President-elect Donald Trump faces immediate challenges: managing the war against ISIS, fixing ObamaCare and boosting growth to create jobs. But as the fallout from his recent conversation with the president of Taiwan indicates, an increasingly assertive China poses the most vexing and far-reaching challenges for American prosperity and security.
Nations, like Superheroes, need an arch-enemy. Let Superman go around spending all his time battling pickpockets and teens doing graffiti, and you would see the man of steel turn to rust.
Nothing can boost the K-strategy and unite a nation like the presence of a common arch-enemy. The Soviet Union’s evil empire was a great K-ifying force during the Reagan years. I have always suspected that when it collapsed under Bush I, that was partly what triggered the r-slide under Clinton. Bush got a small K-shift from bin Ladin on 9/11, but he promptly wasted it by declaring Islam a religion of peace, and demanding nobody judge Muslims. America’s greater purpose was immediately lost, and any reason to unite together against a common enemy disappeared.
Talk about demoralizing and amygdala-atrophying. That, more than anything, set the stage for Obama.
Now Trump has both Islam and China presenting themselves as enemies of the nation, which all Americans should unite to defeat.
He should be careful how he presents them to the public. It should entail a year or two of highlighting human rights abuses, cruelty, and other dehumanizing stories to prevent the left from feeling any moral justification in supporting them. Lots of stories about Islam killing gays and murdering rape victims, as well as stories about Chinese repression of Tibet, organ sales of dissidents, and Christian persecution.
As they grow more evil, Trump should emerge as the noble warrior opposing them. Were he really Machiavellian, he could arrange for the whole thing with Chinese leaders behind the scenes, to help them K-ify their populations as well, by casting the US as a great enemy of their people.
Once he has cemented the image of them as the enemy, he should use it to then motivate the country, and produce an aggressive, competitive mindset in the populace.
Tell people about r/K Theory, because it destroys our liberal arch-enemies
[…] Trump Should Make China And Islam Our Next National Bogeymen […]
That’s a very dangerous game, because the US and China might stumble into a situation where they must go to war or lose face (cf. WWI, the Falklands War). No such problem with Moslems, because they’re already doing everything they can to kill us all.
“Nothing can boost the K-strategy and unite a nation like the presence of a common arch-enemy. The Soviet Union’s evil empire was a great K-ifying force during the Reagan years. I have always suspected that when it collapsed under Bush I, that was partly what triggered the r-slide under Clinton.”
I suspected the same since a long time. I thought this way because the economic downturns in europe and japan (the “marshal plan bloc”, as you might call it, although japan did not technically belong to that directly.) happened or started a short time after the soviets collapsed.
” he could arrange for the whole thing with Chinese leaders behind the scenes, to help them K-ify their populations as well, by casting the US as a great enemy of their people.”
Like the forever war depicted in Orwells 1984?