Recommended: The Retreat of Western Liberalism

I woke up this morning thinking about the approach of a tsunami as a metaphor for America today. The public, beguiled by the media and the twittersphere, is fascinated with the glittering trash and diverting scandals revealed in the newly uncovered beach (Trump, Brexit, the Middle East wars, identity issues, Russian collusion in the election, FBI collusion in the election, Trump again…..), and apparently completely oblivious of the tsunami that caused the beach to be uncovered in the first place and is about to overtake them.

What is this tsunami? It is a combination of things.  America now has a national debt of over $20 trillion, which ought to be frightening enough, but we have unfunded future pension obligations in excess of $127 TRILLION, far more than there is any possible hope of ever paying. So if we think today’s political world is upset, think of what will happen politically, and to the economy, when there is suddenly no more money to pay the pensions of tens or hundreds of millions of retired people!

Then there is the rise of China and India as world powerhouses currently set to eclipse America both economically and politically. That will certainly upset the smug Washington groupthink. And then there is the rise of a remarkably illiberal form of liberalism in America, which segregates us rather than unites us, which extols the virtues of presumed victimhood, which largely rejects the cultural and religious community-focused ethos that formed this nation in favor of a more self-centered individualism, and which has apparently forgotten John Kennedy’s wise inaugural words “Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country.” And the growing and increasingly restive underclass of American workers who are being left behind as income inequality grows, and who, as this last election showed, can seriously upset the political world.

Go is an exceedingly complex game, much more complex than chess. It was minor news that Google’s AI program AlphaGo defeated Chinese grandmaster Ke Jie. What ought to have received more attention than it did was a subsequent story. AlphaGo was reset to only know the basic rules of Go, and then it played itself millions of games a day for only three days, at the end of which it was more powerful than the version that beat grandsmaster Ke Jie, had evolved, from scratch, most of the strategies that human players evolved slowly over 2000 years, and several new ones no human has thought of yet. Think about the implications of that for your job in the future.  And China has committed to be the world leader in this field, and put serious resources and education behind that commitment. Think of the implications of that for America in the future.

There are perhaps another dozen or so trends like this that may significantly affect the future. It is hard to predict exactly how it will all play out because from this point, while still in the middle of it, it is hard to see how much effect each trend will contribute or what unexpected side effects will emerge (and there will be unexpected side effects). But it is certainly clear that the total effect will be a massive disruption of American life, and American politics, as we know it now.

All of which is leading up to the recommendation of Edward Luce’s new book The Retreat of Western Liberalsim. This will not be a comfortable book to read, but it is important if one is trying to understand, and survive, the deeper forces – the tsunamis – that are building. Luce is a journalist and columnist for the Financial Times, and author in 2012 of Time to Start Thinking, a book which anticipated exactly the sort of politics of resentment that drove Brexit and the Trump election. He is worth listening to.