This is a tangent from Stirling’s post at BOP, and is in part an elaboration on Oldman’s concerns as expressed on the thread.
Loss of hegemony to China will have a centrifugal effect on America, because its significance to racist assumptions in American society precisely overlay the political divide.
China in particular, and Asians in general, are bogeymen to the right in a way that’s difficult to understand from the outside. Their racist heritage leaves them with a peculiar heirloom, and if you get to know a middle-aged, white, male social conservative (and if you’re a white male like me), they’ll show it to you.
It looks like this:
[racist]
Blacks are more physical that whites. Asians are more mental than whites. At least whites can take comfort from the notion that whites have the best of both worlds. But the blacks are a physical danger and the Asians are crafty. You have to smack one and keep an eye on the other or they’ll get us.
[/racist]
This isn’t so much a taxonomy as it is a continuum for a self-justifying ontology. I’m reminded of a Mexican-American joke about whites, Latinos, and blacks being baked in God’s oven as He tried to get the recipe right, which has a similar self-situating agenda. But the upshot of the black-white-eastern axis is that the whites who imagine it imagine themselves surrounded. These are the whites who idealize armed societies, believing them to be orderly and well-mannered societies, even though this is historically nonsense.
Part of the anger that drives the right on the War on Terror is the shame and humiliation of American whites. Sand niggers weren’t supposed to be able to do that to us. It’s going to take self-consciously White America a long time to get over the perceived violation of white supremacy. This is a dimension that the left largely overlooks and it explains why the left has been consistently unable to anticipate the degree to which the right will tolerate the suspension of supposedly American principles in the War on Terror (specifically, why the sexual humiliation of Arabs is so important to the right). Guantanamo is a mass, slow-motion lynching that the right desperately needs in order for it to feel on top again. “Arab women” porn spam appeared in my email exactly on schedule with the invasion. Raped, the victim needs to rape another to get back on top.
The Jim Crow hypocrisy of the right’s core constituency was that they could indulge in a little sadism at the wogs’ expense, as a perquisite of hegemony. We take their women, we kill their men. They do not do this to us. In a similar fashion, rural conflicts between Hindus and Muslims in the 20th century were guerilla wars fought on the bodies of women (and this is a war the women always lose). But with this simian joy in utter and even scatological power over others comes an exactly equivalent, terrible, formless fear of what “they” might do to “us” in return, and it drives further violence, and thus fear, in a vicious circle. This fear usually comes out in the form of fears about the safety of white womanhood and blacks wind up sprouting “strangely” from trees while the white frolic under them.
When the Chinese start owning America (in many different ways), the white male angst in this country is going to explode. Moreover, the near monopoly of one side of the political spectrum on (specifically) THIS brand of racist metaphysics will leverage the force and consequence of that violence. It has nothing to do with communism any more than the right’s cultivation of a hatred of Islam has anything to do with Muslims. This is a matter of what color is the guy on top compared to the guy on the bottom. If the racial order of America’s racist assumptions is violated, people are going to get violated.
And I don’t just mean people of the “offending” race, I mean anyone suspected of facilitating the fall of the White Man from Grace. “Nigger-lover,” “liberal,” they’re only the term of convenience for those who will not join us in our fears, and who thereby endanger us in the war with the other. You must just want them to win, you know, unless you’re willing to do to them what we fear they’ll do to us.
In the imaginary conflict, racial adversaries pay each other back in a coin of violence that has two terrible sides: exultation and fear. What the whites who pine for armed societies of gunslingers or (movie) samurai really want is a weapon as an equalizer against the black man he fears, and with it the (presumed) rituals of a bygone society to distinguish between his white superiority and what he imagines as the frightening animal advantage of the black. I know this because they confide it in me, believing that I am a white male like them. Turn this upside down and this is White America’s fear of Asians. But I am not. I am not white. I know that no one is.
Turn this structure of fear backwards again, however and I suspect that it is Asians’ fears of whites: Asians of both sexes look at me the way some whites look at blacks. White America will be surprised to find that Asians have not only their own racial pride, but their own racist pecking-order, unanswerable to American assumptions of the centrality not only of themselves, but of their conflicts. If I am right about this racist reciprocity, then the stage may be set for a very different kind of racial strife within America (driven by foreign confrontations with America). Each “side” will perform a racial antipathy of sufficiently reasonable similarity to the expectations of his Other that each will feel justified in escalation, see such escalation as necessary for survival, and attack those of his own “race” for not playing along. Subverting the structure and inevitability of this confrontation, therefore, will be difficult, and the peacemakers will be vilified on all sides.
Hegemony is demonstrated to the hind-brain of the hegemon, as I keep saying, by a successful monopoly of the privileges of sex and violence. In this way, we are convinced that we have finally reached The Top. As we saw briefly in the late 80s and 90s vis-avis the Japanese, the perceived loss of hegemony will be manifest in seemingly odd personal and intimate fears. This will pull left and right, east and west coast against the middle, and will have unpredictable consequences for the youngest generation, where racial identities are in a critical state of flux.