14 Comments

The topics that were pointed out were largely different from bad things the American government did (as far as those things were publicly known at the time), so the US government appeared less hypocritical.

They weren't largely different. The main thing bewailed about Russia was that dissident political opinions were ruthlessly suppressed. Qualitatively, this was the same bad thing that the U.S. Government did. It outlawed certain political opinions and used the outlawry to frighten others in their broad vicinity.

Accordingly, I thoroughly disagree with you that demonizing China on democracy would make the U.S. more democratic. As in the Cold War, it would only serve to justify American violations of the same principles it was supposedly upholding. The popular logic, if they don't fight fair neither should we, is far stronger than the mere desire to avoid hypocrisy.

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During the Cold War the US government pointed at bad things the Soviets did and that influenced the collective thinking of Americans. The topics that were pointed out were largely different from bad things the American government did (as far as those things were publicly known at the time), so the US government appeared less hypocritical.

If today the US was locked in a cold war with China and put emphasis on the fact that China is a police state that monitors its citizens that would make Americans care more about their own privacy. But the US government doesn't spread propaganda like that about China, they are busy fighting terrorist groups that are not known for being massive privacy violators.

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Isn't that what Robin is bemoaning, the majority of the people not being upset by invasions of basic democratic rights?

Put it this way: I think Americans are far less scared to use their free speech rights to attack the government today than during the Cold War. Red scares weighed heavier against free speech than today's terrorism scares. McCarthy's Senate Unamerican Activities Committee was more inimical to free speech, privacy, and associated rights than today's NSA.

I take Robin (and you) to be saying the opposite.

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It's not historically uninformed. What was practiced was different from what was preached but that doesn't mean the majority of people noticed it or were upset by it.

The preaching was done with such veracity and on such scale that it really dominated. It's really no surprise economic and political libertarianism are so much stronger in the US than in Europe.

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It occurs to me that what support the US public does have for principles of a limited and accountable government may be largely a side effect of war and patriotism propaganda. During the cold war we were often told that what made them bad and us good is that we had freedoms, while their governments had and used arbitrary powers.

I'm mystified by this.

During the height of the Cold War you had Senator Joseph McCarthy. In the run up to WWII, there was the Smith Act, intended for repressing Nazis and then used against Communists. In the aftermath of the Russian Revolution, you had the "criminal syndicalism" prosecutions against U.S. labor and the Palmer Raids against anarchists.

Cold War propaganda did not lead to greater democracy to avoid accusations of hypocrisy. It justified suppression of democracy and freedom.

I can only conclude that your comment is historically uninformed.

The Cold War competition with the Soviet Union brought social reforms, but it didn't help with democracy and civil liberties. That is, it furthered agendas in domains where the Soviets were ahead. The U.S. wasn't competing with the Russians on the civil liberties front, not when Stalin ruled. But we have the Russians to thank in part for what we have of workers rights, social insurance, and civil rights.

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To be persnickety, Robert Rubin's favorite graph is about confidence, not trust. Regardless of whether there's any real difference in their dictionary definitions, I think swapping one word for the other would have changed the results of the poll drastically. In particular, I would guess that people would say they trust, but do not have confidence in, a well-intentioned buffoon. In contrast, they have confidence in, but do not trust, the US military.

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It could also be a good thing if it were used to protect individual rights and liberties rather than undermining them. Alas, that is probably naive.

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Mass surveillance could be a good thing if it makes it harder to develop civilization-destroying techs like strong AI or engineered viruses.

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The connection is very strong and yes there's a disconnect between what was practiced (abroad) and what was preached (domestically), but that's irrelevant. Cold war rhetoric continues to influence American politics and thinking, especially on economics, including Robin's views I bet.

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The effect of war propaganda on US folks is a different issue from world trends in arbitrary powers of governments. Both could be true: governments get more constrained world wide, and US folks feel less inclined to resist arbitrary powers in their own government.

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On reflection, I'm skeptical of the Cold War connection.

During the Cold War, the US was willing to prop up a lot of oppressive regimes as long as they were anti-communist. Then, late in the Cold War those countries started liberalizing (see especially South America and South Korea). We still prop up a lot of shitty regimes in the middle east, but the overall trend in global freedom seems positive, and the direction of the trend seems wrong for it to have been just mostly about wartime propaganda. This would lead me to expect the trend to continue.

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NSA policies and ideas around it, is not to less, we acknowledge the fact that not all bring good response.

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Random comments:

1. If you read current histories of Civil Rights, a lot of historians now argue that anti-segregation efforts only gained momentum when the Soviets were the bad guys.

2. If you read a lot of social history, most people just love passing repressive laws against each other. There is little evidence that people have any intrinsic love of personal freedom and they willingly give it up at the first sight of "bad guys." One of my theories of the state is that it is simply a large organization designed to regulate people that dominant ethnic groups hate.

That is why recent history is a rather amazing departure from this norm. The fact that *any* notable society has *any* norm of freedom is amazing. And yes, sadly, it is often tied to war and conflict.

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"People seemed to agree that such policies are unlikely to change due to concrete publicized examples of specific resulting harms."

Like what? I'm not challenging this notion, I'm just not sure what it means.

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