Democrats haven’t fallen in love yet

AS a starter for this concluding portion of the article begun yesterday, here’s a refresher of the ending question of that first part. In its persistent confrontation with China, what could be the overriding question for the United States is: How to beat China without a fight?

Direk, the scenarist filmmaker, could not but shudder at the question. The US, in its many war adventures the world over, has been clinging tight to principles in Sun Tzu’s deception, subterfuge, strict secrecy in war strategies, etc.

“Let your plans be as dark as night, and when you move, act like thunder,” goes a Sun Tzu dictum.

Nobody else in the world knew America had perfected the atomic bomb until it blasted two in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Direk was rather intrigued when, as pointed out above, top US war officials admitted to the world that America is defenseless against Russian hypersonic missiles. In war, you don’t advertise your weakness; psywar is about pretending to be strong when you are weak. It’s not about the other way around, because when you impart to your enemy an image of weakness on your part, it will invite him to make the first strike, and it is never a good strategy for a general to invite a strike from the enemy. Still, it was Sun Tzu who said a good general is one who wins a war without fighting a battle.

That the US admitted inferiority to Russia — hence, likewise to China — in the nuclear arms competition, could only indicate that the US is engaged in a maneuver whereby to make its enemies disclose their real strength.

China has not taken the bait at all. While Russia has gone to the extent of engaging the US in a proxy war in Syria since 2011, China has persevered in its Belt and Road Initiative as the only way of realizing its vision of a world community of shared future. No nation with such an aim would like to get enmeshed in a world armed confrontation. This is the kind of approach in which China becomes extremely impossible for the US to defeat.

For the US’ sake, China just has to be weakened. If this cannot be done through armed confrontation, then cripple China some other way.

The first time Direk learned about the current spread of the 2019 nover coronavirus acute respiratory disease (2019-nCoV ARD) was when he read in news headlines about a boy from Wuhan, China being suspected as a carrier of the dreaded virus. Followed in Direk’s stream of consciousness news accounts of other nCoV cases, most of them with suspected victims still being under observation.

All of a sudden there appeared before Direk’s eyes another pandemic of sort, similar to the severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) epidemic of 2003. He distinctly remembered that SARS, as news accounts put it, started in Hong Kong — in China. This time around, it started in Wuhan — again in China.

“Why?” Direk found himself wondering, “Why is it that every time there is an epidemic of this kind, the apparent starting point is China?”

At a loss for an explanation, Direk reeled in recollections of war events that had something to do with chemicals. The Iraqi War was for punishing the Saddam Hussein regime for alleged stockpiling of chemical weapons of mass destruction; no such weapons were found when the US-led coalition forces deposed Saddam and took over Iraq. In 2017, while President Rodrigo Duterte was visiting Russia, President Donald Trump ordered Tomahawk target missiles to hit camps of the Syrian government suspected to be the source of an alleged chemical weapons attack at a rebel camp. Fifty-nine cruise missiles hit their targets, but none of the targets yielded chemical weapons.

The point here is that allegations of chemical weapons of mass destruction have all come from the US. Only the US has advanced the idea, so only the US must have the dynamic for unleashing chemical weapons of mass destruction.

This was the case in 1945 when in the face of the Japanese intransigent refusal to abide by the Potsdam Declaration that demanded Japan’s unconditional surrender, President Harry S. Truman issued the threat: “A rain of ruin from the sky.” That “rain of ruin” was dropped in the form of firebombs that turned Tokyo, according to one account, into “a giant bonfire.”

“The human carnage,” said the account, “was so great that the blood-red mists and stench of burning flesh that wafted up sickened the bomber pilots, forcing them to grab oxygen masks to keep from vomiting.”

In the current crisis over the 2019-nCoV, world health authorities have mobilized resources to stop the carnage. World Health Organization ( WHO) DirectorGeneral Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus declared the 2019nCoV outbreak a public health emergency of international concern last January 30, the sixth time WHO has ever done so. The WHO chief lauded China’s policy of lockdown in order to contain the epidemic and said the world should be grateful to China for it.

Indeed, as China was able to contain the SARS outbreak in 2003, so it is determined to stop nCoV now.

Dr. Ghebreyesus expressed the resolve to extensively investigate the current outbreak. Foremost among the considerations that Direk hopes WHO should look into is the fact that the proliferation of viruses similar to the 2019-nCoV began on a mass scale with the H1N1 that broke out in the US in 2009. That outbreak afflicted 1.632 million, killing 284,500 of them; thanks to China’s quick attention, victims of 2019-nCoV number just 8,149, with deaths registered at 170. (As of February 6, there are 31,524 infected and 638 deaths based on WHO figures. — ed)

More than statistical figures, the numbers tell of opposing tales. On the one hand, the virtual nonattention by the US to the huge number of its citizens victimized by H1N1, and on the other hand, the meticulous care with which China handled the comparatively minimal number of victims of the 2019-nCoV. The Chinese lockdown policy has told tremendously on the Chinese economy, crumbling, as one news account puts it, to the tune of several billion dollars of daily losses, and counting.

From this comparison, Direk paints the final scenario. The killer element of HINI is allowed to proliferate — as the atomic bomb was first tested by the US for its destructive potential in a desert called Jornada del Muerto in Los Alamos, New Mexico — thus, determining its full potential as a weapon of mass destruction. It is a strain similar to it, much like a clone actually, the SARS that hit Hong Kong in 2003. Now comes 2019-nCoV, not much different from the H1N1 and SARS and quite similar in lethal effect on humans.

The virus attack is graver now than before. And fanned by bloated media accounts that tend to blame the virus source, the outbreak has made China the greatest sufferer from the proliferation of 2019nCoV. Who would benefit from this development is who would wish the maximum devastation of China.

Ah, talk of chemical weapons of mass destruction. The US said it first, has said it time and time again since then.

After the debacle of the Iowa caucuses, the old quip attributed to Will Rogers seems just right: “I am not a member of any organized political party. I am a Democrat.”

Actually, that broad Democratic coalition encompassing Southern segregationists, working-class union members and Northern liberals used to be one of the party’s electoral strengths. Today’s coalition is much less ideologically diverse, but the central challenge remains to bring it together — and energize voters.

The most worrying news out of Iowa for Democrats is that the voter turnout appears to have been far below that of 2008, when Barack Obama brought people out in record numbers. The 2020 turnout so far looks a lot like 2016 — not a year to emulate. Many Democrats have pinned their hopes on opposition to Donald Trump to galvanize the party. Iowa suggests that negative energy is not enough. (Republican turnout, by contrast, broke previous records for an incumbent, according to the Iowa Republicans.)

Pete Buttigieg has pointed out that every time Democrats had won the White House in the last 50 years, “it’s been with a new-generation figure, who’s not been marinating in Washington for a long time.”

“Every time we’ve tried to go with the kind of safe, established, beenhere-for-a-long-time kind of figure,” Buttigieg told magazine last November, “we have come up short.”

It is a reasonable conclusion. Jimmy Carter, Bill Clinton and Obama all won. Hubert Humphrey, George McGovern, Walter Mondale, Al Gore, John Kerry and Hillary Clinton lost. (Michael Dukakis was an outsider who lost, suggesting that it is a necessary but not sufficient condition.)

The pattern also speaks to something distinctive about the party. As the saying goes, “Democrats fall in love, Republicans fall in line.” The Republican Party remains a somewhat disciplined group of people focused on winning. Consider 2016, when almost all the candidates running against Trump believed that if he were the nominee he would, in the words of South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, “destroy the party.” Once Trump was nominated, the party got squarely behind him, and today he enjoys a 94-percent approval rating among Republicans, according to Gallup.

Democrats, however, need to fall in love. They need someone to energize them to come out in droves. And that person has to feel like a transformative figure, someone who represents a new generation or new way of thinking. The problem with Buttigieg’s argument is not that he’s wrong about the history, but that his own candidacy — while remarkable and refreshing — seems to inspire older, whiter Democrats more so than younger and more diverse ones. The person most attractive to young Democrats remains Bernie Sanders.

The problems with Sanders are obvious. The country is not nearly as left-wing as he is. It is easy to get seduced by the idea that he represents a new wave, that young people are more open to his ideas, that we are entering a new world in which far-left ideas once considered unthinkable are now part of mainstream conversation. That same argument was made by Labor Party leader Jeremy Corbyn and his supporters in Britain’s elections last December — and the party suffered its worst electoral defeat since 1935. It’s not just in Britain. French Socialist Benoit Hamon pushed his party left and got only 6 percent of the vote in the 2017 presidential election. contributing columnist Anna Sauerbrey notes, “Across Western European countries, social democratic parties have gone from an average of well over a third of the vote in the mid-1990s to about a fifth in recent years.”

There are all kinds of explanations for why the left is doing poorly. The old base of working-class voters has been eroded. Many younger voters in Europe opt for Green parties. But above all, it seems to me, is the reality that the cutting-edge issues of today largely involve identity, chiefly immigration. Despite the global financial crisis, people are not embracing more radical left-wing solutions. In an age of uncertainty and change, they are moving not left economically but right culturally. When there is a choice, right-wing populism almost always beats left-wing populism.

Those who have succeeded in this environment have tended to be politicians who appeal to the center and feel fresh and authentic: France’s Emmanuel Macron, Canada’s Justin Trudeau, Greece’s Kyriakos Mitsotakis. Other countries with left-wing parties in power, often in coalitions, remind us that the political landscape is complicated and ever-shifting, and it’s hard to draw clear-cut lessons or rules.

One lesson is clear, however. This year’s Democratic candidate needs to energize the party’s voters and bring together its left and centrist wings. And no one has been able to do that yet.