This is a fashionable question nowadays. The literal answer can be very simple. Yes, the United States has indeed declined rapidly in the past year. But this is not a continuation of a long-term trend, but a sudden decline after a significant increase in national power. So, I would rather treat it as a rhetorical question. The national power, soft power, and credibility of the United States have experienced ups and downs like a roller coaster for decades. But in just a short year, these have dropped to their lowest points and may even to be lower. Once we find the underlying causes of these ups and downs, we can accurately figure out the genuine question and the correct answer. As the nation has already entered the 20th anniversary of the 9/11 attacks, we owe the answer to the heroes sacrificed in the war on terrorism even more.
Enlightenment of “Democratic Vistas”
It came to my attention that someone criticized the author’s naïve optimism when I read Democratic Vistas by Walt Whitman. However, I still think this is one of the most visionary books on the ideals of democracy and individualism and one of the classic books on comparative politics. This was on my textbook list.
Whitman condemned the corruption and greed of the Gilded Age. He pointed:” Never was there, perhaps, more hollowness at heart than at present, and here in the United States. Genuine belief seems to have left us.” His solution to the crisis was literature: “What I say in these Vistas has its main bearing on imaginative literature, especially poetry, the stock of all. “He suggested this” would give more compaction and more moral identity, (the quality to-day most needed) to these States, ……” The core of his solution was the moral identity. This is also the most needed quality in 21st century today. It reminds us of Alexis de Tocqueville’s thinking: “Liberty cannot be established without morality, nor morality without faith.”
Empirical and scientific analysis of non-institutional and non-political determinants of political behavior, such as the pattern of culture within, is crucial to understand today’s world. Whitman outlined how a cultural order for this great country had formed and provides a foundation for our research on current cultural distortion. If we further check the clues within the question of this post title, the research may go deeper.
The Great Controversy
There is a proposition in the above question: China is rising. In the past few decades, most research on international politics in the West has based on this assumption. Some research directly uses this as the basis for their reasoning; some combine it with another proposition and use the form of syllogism to reason. The most famous example of the latter is the so-called Thucydides trap. Unfortunately, this assumption of ‘China is rising’ violates historical facts and is a typical false proposition. As a result, the PRC policies of the most Western countries have been chaotic or completely wrong for a century.
China is not rising and has never risen. She has always been a victim of a rising power. The real rising power is the communist barbarism. It had poisoned Chinese civilization as early as the beginning of the last century, and in 1949 controlled mainland China via the CCP by a violent means. For a long time, it has also poisoned Christian civilization and cultivated powerful radical left forces in the upper levels of Western politics and all walks of life.
The combination of these two forces, domestic and foreign, set off a climax for attacking the United States with the CCP pandemic as precursor last year. For a long time, the United States has an absolute advantage in social system, economy, science, technology, and military. However, faced with the above attack happened inside of our country, these absolute advantages became useless…
The rising communist barbarism is fatally threatening the United States and the entire human civilization. The decisive battle between Good and Evil has entered a critical stage of life and death. We must clarify the chaos caused by the CCP’s propaganda and by those self-righteous scholars and reveal the truth behind this battle from a cultural perspective. Whether in the East or the West, evil has always deceived people under the cloak of civilization. Only by crossing the barriers of time and space and melting the obstacles of languages can we expose the evil and find the truth. This book is just a humble initiative. The enlightenment from Whitman and Tocqueville encourages us to go on along with the path. Through the deep integration of Christian culture and traditional Chinese culture, more enlightenments will inevitably appear. There is a long way to go, and the evil forces inside and outside the United States are still powerful and arrogant.
(09/12/2021)