Is it too late to prevent a "great-power competition” police state?
Since 2018, coinciding with the start of “Trump’s trade war,” the surveillance and law-enforcement arms of the national security state have been targeting Asians and Chinese as part of “great-power competition” (by one measure, close to 90% of those targeted have been Asian-American).
Worse, Republicans are deliberately blurring lines by going after leftist orgs, public education, and LGBTQ+ rights—all of which are now opposed in right-wing discourses not on the basis of principled disagreement but rather because of their purported linkages to an omnipresent China threat. As Mike Pompeo said recently:
The Chinese Communist Party is coming for your kids.
Great-power rivalry is repression politics.
One reason we know this is because it’s not new for the national security state to turn on its own citizens.
It did this during World War I. And the first red scare. And the second red scare. It did this to the New Left and to folk singers. And to the Civil Rights Movement. And to rappers in the ‘90s. And to anyone with brown skin or ties to the Middle East during the long War on Terror.
But to date, the domestic persecutions that have accompanied “great-power competition” have not been extended to the mass of society. The state, initially anyway, has been limiting the scope of its great-power competition-related persecutions to people with some combination of the “wrong” dual citizenship, the “wrong” scientific knowledge, or the “wrong” work history with China.
This is already an erosion of democracy, but it could get much worse.
I frequently find myself worrying how geopolitical competition could become a vector for neofascism or nationalist authoritarianism in the US because of how a toxic bag of militarists, billionaires, MAGA politicians, and opportunistic technocrats traffic in great-power schlock.
That is, there are pathways by which the persecution of some minority groups expands to ever larger circles of persecution. “First they came for the communists” etc.
One of those possible pathways has emerged.