I wish to commend Kevin Williamson’s essay from yesterday: “America’s Unwarranted Pessimism.” It returns to a theme he has been hitting often lately: Whatever its practitioners and admirers say, autocracy is bad, actually. Its supposed bargain is limited freedom for “results” — eggs broken to make an omelet. But as George Orwell asked, “Where’s the omelet?” In the process, moreover, the limitation of freedom also makes society more brittle and less dynamic. Kevin writes:

Americans wallow in doom and gloom, even though our fiscal policies belong to a nation of insane pie-in-the-sky optimists. We almost always overestimate the strength of the autocratic regimes and underestimate the strength of the liberal-democratic ones — we did it throughout the Cold War, and we have done it for decades with respect to China. And even among the liberal democracies, we Americans always overestimate the strength of our rivals and competitors and underestimate ourselves. There is much to admire about Japan and much to learn from the Japanese, but nobody is writing science-fiction novels about a world dominated by that aging, complacent, declining country anymore. Ezra Pound thought he saw the future in fascist Italy, while Lincoln Steffens visited the Soviet Union and declared: “I have seen the future, and it works.”
As it turns out, “what works” is the boring old stuff we have here: freedom, democracy, property rights, rule of law, modest regulation and light taxation, free trade, a culture of entrepreneurship, hard work. The United States isn’t the only country that has all that — but we are the biggest country that has all that, and we have oodles of it.

The coronavirus pandemic initiated a good deal of admiration for the Chinese government, particularly early on. Responding to this at the time, I similarly noted:

The United States is a divided nation, though it has been even more divided before. It has made many mistakes recently, though it has made worse ones before. But the nation is stronger than its government; indeed, much of its prosperity results from the kind of entrepreneurial innovation that government is just as apt to stifle as to foster. America can react to errors, form a consensus about how to correct them, and, through that same government, put the resulting solutions into action. Indeed, there are signs that this may already be happening where China is concerned: Witness the otherwise unthinkable alliance between Senator Ted Cruz and Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez against Beijing, reflective of broad bipartisan skepticism of Xi’s regime, which 72 percent of Republicans and 62 percent of Democrats oppose, according to a recent Pew poll.
China’s strength, meanwhile, is its main weakness: It is a totalitarian system. Its consensus is determined unilaterally without the consent of the governed, insulated from blowback and prone by design to groupthink. Its top-down decision-making process channels dissent into potentially even more destructive forms of discontent. Its regime’s success depends considerably on the stifling coercion of its own people, and mimicry of and theft from other nations. This can render it vulnerable both to unpredictability and to systemic errors, such as its one-child policy, its brutal suppression of restive ethnic and religious minorities, a foreign policy that has left it virtually without allies except those forced ruefully into financial reliance upon it, and a dependence upon ever-increasing material prosperity to keep its populace docile.

The record of the Chinese government in the time since makes this castigation of America and praise of China look foolish. So I will continue to bet on freedom, and to bet on America.