China’s intellectuals are often “Party” thinkers, but as Mark Leonard noted in Prospect Magazine as long ago as 2008, despite the global interest in the rise of China, no one is paying much attention to its ideas and who produces them. “China,” Leonard says, “has a surprisingly lively intellectual class whose ideas may prove a serious challenge to western liberal hegemony.” One thing that became clear after the false start of the 1000 Flowers Campaign in 1957 and especially since Deng Xiaoping’s reforms in 1986, China has begun the debate of the role of the intellectual in society. It is not strong enough or thorough enough just yet, but compared to America where the intellectual is a leper, and science is regarded, like the arts, as an extravagance, intellectualism is respected and taken seriously. China cannot yet love its critical intellectuals as they deserve to be loved, but it would like to. America by contrast has no real use for the life of the mind: it is to America what political dissidence is to China, the punishment being irrelevance rather than imprisonment or silencing. In the long run, however, it is the voice of Emerson and Thoreau, and Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Howard Zinn that changed our perception of America, in ways that will not let smart women and men go back to pre-reflective times.
China knows that a coherent vision of the state is necessary for a sustainable patriotism. It is simply no longer possible for Americans to feel the patriotism they once felt during the early twentieth century; it has been unrevivable—impossible– since Viet Nam, and even discussions of it seem nostalgic and stale. Except for the solitary exception of 9-11, Americans no longer are able to evoke patriotic emotions evoked by a single source or threat. In its place they have put a contrived interest in the security of the “homeland” (mark the phrase). They have learned to fear Syrians, Mexican immigrants, undocumented “aliens.” And they have learned to “foreignize” political correctness, gay marriage, abortion rights, Obamacare, and sensible limits to second amendment “rights” as a composite European bogeyman whose slaying would make America the awesome country—safe, secure, unequivocally self-confident– it once was.
But it was never that country.
