We've Been Shanghaied (A Political Musing)

There’s an idiom in English, “We’ve been Shanghaied;” used when someone or something has been kidnapped or tricked into working by force or threat.

It might be time for an update, as “We are getting Jinpinged.” When Xi Jinping’s camp came to power in China, they washed away the former oppositional power base via a sweeping anticorruption campaign. This wasn’t wholly misguided; corruption is part and parcel of unchecked totalitarian governments.

Citizen participation, freedom of speech, and the rule of law are the three defining characteristics of democracy. The United States of America is a representative democracy, in which the government is elected by its citizens—the people—who represent their concerns in the government.

The US government in itself is ruled by the power of checks and balances along with the resulting separation of powers. The idea is that all people, and their ideals, are represented by democratic selection of their representatives. However, in recent times the power of interest groups has risen to a crescendo. The biggest danger, when big business and big money gets over involved, is that we begin to look more like a plutocracy than a democracy.

As much as Americans hate Marx, his philosophy of false consciousness begs to enter the conversation:

“Members of a subordinate class (workers, peasants, serfs) suffer from false consciousness in that their mental representations of the social relations around them systematically conceal or obscure the realities of subordination, exploitation, and domination those relations embody. Marx asserts that social mechanisms emerge in class society that systematically create distortions, errors, and blind spots in the consciousness of the underclass. If these consciousness-shaping mechanisms did not exist, then the underclass, always a majority, would quickly overthrow the system of their domination.”

Now a question: Who is overthrowing the system of liberal domination? Is it the underclass?  These are questions we should ask and ponder sufficiently.  It is both our duty and our right.

Back to China, a country that is built on different principles and characteristics than the United States of America.  Aside from a brief republican era (1912-1949), China has been—by contemporary standards—totalitarian.  However; the concept of totalitarianism didn’t appear in political discourse and language (totalitario) until the 1920s through the work of Giovanni Gentile, then coined by Benito Mussolini to characterize the new Italian fascist state. Using the term “totalitarian” to describe imperial China is anachronistic.  Prior central governments, in their various forms, have never had the same control over their entire population as the modern state does.  There was no administrative reach, no comprehensive universal institutions, and no technology for a central authority such as Ming China to exert the amount of control over its population, as 20th century dictatorships in Europe had.  China is, and has always been, a different animal.

Returning to the US, politics are entering a different era.  There is more potential for control and isolation of power than there has ever been before.  The nation has polarized, taking on a strong consciousness that has become a driving force to impose its own anticorruption campaign withing the central government. 

It is beyond important that US citizens are certain that this driving consciousness is not a false consciousness that quickly metastasizes to an incurable terminal conclusion.