>What do our findings say about democracy in America? They certainly constitute troubling news for advocates of “populistic” democracy, who want governments to respond primarily or exclusively to the policy preferences of their citizens. In the United States, our findings indicate, the majority does not rule—at least not in the causal sense of actually determining policy outcomes. When a majority of citizens disagrees with economic elites or with organized interests, they generally lose. Moreover, because of the strong status quo bias built into the U.S. political system, even when fairly large majorities of Americans favor policy change, they generally do not get it.

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-poli...

I think you're looking at entirely the wrong metric.

3 million Uyghurs in internment camps have increased quality of life? ~400 million still stuck ineural farms? The gap between the to 1% in China and the bottom is vastly larger than in the US. And of course it is easy for China to “improve” coming from the ruins of the cultural revolution. There was nowhere to go but up.

I feel that over-priveleged peoples in the West with a really good life and pretty much every comfort available, often tend to just look at these superficial charts and numbers and tend to gloss over the context in these other countries.

It's pretty sad really that you are comparing China to the USA in this way just by mentioning that the USA is a oligarchy and somehow that's worse than being in China. The US at least has the option. Chinese people do not.

This worshipping of communist governments and downplaying the USA's freedoms and comforts really need to tone down a bit.

There are superficial differences in the tribal totems and rhetorical promises used to promote conformity, and in the mechanics of manipulation and repression.

Beneath that, the dynamics are very similar.

Life can be quite pleasant in any of the above if you're upper-middle class.

If you're on the wrong side of any of these regimes and on the receiving end of institutionalised government violence, it really isn't.

And there's no shortage of e.g. college students from China who want to return after their studies instead of trying to stay around America and get a work visa. They're smart, and they're under no Chinese censorship when in America, so it seems to me that one is not vastly better than the other.

(Also the unspoken question is how China, the USSR, Korea, etc. would be were it not for their economic suffocation by the US. I didn't bring this up in the context of the Great Firewall, but if we're talking about quality of life it's absolutely relevant. It's important for the US to buy Huawei because not doing so when they have a better product is just repeating the same immoral economic suffocation.)

Of course, there are those that don’t. That’s beside the point, there always are.

From memory it used to be about 80% and now it is closer to 20%

Like, what is Huawei going to do if it has information on you and you live in Boston, compared to the local police?

From the perspective of individual liberty it seems better to be subject to surveillance by someone who doesn't have legal authority over you than be subject to someone who does. I'm not sure the American prison population or minority groups have to fear a foreign government more than their own.

It could to take what your local industries you are researching and give it to a Chinese company that will take it into the international market. Is that not harmful? Do you think the US government would similarly take your work and send it to a Chinese competitor before it is made public?

Well, this idea is false. The CCP has power in the U.S. over people they surveil, through the information gained with that surveillance. It doesn't take much to compromise ordinary people, if you can watch a lot of what they do.

> I'm not sure the American prison population...

They're already in prison.

> ...or minority groups have to fear a foreign government more than their own.

Not sure what kind of minority you're talking here, but foreign governments can compromise you and take over your life just the same regardless of the colour of your skin.

What the average American does not need to worry about is the Chinese coming after him because he smoked pot on the weekend. The primary threat to American civil liberties is their own government, not distant foreign ones.

Sure, your own government is responsible for not trampling on your civil liberties; that doesn't mean it's somehow not worse to be also surveilled by the Chinese government, in addition to your own.

When China is spying on you, that doesn't mean the U.S. isn't; it means they both are.

As far as I can tell, your argument is: Because governments in the U.S. don't recognize some things you consider civil liberties, like smoking cannabis recreationally, you don't care that the Chinese government is also spying on you, and you don't think the U.S. government should take a stance on that spying?

It seems pretty incoherent to me.

> Since when is the Chinese government in the business of compromising ordinary Americans?

Roughly since they have had intelligence services. It's not like the Soviets invented Kompromat, and it's not as though they were the last to use it.

>you can’t really argue that America and China are equally bad to Americans.

Yes, the American government can be a 'bigger bad' for Americans than the Chinese government. And it's also not incoherent in a general context, because using China or some other cold war enemy as a strawman to divert attention from domestic civil rights violation is as relevant as it has always been in the US. The Soviet Union was no danger to ordinary Americans either (well nukes aside), because by definition ordinary Americans are.. well ordinary and entirely uninteresting.

Instead of falling in line with the US government circus of blaming China, Americans would do well to pay close attention to their own government. As another poster pointed out, one of the primary reasons for this in the 5G arena is companies struggling to compete with Huawei.

I didn't say the thing you are refuting, that was somebody else paraphrasing my more precise statement. I said that the Chinese government is more willing to be evil to Americans than the U.S. government. The outcomes are a matter of proximity and control.

The reason I made this distinction is because right now we are at a crossroads, deciding whether or not to potentially give the Chinese government more proximity and control when it comes to ordinary Americans. My point is that they really don't have your best interests at heart.

> Instead of falling in line with the US government circus of blaming China, Americans would do well to pay close attention to their own government.

This is not an either-or sort of situation. Americans would do well to pay close attention to both the domestic actions of the U.S. government (and their local and state governments), and equally close attention the foreign actions of the government of the PRC.

> As another poster pointed out, one of the primary reasons for this in the 5G arena is companies struggling to compete with Huawei.

I'm not even convinced there's much of a market for 5G in the U.S; but sure, there is a competitive angle to this. Tell me, though, why Huawei is so interested in making the carrier equipment, but the modems so much less so?

(I think you can construct an argument that America treats the rest of the world better than China, though. I don't think I believe it right now but I could be convinced.)

Being able to say that sort of thing with a straight face is the tremendous privilege of being an American.

> I don't think promoting the American intelligence apparatus is good for the world

In a vacuum I would not promote them, but in a counterintelligence scenario, I side with U.S. and Canadian intelligence services over the PLA, 100%. The thing I try not to do is believe the CIA when they say somebody is committing an act of war against the U.S, because their track record on that is not great. ;- )

> (I think you can construct an argument that America treats the rest of the world better than China, though. I don't think I believe it right now but I could be convinced.)

Well, look into it. I don't think you can compare the callousness and limitless self-interest of the CCP (and the culture of the people they empower) abroad to even the greatest excesses of modern U.S. foreign policy. China is ruthlessly raping the developed world of its natural resources, and leaving superfund sites in its wake, and nobody is tempering that; some because they're afraid, others because they simply never cared.

When the U.S. has an interest abroad, at least Americans feel they have a right and duty to keep tabs on it. That is a huge step up from most of the world. That doesn't mean that American businesses and U.S. government organizations don't do bad things abroad, but it does mean that ordinary Americans can say and do something about it.

There's a false dichotomy here between trusting U.S. intelligence services, and trusting the PLA. If you don't trust either, you may still be surveilled by U.S. intelligence services in America; if you "equally distrust both", you will be surveilled by both, in America.

Because America is the only developed nation...

I think this is a really important point. It's hard to be rational and idealistic when you're under the stresses of scarcity and oppression.