Why Shanghai’s fight is our fight, too | Will Bunch Newsletter

Something else to give thanks for coming out of Thanksgiving: Twitter is still up and running — for now — despite Elon Musk’s daily proofs that you don’t have to be smart to be the world’s richest man. Since my beloved social media site (really, my home away from home) may not survive Musk’s idiocy, I’ve dipped my toe in the waters of Mastodon. Follow me at @willbunch@mastodon.social.

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Xi Jinping may be the most powerful man in the world as the 21st century nears the whistle for the end of the first quarter, but as a political forecaster his track record may prove no better than your typical MSNBC Morning Joe pundit.

“Democracies cannot be sustained in the 21st century, autocracies will run the world,” the Chinese supreme leader reportedly told President Biden in a 2020 congratulatory phone call, as the 46th president later related. “Why? Things are changing so rapidly. Democracies require consensus, and it takes time, and you don’t have the time.”

Xi proved right about one thing: Things are indeed changing rapidly in China right now.

Protests have flared in at least 10 cities across the world’s most populous nation, as demonstrations that started with brave hundreds have grown into the thousands, sometimes befuddling white-garbed COVID-protected cops who look more like actors playing sperm cells in Woody Allen’s Everything You Ever Wanted to Know About Sex ... than tough-guy enforcers. Angered by the Chinese government’s harsh COVID-lockdown regime that has restricted their freedom and may have cost 10 lives in a Urumqi high-rise fire, some of the protesters have already gone so far as to chant for Xi — one of the most repressive strongmen on the planet — to step down.

Most are more cautious — in ways that are brilliantly subversive. Many have taken to holding aloft a blank sheet of A4 paper, both frustrating the government’s men-in-white who line the nearby streets but also sending the powerful message that the problems with the regime in Beijing are so clear they don’t need to be written down.

Hazel Liu, a 29-year-old film producer who attended a riverfront vigil in Beijing, told the New York Times that the white sheet of paper “means ‘we are the voiceless, but we are also powerful.’”

Indeed, the Chinese protesters’ unspoken demands that leap off that tabula rasa include things like free speech and a free press, as well as the ability to cast a vote that would actually make a difference — that possibly would have denied Xi that third term as president he just anointed for himself.

The beauty is that a white sheet of paper is a message that translates perfectly on the streets of Tehran or Zahedan, where a protest led by young women furious over the killing of 22-year-old Mahsa Amini in the custody of Iranian morality police has stretched on for days, gyrating between wild bouts of dancing, hair cutting, young girls burning their headscarves, and deadly bursts of police repression. It surely resonates even across the front lines in eastern Ukraine, where an army bolstered by taxi drivers or accountants with a few weeks training is risking death to preserve their democratic government against a Russian invasion.

Look what’s happening out in the streets as a wild 2022 lurches towards its conclusion. Got a revolution? Got a revolution. And much like the last viral contagion of global rebellion — from the Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street in 2011 — it seemed to come out of nowhere. But while demonstrators 11 years ago were pushed to the brink by the income inequality made worse by a worldwide economic crisis, this time feels different. If there is a common plea in these protests, it is this: Down with dictatorship.

The youthful 1968 lyrics of the Rascals that went from hopeful to feeling naively trite in a bitter few years feel alive once again: “People everywhere just wanna be free.” This moment feels like a tipping point in the planetary battle between right-wing populism — in which grievances over rapid cultural and economic changes transforms into support for authoritarians — and a more scattered coalition fighting back to preserve democratic norms.

The relentless rising tide of these autocrats — from Viktor Orbán in Hungary to Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil to Donald Trump right here in the U.S. — and the increasing brazenness of the world’s incumbent dictators like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and of course Xi — has been the story of the last decade. But waves crash and waters recede. Trump lost in 2020 and Bolsonaro lost in 2022, because the electoral system held and new alliances of those opposed to autocracy won — just barely on both counts. The threat of losing freedom of speech, a free and unfettered media, and the right to vote has created new fans of democracy.

But there won’t be free and fair elections in Russia or China or Iran anytime soon. In these places, fighting for democracy means resorting to the sly cleverness of memes that may or may not confound the government’s censors, and relying on the unvarnished courage of never knowing when the omnipresent state security forces might suddenly open fire.

It’s too early to tell whether the surprising flareups in places like Shanghai or Wuhan will prove to be brief flashes in the pan, but this fall’s staying power of their comrades in Iran feels instructive. It does suddenly feel different, which is why America — both as a world power, and as a people — needs to be supporting the protests in China and Iran, not as passive observers but to see ourselves as leaders in a new, cold world war (and a hot one in Ukraine) against autocracy.

Tuesday’s New York Times noted that the Biden administration is treading lightly around the China protests — for reasons that probably make sense in the short term — but in the long run I’d love to see the 46th president continue to sharpen and articulate a global strategy for the pro-democracy creed that he voiced at home before November’s election. Over time, the world will benefit if Biden can take the essence of his so-far successful efforts in Ukraine — offering that nation the maximum support possible without triggering World War III — and develop a new paradigm for countering autocracy elsewhere.

As U.S. citizens, we need to let the world know that we share these values of freedom, and the good news is that many are answering the call. Our own latest test of democracy is the runoff Senate election on the red-clay soil of Georgia, where on Saturday thousands of people — from college students home for Thanksgiving to the Democratic incumbent, Sen. Raphael Warnock — waited on long lines after a court fight opened an extra day of early voting. That’s an American reminder of what those blank sheets of paper more than 7,000 miles away in Shanghai actually mean: the ability to one day fill in the blanks with a vote.

Question: What does the University of California strike tell us about the future of public higher education? — Via Todd Wolfson (@ProfTWolf) on Twitter

Answer: Great question, Todd. There’s been a lot of talk in 2022 about the college crisis in America that has focused, understandably, on one key aspect: the astronomical cost of tuition, which in turn has led to the unthinkable mountain of $1.75 trillion in student debt. As I laid out in my recent book After The Ivory Tower Falls (which makes a great holiday gift, by the way), the roots of the college-loan problem is a political decision: We would not make higher education a taxpayer-funded public good, even as a diploma became the price for admission to the middle class. The University of California, which abandoned its noble traditions of free tuition in the 1970s, is Exhibit A. But the flip side of public disinvestment has been the employee side, where the teaching burden has increasingly been subbed out to grad students struggling to pay rent, or to grossly underpaid adjunct professors. This strike by 48,000 grad students in the California system may be the final proof of my book’s contention: The current American Way of College is not sustainable.

There’s a famous expression in journalism called “burying the lead,” which is what happens when what’s truly important about a story somehow ends up hidden in the middle passages. That’s exactly what happened early this month when the New York Times published a bombshell report under this headline: “Former Anti-Abortion Leader Alleges Another Supreme Court Breach.” The supposed shock value of the article is that while the High Court investigates last spring’s stunning leak of the draft decision that overturned the Roe vs. Wade precedent on abortion rights, a former right-wing activist provided evidence that conservative Justice Samuel Alito — the author of that abortion ruling — had leaked advance word of the 2014 decision about religious freedom involving the Hobby Lobby retail chain.

Personally, I was underwhelmed by that big reveal. Maybe that’s because as a lifelong journalist I have a pro-leak bias, although I do agree that these breaches are a sign of serious Supreme Court dysfunction. But I was much more alarmed by what else the Times’ investigation revealed: Wealthy right-wing political donors had a shocking level of personal access to certain justices while these jurists were weighing the high-stakes issues these millionaires cared about. The story’s real “lead” (or “lede”) is this: An anti-abortion activist “recruited wealthy donors ... encouraging them to invite some of the justices to meals, to their vacation homes or to private clubs. He advised allies to contribute money to the Supreme Court Historical Society and then mingle with justices at its functions. He ingratiated himself with court officials who could help give him access, records show.”

Did young, poverty-stricken, would-be mothers desperate for the Supreme Court to preserve their reproductive freedom have the same ability to wine and dine or go on vacations with justices like Samuel Alito or Clarence Thomas? Of course not. The ability of such rich donors to essentially lobby these justices — given lifetime appointments meant to shield them from political pressure — is a national scandal of the highest order. Which is why the media’s muted reaction to this major revelation is somewhat disturbing.

Arguably, this unfair and unseemly access isn’t even the worst ethical scandal at the Supreme Court right now. That would be Justice Thomas’ unwillingness to recuse himself from cases around the Jan. 6 insurrection, despite ever-growing evidence that his wife, Ginni Thomas, was an enthusiastic and deeply involved backer of that plot. The level of public confidence in the nation’s highest court is at an all-time low because its conservative justices have frittered away nearly 232 years of accumulated trust. Major reform of the judiciary — and especially the mess at the Supreme Court — must rise to the top of the agenda. The court has never had a code of ethics, but it needs to adopt one, pronto. Severe damage to democracy has already been done.