justifies another?
The US’s, and western world’s current problems is caused by leftoids and rightoids undermining Liberal Democracy.
Have you not paid any attention for San Francisco the last few years. The great leftist experiment without limits, including cancelling law enforcement.
Yes, I have. That is a good example of exactly what not to do.
What remains of Federalism contains the terrible policies of San Francisco to San Francisco.
It was the over-centralization of government that has enabled it to leak out. If we do not rediscover the Federalism of the constitution, then those terrible policies will be imposed even more on the rest of the nation.
Ah yes… because leftoids absolutely love liberal democracy.
Totally.
>"What is striking with most illiberal thinkers, whether alienated Americans or anti-American Europeans, is their total lack of engagement with the U.S. political tradition."
The only kind of reform usually possible is reform from within; a more intimate study and more intelligent use of the traditional forms.—George Santayana
"What is striking with most illiberal thinkers, whether alienated Americans or anti-American Europeans, is their total lack of engagement with the U.S. political tradition."
What Indeed I've always found amusing about modern American far right is they are as much as esterophile as the far left. While I can understand the far left fantasizing about making the US in best case a Nordic style Social Democracy and in worst case a Democratic Socialist Venezuela, right wingers looking for to apply foreign models to US reality is such weird and absurd, since they are implicitly declaring left wing cultural relativism is on point.
They are so immersed in their larping that they are completely unaware of the aims of what once was called "conservative revolution". It is not just about setting up a dictatorship (why not a Sunni Monarchy like Saudi Arabia, then?) , but to restore founding values of the nation. In the case of the United States, these values are found in Anglo-Saxon Protestantism: limited government, private property, personal responsability, and yes also a not so very welcoming attitude in face of foreigners. But to my surprise, when I tried to point this out some people answered me <<protestantism is gay and catholicism is "based">>. Do I have to remind them what their ancestors thought about Catholicism?
Personal responsibility lol, from the same puritans who sponged off the natives until it was time to dispossess them. Protestant propaganda on this subject is laughable in the extreme.
"I actually don’t think we even needed Christianity in that respect: northern European societies and their offshoots all seem to tend pretty strongly towards a moralistic “niceness” once prosperity and safety have eliminated the apparent need to be tough on others."
-I'm not so sure about that, I think that Christianity had an enormous impact on cultural virtues, in a way that was probably very positive. Machiavelli also hated Christianity, he thought that the old Roman gods encouraged people to be virtuous (by which he meant strong and powerful, braggadocious) while the new Christian virtues (humility, forgiveness) taught people simply to tolerate their slavery. But I think the new Christian virtues promoted a culture where people could trust each other and collaborate more easily, a necessary component of industrialization where progress depends on large groups breaking a task down to small parts and then combining them back together.
Great article, I agree with you on most everything. Even if you could have a benevolent dictatorship (which obviously isn't Trump), regression to the mean will always give us corrupt fools in the end. Singapore is a fascinating subject (and I'm currently reading How Nation's Fail). I just recently learned that 80% of Singaporeans live in public housing, which is ironic since the Heritage Foundation calls them the economy with the greatest freedom in the world.
Under the pagan gods, the official philosophy/ethics of the Roman empire tended towards Stoicism, which has a lot of parallels with Christian ethics, such as universal brotherhood, altruism, self-abnegation, and so on. Nietzsche hated Stoicism too.
"there is no corrective mechanism should the regime cede to the temptation of abuse and corruption, as we see in Russia and China"??
Are we looking at the same countries?
Compared to the USA, both Russia and China are exemplary in rejecting and prosecuting abuse and corruption.
Both Russia and China have massive problems with corruption.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_Corruption_Perceptions_Index
The regimes in Russia and China just declare all their political enemies to be corrupt and purge them. It is about consolidating power, not reducing corruption.
The purpose of a system is what it does (POSIWID)
The “intent” is irrelevant. The West is in a state of societal decline. Russia and China are on the rise. Your wailing about intent is what got us into this mess
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_purpose_of_a_system_is_what_it_does
Yes, I agree that the purpose of the Russian and Chinese system is to declare all their political enemies to be corrupt and purge them. Glad that we agree.
I never used the word “intent”, nor am I “wailing.”
Russia and China will collapse just like every other totalitarian regime.
The Russians and Chinese peoples standards of living have rapidly advanced and government approval from its citizens are at all time highs. Unlike the US and so called liberal west.
So nobody cares what you think or what labels you put on them. The purpose of a system is what it does.
The west degrades its citizens standard of living and increasingly takes away their rights.
If you consider living under a surveillance police state to be prosperity.
Lmao "muh ceeceepee" It's hard to tell if you lot are NPC boomers or NSA boys. 🤦 either way you are so out of touch its ridiculous
Any comparison made between the U.S. with a stable, homogeneous country, especially a Chinese one, should never be considered beyond a superficial level. You may as well say on Mars, it's done this way.
You were SO close to the answer, and then veered off into weakly handwaving about why America is different and why we can't replicate LKY's accomplishments.
The big problem with "benign tyrannies" is succession - the benign tyrant's successors are either corrupt or much less capable. But modern technology has solved this problem, permanently.
We've been able to clone primates for at least 30 years. The technology is already there, we don't even need to dedicate "space race" level funding and brains to it, just a moderate level of years and a few millions of dollars.
As you say, LKY is the ONLY leader who was able to build a profoundly functional, non-corrupt government from the ground up with prosperity for all, while solving all the hard problems post WWII nations face. He's also the only proven leader with a verifiably amazing track record we can fully sequence.
The solution is simple, and has been the root of my single-issue politics for the last ten years: clone LKY 200 times and install him as dictator for life in EVERY country:
https://performativebafflement.substack.com/p/why-we-need-to-clone-lee-kuan-yew?r=17hw9h
People look at the political status quo and relevant demographics and conclude that reform impossible. They are probably right. Our current situation really is very different than past challenges.
What other options one has after realizing this are an entirely different matter.
This is an excuse for dictatorship in the West because we don't have a culture of benevolent ruler and meritocracy. The oligarchs like Thiel cares for the people??? He doesn't pay his fair shares of taxes. Trump has no morality except for green. This is the ultimate fox guarding the hen house.
It's about the policies: Investments in human capital, infrastructures, and R&D. Stop relying on consumer consumptions. Consumer consumption is the result of good economic policy not quick monetary gimmicks. Hamilton, Teddy Roosevelt, and Eisenhower gave us our economic strength. Each of these people contributed to the economic foundation of the country not some gimmick monetary policies.