Today’s Impromptus has a range of items, from Harry Reid to Jack Nicklaus, but nothing about China. I’d like to add something here. Fred Hiatt of the Washington Post has a column today which I very much appreciated. He writes that “China is in the midst of a historic crackdown on civil society and freedom.”

It is. I know this from my reading of the news, but also from the personal testimony of some friends and acquaintances.

For a long time, many of us believed the following: Political liberalization follows economic liberalization, as night follows day, or day follows night. Let me quote from a piece I wrote about Condoleezza Rice in 1999. I had interviewed her from her perch at Stanford.

On the critical issue of China, Rice favors strengthening the hand of the “liberalizers” in Beijing — those who suppose (erroneously, according to Rice) that economic liberalization can proceed without a political loosening: “I don’t care if they believe that. Economic liberalization is ultimately going to lead to political liberalization — that’s an iron law.” … The Chinese Communists, she is convinced, are “are living on borrowed time.”

The iron law seems to be made of softer metal. But maybe I should take a longer view.

Recently, I was talking to an Africa expert about governments post-colonization. What a disaster it has all been. She responded, “Yes, but it’s still early days yet, isn’t it?” (She is British, hence that locution.)

I immediately realized she was quite right. It’s been, what? Fifty or sixty years? That’s nothing, in a Gibbonesque perspective. That’s barely a nanosecond. Of course, a lot of people suffer and die in these “nanoseconds.” And then we’re back to Keynes (“In the long run …”).