Can american political culture and ideology survive the 21st century?

The 20th century was without a doubt the century of the United States. This was the century when, on the shoulders of European Enlightenment ideas, Protestant ethics, an unwavering faith in the power of the market, and the destructive tendencies of the “Old Continent” countries that culminated in the two world wars, the USA won the global hegemonic throne, both politically and in economic and cultural terms.

The world had every reason to believe the American success story grounded in their political philosophy. The USA achieved economic miracle after economic miracle, had the highest GDP per capita and finally, with the end of the Cold War, the absolute throne of the world. Hollywood and the rest of American popular culture are well established in most developed countries, while the American technology giants are Microsoft, Google, Apple, etc. began to dominate the new global communication platform, the internet. The international political order was unequivocally based on American liberalism, robust individualism, and subtle Christian ethics, to which we can largely attribute credit for formulating and enforcing the concept of human rights. The victory of America and its political ideas seemed so absolute that in 1992, Fukuyama famously announced the “end of history.”

Thanks to their dominant status, American political culture and ideology have shaped – in many ways – with the “hard” and “soft” power – the political cultures of other countries. Initially only the countries of the West, later known as the “capitalist bloc”, and part of the “third world”, and then with the fall of the Iron Curtain and the establishment of the Washington Consensus, most of the rest of the world. Borrowing Gramsci’s concept of “cultural hegemony” – that the ruling classes tend to dominate particular culture in order to maintain power relations and institutions that benefit them socially, politically and economically – and applying it to the global context, replace the leading classes and the particular culture with the United States and global culture, we see how American status as a superpower in the second half of the 20th century Americanized our local cultures. The general tendency of the “weaker” is to culturally imitate the “stronger” in order to achieve their level of technological, economic or military dominance. All of this results in our subconscious and gradual acceptance of ideas that were once foreign to us.

With the 21st century, however, the sanctity and inviolability of American political ideas began to loosen. The American ideal of (global) economic liberalism and free trade began to degenerate into so-called “crony” capitalism, with the growing monopolization of the domestic market, where in theory at least an approximation of the maxim of equal opportunities prevailed, and global inequalities. With the rise of so-called “fake news” in the age of social media, especially disinformation during the election and now during the covid-19 crisis, the first amendment to the US Constitution on freedom of speech is in question. Even American exports of democracy and the concept of human rights to the non-Western world was, contrary to expectations, met with rejection by the local population and failure.

With the multiplication of domestic and global problems under American “control” (and their political culture and ideology), we in the West began to question the set of ideas we took for granted, which was also helped by the rise of America’s philosophically (as well as traditionally, interestingly, etc.) antithetical political entity of China that challenge Western political ideology and culture. American and Chinese political cultures clash in several areas, but in none more than in the contrast between freedom and authority.

In one of the founding documents of the United States, the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson wrote, “For us, these truths are sacred and self-evident, that all human beings are created equal and independent, and that inalienable rights arise, including the protection of life, freedom and the pursuit of happiness.” The primary American value – freedom – was the basis for the moral and political philosophy of all major schools that unequivocally called themselves American – from Dewey, who advocated economically progressive liberalism as the right path to human happiness, to Robert Nozick, who believed that a minimal state that does not “intrude” on the lives of freely traded individuals is the only one that is morally just.

Chinese philosophy, on the other hand, is perhaps best illustrated by the answer of the greatest and most influential Chinese philosopher Confucius, to Duke Jing’s question about the true mode of government: “Government exists when a prince is a prince and a minister a minister; when a father is a father and a son is a son.” In other words, adequate security and prosperity provided by the state is achieved only if we respect the social and political order and the authority that determines it.

The question arises, can American political culture and ideology as we know it today survive the 21st century? Will concepts such as freedom, open society, individualism and democracy remain more attractive to the West and the rest of the world than benevolent authority, closed society, collectivism, social harmony and party meritocracy? Like the previous cultural-ideological “war” between the United States and the Soviet Union, our beliefs, values, and worldviews will be at the forefront. But who is more prepared for a global clash of political cultures and ideologies for dominance / hegemony?

Many would say that today’s American ideals of open society, multiculturalism, and globalism (to which the “opposition” part of American society no longer agrees as enthusiastically as other “rulers”) are made perfect for China’s infiltration, sowing dissent, and stealing technology, economic and partly military achievements of the United States, which this country does not hide enough compared to China.

Some would refer to game theory for insight, which says that if one side participates in a process and the other does not, the one who does not participate will lose the maximum possible gain compared to all other variations of the game. The US, with its openness (in the jargon of game theory, “cooperation”) and the tendency of the private sector to maximize profits in the global market, is inferior to China, which has a highly nationalistic culture and prioritizes national interests unlike the U.S. national interest separate from the private (in game theory jargon, with an actor “not participating”). Others would say that the traditions of individualism, creative destruction, and the American profit orientation are economically superior to the Chinese way, where the party directs and controls the economy through a strong state.

Whichever country will prevail in the end, however, something is clear. Some ideas will, contrary to Fukuyama’s predictions, exhaust their moment of glory. But perhaps, as Berggruen and Gardels argue in “Intelligent Governance for the 21st Century: A Middle Way between West and East”, it will make the most sense to synthesize ideas from the political philosophies of both countries. However, no political scientist or political philosopher can predict in which direction this scale of synthesis will turn, into American or Chinese.