Chapter 12 6. Three "gene defects"

Whether we talk about the "five deficiencies" of the Western political system or the "empty talk that harms the country" of Western politicians, is there a bigger problem behind it?I think there is, and that is some deep-seated defects exposed by the current Western system, which may be called "genetic defects".If these genetic defects cannot be repaired for a long time, history may eventually prove that the Western democratic system that still temporarily dominates the international discourse today is likely to be an episode in the long history of mankind, or even a flash in the pan.why would you say so?

If we go back in history about 2,500 years, there were some small city-states in Greece that implemented some kind of democratic system-first exclude women and slaves, and then set up one-man-one votes, a system that was later defeated by Sparta.In the following two thousand years, the word "democracy" was basically a derogatory term in the West, roughly equivalent to "mob politics".Modern Western countries began to introduce a democratic system of one person, one vote after completing modernization.Taking the United States as an example, the real universal suffrage only started in 1965. Compared with China's reform and opening up at the end of 1978, the time difference between the two is only 13 years.Of course, behind the two is the difference between Western civilization and Chinese civilization.Since the time gap between the formation of the two new systems is not long, the two might as well compete. I am more optimistic about the Chinese model.

Western political elites in history, including the founding father of the United States, were much more cautious on democratic issues than current Western politicians.Most of them tend to adopt "republic" and "rule of law" to prevent "populism" that "democracy" may bring.But with the end of the Cold War and Fukuyama’s declaration that Western liberal democracy represented the “end of history,” we not only saw the arrogance of Western countries in their political systems, but also the enormous impact that this arrogance had brought to Western society. cost.After the end of the Cold War era, Western countries, especially the United States, promoted the Western democratic model all over the world with the attitude of a victor and the enthusiasm of missionaries, setting off the so-called third wave of "democratization", which was quite overwhelming for a while. momentum.But more than 20 years have passed, and the report card of the third "democratization" is almost lacklustre. Instead, China, which firmly rejects the Western political model, has risen rapidly at a scale and speed unprecedented in human history.

I have said many times that if a non-Western country or region adopts today’s Western political system, there are basically only two endings: one is from hope to disappointment, such as the Philippines, Thailand, Ukraine, Kyrgyzstan, Taiwan, China, etc.; the other is from hope to despair, such as Haiti, Iraq, Afghanistan, Democratic Republic of Congo, etc.The question is whether this ending is starting to befall the West as well?With the development of European and American financial crisis, debt crisis and economic crisis, this possibility cannot be completely ruled out.While most Western countries have not yet fallen from hope to despair, this is largely because they still enjoy the wealth accumulated earlier (including a lot of ill-gotten gains) and some of the privileges of the international order, such as the US dollar as the international reserve currency status, but the Western people are also showing more and more situations from hope to disappointment or continued disappointment about the status quo of their own country.According to the poll conducted by the Pew Center of the United States, the American people’s satisfaction with the status quo of their country was 30% and 29% in 2009 and 2012 respectively; 30% and 30% in the United Kingdom; 32% and 29% in France; 25% and 11%.If Western countries still refuse the reform of "advancing with the times", the trend of overall decline in the West is estimated to accelerate, and the possibility of some Western countries slipping into the "Third World" cannot even be ruled out. Countries like Greece seem to be on the decline as a whole. To the "Third World".

What is the deep-seated "genetic defect" of the Western political model?In my opinion, there are mainly three presuppositions in the operation of Western democratic systems today: (1) people are rational; (2) rights are absolute; (3) procedures are omnipotent.The so-called "people are rational" is what some of our scholars like to talk about: people can make rational choices through their own rational thinking and cast their own solemn vote.So far, social experience and practice have proved that people can be rational or irrational, even extremely irrational.With the rise of new media, the irrational side of human beings has even been strengthened.How many politicians make full use of the irrational side of people to play the populist card, so as to gain more votes and benefits.This is how Hitler came to power; this is how Yugoslavia was destroyed by populist politicians in the 1990s, and today’s new media era provides better conditions for the expansion and spread of populism.

American scholar Bryan Caplan (Bryan Caplan) recently published a monograph titled "The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies" (The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies), Point out the crux of the rational person assumption.He pointed out that it is because of the "bias" of "rational voters" that their votes will be used by various interest groups, which in turn will cause damage to the economy.For example, "rational voters" have a "prejudice" to favor high welfare, and politicians play the "high welfare" card. As a result, Western countries have fallen into debt crises caused by high welfare one by one.He believes that the main reason for the frequent mistakes of democracy is the "rational nonsense" of voters: most American voters are ignorant of political issues, and their inherent views are also problematic. Because of their ignorance, they messed up the election; because One's own "prejudice", one's own votes are also "prejudiced", and one's own country's policies are ultimately "prejudiced" and go astray.He believes that what the United States needs to do now is to improve the "quality" of democracy rather than increase the "quantity" of democracy, and suggested that "qualified voters" must vote to solve the quality problems facing the American democratic system.Of course, in the United States, where mass democracy has almost become a religion, Kaplan's suggestion can only be a hypothesis, basically impractical.

The current political system arrangements in the West basically hand over the task of electing national leaders to voters every four or five years, and voters in the collective sense, like individuals, have inherent limitations and defects, especially restricted Due to the limitations of personal vision and interests, we often cannot see the overall and long-term interests of our own society.The main manifestation of the irrational choice of voters is the proliferation of populism.As long as politicians have enough money and the ability to put on a show, they can cater to the short-sighted and partial interests of the public.In contrast, the core of the "mass line" in the Chinese model is to "come from the masses and go to the masses". Decisions with broad consensus.Judging from the experience of the past few decades, China's decision-making is generally much less populist than the West.

The presupposition of "absolute rights" also brings about many problems, especially the excessive expansion of individual rights and the serious degradation of individual responsibilities.Moreover, the contradictions between the various absolute rights cannot be resolved.So many rights are absolute, cannot be compromised, and cannot be transferred.As a result, rights are mutually exclusive, and the cohesion of the small family to the large society has been greatly reduced.American society today is full of serious problems of rights fighting each other: gay rights versus anti-gay rights, pro-abortion rights versus anti-abortion rights, religious rights versus non-religious rights, privacy The rights of defenders of rights and defenders of the right to information are in conflict with each other.The crisis brought about by the culmination of absolute power is one of the greatest social crises in the United States today.With the absolutization of power, the traditional family structure has basically disintegrated, and everyone emphasizes their own rights and freedoms instead of their own responsibilities and obligations, including responsibilities and obligations to relatives, family members, and the family.The United States has transformed from a society dominated by "traditional families" (a couple with children) to today's so-called "multiple family" society, which includes single parents, illegitimate children, older children with younger children, same-sex marriages, etc. "family" status constituted society. In 1970, "traditional families" still accounted for 40% of the total number of American families, but by 2012, the proportion of "traditional families" had dropped to 19%. In 1965, only 7 percent of children in the United States were born to unmarried mothers, but in the decades since, the number has skyrocketed.Today, 41 percent of mothers are unmarried or divorced at birth, and 53 percent of mothers under the age of 30, while 40 percent of single-mother households are poor.

The characteristic of this "deformed family" is that the child does not know who the father is.More than ten years ago, a Chinese movie touched countless Americans, because in the movie, there can be family exchanges between generations. This kind of scene is rare in the United States today, which makes many Americans, especially The elderly audience in the United States was moved.The "deformed family" structure in the United States has naturally produced a deformed society, and the extremely high crime rate in the United States has an inseparable relationship with this deformed family structure.China's social construction must surpass the deformed society model of the United States.

At the political level, the absolutization of rights is manifested in the increasing trend of partisan politics "polarization". More and more people believe that both parties and their supporters in the United States put their rights above the interests of the entire country, so the United States Today's political landscape is a divided one. During the "September 11" incident in 2000, there was a rare consensus between the two parties in the United States. Afterwards, partisan disputes continued, and a new political consensus could not be formed.Harvard scholar Mary Ann Glendon lamented in her book "Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse" (Rights Talk: The Impoverishment of Political Discourse): The United States has the most diverse types of rights in the world. The country with the strongest beliefs, but "the bluntness and straightforwardness of the American-style rights discourse, the profligacy, exaggeration and absolutism when granting rights, the supremacy of individualism and even intolerance, and the silence on individual, civic and collective responsibility", etc., This has led to "the closedness of rights, the isolation of rights holders, and the lack of social responsibility." 33 The balance between rights and obligations and the balance between different rights upheld by the Chinese represent a value concept based on common sense, and also represent the future that human society should move towards.Furthermore, not only rights and obligations must be balanced, but also the necessary reciprocity and cooperation between different rights must be ensured.Only in this way can a society function well.

As for the presupposition that "programs are omnipotent", this first led to the increasing gamification of Western political systems: Western democracy has evolved into a procedural democracy with "game democracy" at its core. As long as the procedures are correct, it doesn't matter who comes to power.In an increasingly competitive world, this kind of "gaming democracy" looks set to fail. In his book "Nation of Devils", Oxford scholar Stein Lingen explores the procedural dilemmas facing the American political system, for example, the problem of "legislation out of control" in the United States: various interest groups The lobbying of the US Congress has allowed the various vested interests they represent to be taken care of, which has led to bills passed by the US Congress that seem to be getting longer and longer.The length of the U.S. tax code, "has grown from 1.4 million words in 2001 to 3.8 million words today."But if the United States wants to change this status quo, it needs to amend the constitution, and constitutional amendments must first go through some procedures, which is almost impossible.In other words, the reform plan could not be "democratically approved" due to procedural reasons. Lingen could only sigh: "How can you expect patients to see patients?" Social and procedural justice has become a weapon to resist reform and protect backwardness, rather than a tool to encourage reform and promote innovation.Once procedural justice is regarded as the highest requirement of justice, once procedural justice is made absolute, the consequences are often procedural injustice and result injustice. Procedural dilemmas exist at other levels of economic and social life as well.Economist Chen Ping studied the time it takes for an invention to become an industry in the United States, and came to the following conclusion: Although the United States is still at the forefront of the world in terms of innovation and R&D, the new technologies developed by the United States have never been The average cycle from testing, investing, lobbying parliament, revising relevant laws and regulations to production and marketing takes about 10 years. In contrast, China generally only needs about 20 months, which is about 1/5 of the time in the United States.So now not only is the manufacturing industry in the United States flowing to China, but more and more research and development and trial production in the United States have also been transferred to China. After successful trials and production in China, the products are then sold back to the United States. Of course, for China, building a society ruled by law and procedural justice is still a very important task, because China's traditions of rule of law and procedural justice are quite weak, but we have to take one step and look at three steps, and our ideal goal must be Beyond the American model.The United States is a country with extremely expensive governance costs and severely solidified vested interests.The rule of law and procedural justice are very important, but the rule of law and procedural justice themselves must also keep pace with the times.If they fail to keep up with the times, a country becomes less and less dynamic.When the Western model swept the world and had no competitors, this lack of vitality did not seem to be a big problem, but when the Chinese model became an alternative, the omnipotent model of Western programs became a big problem. In short, generally speaking, under the existing Western institutional arrangements, the irrational side of people seems to be strengthened, and various populist trends of thought are encouraged, making it increasingly difficult for Western societies to discuss issues "seeking truth from facts".The absolutization of rights is manifested in the mutual exclusion and confrontation of various rights.The omnipotence of procedures has made the Western democratic system more and more "gamified", and "talent-based" and "foresight" have become increasingly rare.Under such circumstances, "empty talk harming the country" has become the norm in many countries.In countries like the United States, capital forces have also taken advantage of the "genetic flaws" of the democratic system to achieve the goal of expanding their influence and even achieving dominance.These three "gene defects" are big problems that Western system reforms will have to face up to sooner or later, otherwise, the decline of Western society as a whole will be irreversible.

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