Fixing our own house

Here's an interesting interview with James McGregor, famed China business expert. The interview, by India's Rediff news service, gives the quick-and-dirty lowdown on what's going on in China right now.

The interesting thing about the interview is that McGregor doesn't seem to share the Western media's fixation on whether or not the internet will force China to change (for the record, he thinks it will). He points out one huge reason why China - its people and its government - isn't so eager to accept democracy as the best system.

That reason is the shabby state of American democracy.

McGregor notes:

Put yourself in the role of a Chinese official today, when America says we want you to have a democracy like ours. What has American democracy become?...To get elected, you come up with issues that divide the population and pit them against each other. Like gay marriage, abortion, and all of that. You don't discuss the real issues like education and healthcare and other things that the country needs. And now we are asking the Chinese to adopt this system?...I think Chinese officials get up in the morning and say 'I got a lot of problems to fix, and I'm going to work on them'...American politicians get up in the morning and say, 'How do I kill a Republican today?' or 'How do I kill a Democrat today?'

Wow. McGregor is my new idol. No one else can sum it up so bluntly.

Basically, America is a house divided against itself. We got too rich, and we started fighting over the pie instead of focusing on making it even bigger. Now we're wasting all our time on partisan battles while China's economy eats our lunch, economic malaise slowly kills our European allies, and radical Muslims are burning down a third of the world.

Politicians aren't the only ones to blame. Our media are divided between the "reds" and the "blues." Partisan outlets like Fox News, the National Review, the Nation, the Daily Kos, and the Weekly Standard are more interested in demonizing the opposition than in building up the nation.

And people I talk to - online and off - just don't get it. They all seem to think that the best way to unite the country is to crush the "other side" once and for all. They pay lip service to the need for unity and then refuse to rationally consider the viewpoints of the "enemy." Put simply, this is insane, and it's going to send our country into decline if we don't collectively cut it out.

I'd like to think I'm different. I consider myself solidly liberal - my top priorities include building the middle class, achieving racial economic equality, protecting the environment, stopping anti-gay discrimination, and building international alliances. I despise the notion of turning our country into a theocracy, launching "preventive" wars, or closing our doors to immigrants.

But all the same, I recognize that conservatives and Republicans often have valid points. I'm not a fan of welfare, at least the kind we used to have - I think it contributes to crime and keeps black people poor. I'm glad we changed it. I recognize that the UN is badly corrupt and increasingly amoral, and it needs to be fixed. I think redistributing wealth usually just makes everyone poorer. I think "carbon trading" schemes are probably the best way to reduce greenhouse emissions. And I don't think having Christian symbols in public (or symbols of any religion) would make us into a theocracy.

When conservatives have a point, I want to admit that they have a point. They're not the "enemy." And they shouldn't think of me as the "enemy" either.

My positions on those particular issues may be right and they may be wrong. But until most politicians, media outlets, and regular voters are able to make such concessions, we're going to be stuck in our ideological civil war while history passes us by. James McGregor is absolutely right when he says:

We have to forget our arrogance about democracy for some time. The only way that we can make China be democratic is to make our democracy so good that they want to copy it. We should lead by example, not by wagging our fingers and saying we've [got] something they don't.

Bam.


PS - McGregor also makes a good point when he notes one big reason for the anemic state of our democracy:

If you run for political office in America today, you spend more than half your time in raising money...Making thousands of phone calls, saying 'Can I have $500?' to everybody you ever went to school with...What has that got to do with somebody who ought [to] be a statesman and visionary and lead the country?

Excellent point. I say we just ban politicians from fundraising activities more than one day per week until a certain number of weeks before election day. Let their campaign staff do the fundraising. Also we should increase public financing of campaigns, it's not that expensive. Finally, I think it would be a good idea to stagger Congressional election days state-by-state so there's never a frenzied "election season" that shuts down Congress.

PPS - McGregor is no starry-eyed China sycophant. He recognizes that the whole Chinese system is riddled with corruption:

What they need to do is stamp out corruption, and you cannot do that with the current controls that they have. They are trying to do it through morality and the Confucian Man, and the Socialist Man, which is nonsense.

Like McGregor, I'm not holding up China as a model we should emulate. I'm saying we need to show why our way is better by making it work.