Never have. Never will…?
Every time I hear Trump praise a dictator–which is frequent–especially if that dictator said something nice about him, he’s never asked the right follow-up question.
Take the Joe Rogan slot Trump did. In which he said admiringly that President Xi, in China, “controls 1.4 billion people with an iron fist.”
Rogan’s follow-up: “it doesn’t mean he’s not evil, or it doesn’t mean he’s not dangerous”. Fair enough.
At the same time: “isn’t a great thing about the US that we don’t need that? We can have dissent and still have the strongest economy in the world?” might be another comeback.
The US, without a dictator, without “iron fist” rule, with lots of dissent about almost everything, still has the biggest, strongest, most nimble, most innovative economy in the world: stronger than China, stronger than Russia, stronger than Hungary, stronger than North Korea by light years.
Not only that, but the US is also more innovative than those other countries, because dictatorships tend to stifle entrepreneurship and innovation, because dictators like to make sure they hand pick who is allowed to make a lot of money. And that includes emerging technologies, which are the hardest to control.
Like Russia may be really good at hacking. But at the same time, there is no Russian Apple. Or Google.
Of course, Trump’s response to that would probably be to say that the US economy is actually crap. Because he hates this country if it’s not run by him.
Sure people are suffering and straining to make ends meet.
At the same time, a recent story in the Wall Street Journal described a couple on the fence about the election because while their own salaries had more than kept up with the pace of inflation, they now were feeling compelled to trim their own hedges because they’d decided the absolute cost of continuing to pay a landscaper for that was just too much.
And that story reminded me of President George W. Bush in and around 9/11 telling the American public we were all going to have to make big sacrifices in the coming years. And we were all ready to. And then, in the coming years–with the exception of military and their families–no one did. And now no one thinks they ever should have to. Even in the face of things like a pandemic. And somehow the “logical” conclusion to that is having Trump as a dictator will make that so.
Coming out of COVID, it’s kind of a miracle we are where we are. Yeah, inflation hit the US more dramatically than some other countries during COVID, but it’s also come down more quickly, and wages have gone up more quickly too as jobs came back. That’s not luck. That’s the result of a lot of work. Even in a democracy, maybe only in a Democracy, could that level of innovation happen, and the job get done.
The problem with all dictatorships is however good the dictator is at governing or at least keeping his subjects in line, if he makes even a small mistake, which he’ll never admit, it just gets magnified. See Ukraine. Dissent and freedom to move around and invent stuff and build stuff on your own is essential to keeping countries vibrant, innovative and afloat.
And no, you won’t automatically get shot in the face by an immigrant if you go to a big city. So you don’t need a dictator to protect you from that.