Our political system and over financialized economy seem to suffer from same hyper short term focus that many corporations chasing quarterly returns run in to. No long term planning or focus, and perpetual "election season" thrashing one way or another while nothing is followed through with.
Plus, in 2, 4 or 8 years many of the leaders are gone and making money in lobbying or corporate positions. No possibly short-term-painful but long term beneficial policy gets enacted, etc.
And many still uphold our "values" and our system as the ideal, and question any that would look towards the Chinese model as providing something to learn from. So, I anticipate this trend will continue.
It appears the Republicans are all-in on the anti-China bandwagon. Now you just have to convince the Democrats.
I don't think this will be hard. Anyone with a brain looking at the situation realizes we're setting ourselves up for a bleak future by continuing the present course.
The globalists can focus on elevating our international partners to distribute manufacturing: Vietnam, Mexico, Africa.
The nationalists can focus on domestic jobs programs and factories. Eventually it will become clear that we're going to staff them up with immigrant workers and provide a path to citizenship. We need a larger population of workers anyway.
My impression was that Republicans were only half-hearted about China as that issue made it's way through President Trump's administration. The general tone I felt was that things like tariffs were tolerated in support of their party's leader, not the tariffs themselves. And the backtracking on sanctions on specific Chinese firms indicated there was little/no significant GOP support pushing President Trump to follow through. The requirement that TikTok sell off its US operations was watered down into a nice lucrative contract for Oracle, though all that's in limbo and the whole issue has lost steam, its fate possibly resting in the courts, or with a new administration that will be dealing with many larger issues.
The molehill -> mountain issue of Hunter Biden's association with a Chinese private equity fund will raise lots of loud rhetoric, but more for partisan in-fighting than action against China.
Meanwhile the US, the West, Corporations will pay lip service to decrying human rights violations and labor conditions. China will accept this as the need to save face, while any stronger action will be avoided to prevent China from flexing its economic muscles against the corporations or countries that rely on their exports. No company wants to be the next hotel chain forced to temporarily take down their website & issue an embarrassing apology. No country wants to be the next Japan, cut off from rare earth exports.
Just look at Hong Kong: Sure the US has receded from such issues in the last 4 years, but it's not like any other country did anything more than express their displeasure in various diplomatically acceptable ways.
Hong Kong was a lost cause to begin with. With China having full sovereignity over Hong Kong and the Sino-British Joint Declaration being useless (not enforceable in practice and not even violated, at least on paper), the West could do little more about Hong Kong than about Xinjiang or Tibet.
Trump was all in on the anti-China bandwagon. The traditional Republicans were just tolerating Trump long enough to get their agenda passed - conservative judges and tax cuts. Republicans traditionally have been about free trade.
Our political system and over financialized economy seem to suffer from same hyper short term focus that many corporations chasing quarterly returns run in to. No long term planning or focus, and perpetual "election season" thrashing one way or another while nothing is followed through with.
Plus, in 2, 4 or 8 years many of the leaders are gone and making money in lobbying or corporate positions. No possibly short-term-painful but long term beneficial policy gets enacted, etc.
And many still uphold our "values" and our system as the ideal, and question any that would look towards the Chinese model as providing something to learn from. So, I anticipate this trend will continue.