What If We Lose?

What if we lose?

Some people will tell you Britain is pretty familiar. In an important way, Britain lost World War One. Pretty well the entire elite class died in the French and Belgian mud. And then after World War Two, having exhausted its last reserves of strength, Britain promptly lost most of its imperial possessions and withdrew west of Suez. More recently, the influential Foundations essay highlighted Britain’s “economic sclerosis” and rattled off a list of 9 sobering facts about how screwed we are.

There’s another kind of losing that happens in first world countries, and it’s the kind we’ve been told about for going on a decade now. The tagline for this kind of losing is being “disenfranchised” or “left behind.” The words change over the years, but the tune is familiar. We’re getting screwed by unelected Eurocrats or rich men north of Richmond. Politics just isn’t for people like us. Politicians don’t care about anyone except themselves — they just want to make money. This kind of losing is more like giving up.

The sort of person who thinks these things thinks that they are a loser. They continuously lose from the system. They might be right. I don’t really know. It doesn’t really matter. This is an odd thing to have in the national mind. Because people like to feel like they are winners.

In Britain, we persuade ourselves that we are losers. The story I told about the decline of Britain is a familiar national story. It goes behind just the usual British whinging. It’s pervasive. In America, they love winners. They identify with winners in a way that in Britain we find foreign. That’s probably why we don’t get the whole Trump thing.

The thing is, we aren’t actually losing. Things might not be great, but in reality, Britain has won the cosmic lottery. Even with all the issues we have, right here and right now is still one of the best times and places in the history of humanity to be alive. Things have been worse, and they might get better.

Why does it matter if we lose? I mean, would it really be so bad? It’s easy to think of examples where if we lost, it really would have been awfully bad. Losing to those ideas would have created a darkened world illuminated only by the lights of a perverted science. The Soviet Union’s vision of the future was all grey and boring, commieblocks and regulated haircuts. That would have been terrible. Nobody wants that.

But compare that to the Chinese vision of the future. The propaganda vision is pretty tempting. Lights on all the buildings. Modern and ancient living in perfect harmony. And a competent government which just gets things done. No sclerosis for the efficient mandarins of the Chinese government. The Party is at pains to emphasise that it wants to keep out of others’ affairs. The Chinese model is for China, and your model might be better for you. The Party won’t judge! Just don’t mess with our thing.

WAOW, ZOMG!!!!

Geopolitically losing is one kind of losing. But I want to suggest that there is another kind of losing going on. It’s common to hear losing phrased in terms of being cut out of the game. If you lose in dodgeball, you don’t get to play any more. You lose in the FA Cup, you’re going home. The way this applies to politics is simple - “it’s a big club, and you ain’t in it.” Politics isn’t for you, why bother, it’s all just a scam run by the rich to further enrich themselves.

Enter BrexitTrumpLePen. We’re told that the New Right represents a wave of disaffection. But disaffection is just a 10-cent word for “losing”. If you’re disaffected, you feel like you’re losing.

If you’re an elite, Donald Trump winning for the second time is the first time you’ve ever really lost in the sense I’m talking about. For a long time things were probably basically okay for you, no matter what. You might have had disagreements with Prime Ministers and Presidents, but things were basically okay and life didn’t change all that much.

Watching a kid you disagree with, who has the hilarious handle of “bigballs”, run riot over the federal government is what losing looks like. Elections suddenly have consequences for you. It feels like there’s a big club and you’re not in it. You just don’t understand why the people in charge do what they do. On, and on. And this is an unfamiliar feeling. The discussion of moving to Canada during Trump 1 is just a more elite-coded version of not voting.

That’s what happens if you lose. You don’t get to play the game anymore. Someone else gets the football. Pac-Man eats your quarter. Game over.

Back to China. The vision for the future doesn’t sound that bad. The thing is, the fact that it doesn’t sound so bad is exactly the point. As Alex Karp argues in his new book, the self-image of the United States is as the technological republic, and the Chinese play is to knock the Americans off the perch. The Cold War was won (partly) by Coke, blue jeans, dishwashers, and multicoloured supermarket aisles. The strategy which eventually bankrupted the Soviets was called Star Wars.

The recent hysteria over DeepSeek is a reflection of deep American insecurity about not retaining technological dominance. For a long time, Americans could rest in the comforting fiction that the Chinese could only steal and not create. This may have been true for a time, but not for the last decade. Nick Land famously saw neo-China arriving from the future, and Xi is plugged into this current in his boomerish way, believing that new quality productive forces are central to the ability of China to project cultural power.

It isn’t only the promise of the cutting edge of technology which the CPC recognise as a core part of the American appeal. Over the past few decades, there has been a concerted effort to disarm the other parts of the American package. Democracy has been replaced with the shiny new “whole-process people’s democracy”, human rights blunted with a reused Soviet complaint, and even freedom vitiated by the autocrat’s classic promise of panem et circenses. The brilliant propaganda of the CPC over the past decades is an ideological guerrilla war against the victory of liberal democracy. And it’s working.

This graph shows how successful Chinese propaganda is in third countries. I want to pick out three observations. Number one, across the board, Chinese propaganda changes more minds, more, than US propaganda. Number two, where China wins - on government performance - it wins big. And number three, when the narratives are in competition, Chinese propaganda narratives are winning pretty handily.

To be sure, the Chinese are working with a lower baseline. In the control group, 84% of respondents preferred the U.S. political system over China’s political system; 70% preferred the U.S. economic system over China’s economic system; and 78% preferred the U.S. over China as the world leader. These facts are probably why we got complacent, and why the CPC invested so heavily in its ideological counteroffensive. Part of this is probably because American propaganda isn’t Radio Free Asia or Share America. It’s Top Gun, Jay-Z, Kylie Jenner, and WWE. The effortless cultural hegemony of the United States is the real prize.

The reason that Chinese messaging beats John Cena is because the promise is that if you don’t mess with the Party’s thing we won’t mess with your thing. The party loudly proclaims that they only intend to implement the Chinese model in China. If you’re Burundi, you get the Burundi model. If you’re Tibet - uh, whoops, never mind. If you’re Djibouti, you get the Djibouti model. It’s a tempting pitch, especially for would-be autocrats.

So what we’re promised is getting to retain the British model as long as we play ball with certain core Chinese interests. In a way this is not dissimilar to the old idea of spheres of influence.

The problem is that those core interests are considered very broadly. The reason is what I’ve discussed above, because the presence of an alternative idea with any power itself infringes on the Party’s claim to sole control of China’s destiny. Ahead of the Trump inauguration, the Party set out its stall. The red lines are “the Taiwan question, democracy and human rights, China’s path and system, and China’s development right are four red lines for China. They must not be challenged.”

Not challenging the red lines is game over because it means the end of cultural self-confidence. Liberalism is inherently universalist. The ideology which starts from “all men are created equal” can’t end in “…except if you were born in China.” I’ve argued elsewhere that the driver behind what is afflicting us is a crisis of self-confidence. If the world order demands our system is no longer universalist, our system is no longer our system.

As others have astutely observed, the American - to a lesser extent, the British - idea is a dagger aimed right at the heart of the party’s control over power. The idea that all men are created equal and that to each accrue inalienable rights is poison to a system which believes that another inalienable thing is the right of the Party to control China.

The price of losing is no less than the death of our societies. In a world of stalemate, we can insist that we are right and our enemies are wrong. If our role in the battle of ideas is reduced to impotently whining from the sidelines and nursing revisionist grievances, it’s game over. History is written by the losers, because the winners are too busy taking and using power. Winning would be ideal. But the most important thing is to retain the will to fight.

Leaders - not just in politics - need to think carefully about developing and maintaining this will to fight. Top Gun, Jay-Z, Kylie Jenner, and WWE are all great but people won’t fight and die for films or makeup. At base, this is what is missing; belief that what you’re fighting for is worth saving.

Part of the contest will be in outcomes. It’s time to stop whining about DeepSeek cheating and get back to competing. Fix the Tube, clean up the streets, build nuclear reactors. Break the CPC’s claim to superior performance and you break the back of its main narrative push. It’s not about doing our best, it’s about winning. I’m not making any claim about whether seeking to win is the right messaging to pursue. But winning has to be the core of the strategy.

Another part will be re-engaging in the battle of ideas. To be sure, peace will have to be made once more with the idea that Britain needs to align with countries with whom it disagrees. And, however painful, that might mean biting our tongue about what we believe some of the time. Leaders need to explain to publics why this apparent contradiction exists. It will be difficult. But they have done it before, and so they can again.

The prospect and consequences of losing should be bracing enough to ensure that we want to win.