America’s Real Cold War

Contra Trump

苦迭打

In ‘Some Thoughts on a Glum Convergence’, remarks delivered at the State Library in Sydney, Australia, to mark the thirtieth anniversary of Australia-PRC relations in November 2002, I observed that:

Once, many students of China shared a sense of fascinated engagement with a country that was vastly different from our own, one whose values and institutions were not only at variance, but markedly inferior to those of our own shores. Anyone who is seriously engaged with both China and Australia knows that such certitudes are now little more than an unsettling memory.

Here our media enjoys a narrowness of bandwidth that is unique in my lifetime. Our independent and public sources of debate and speech are more constricted and threatened than ever before. And when it is in doubt, a grey bureaucracy run by lacklustre ideocrats falls back on national crisis, the sense of embattlement and the fear of faceless foreign terror to stir up a populist response and convince all that their mandate represents the true and abiding interests of the people’s will. Of course, I’m talking about the federal government, generally aided and abetted by the supine members of what can only laughingly be dubbed an ‘opposition’.

One recalls the outpouring of national grief at the time of the Beijing massacre of 4 June 1989 and the generous response to those becalmed in Australia. Remember the human rights delegations of the early 1990s when Australia had the temerity to monitor the human rights situation in China? And, and … But that was all long before the revival of race-based politics; it was also before we saw the efflorescence of opinion-poll driven demagoguery; and before we realized how the decay of civic values and vision happens: not in a wild flurry of calamitous agitation, but gradually, with insouciance, and even with a measure of self-deceptive willingness … .

The certitudes of those early years of contact with China have been confounded by history; the values that so many of my generation, at least publicly, held dear and to be self-evident are now under attack or being rejected at every turn. While economics and trade provides a veneer of unity, the underlying world views and aspirations of countries in our region are not simple, stagnant or obvious.

I have suggested that there has been a glum convergence over the recent decade or so, one that parodies the ‘harmonic convergence’ that you may recall was touted in 1987. Remember, that was when an alignment of stars promised a coming together of the people of the world in a mood of sharing, equality and a tremulous group hug. Given the new-agey overtones and bleeding-heart simplicity of it all, many derided that meeting of global minds as more of a ‘moronic convergence’.

— quoted in Shared Values: a Sino-Australian Conundrum

In 2025, a new convergence is afoot. As the regime of Trump 2.0 engineers what is something like a Sino-US level playing field, the contours of an extraordinary topography are being revealed: a contestation between the looming Christian Fascism of the United States and the entrenched Sino-Fascism of the Chinese party-state. For those of us living in the periphery of empires, these are bracing times.

[Note: See We Need to Talk About Totalitarianism, Again, chapter one of the series Xi Jinping’s Empire of Tedium. ; and, Who Is Russell Vought? Probably the Most Important Person in Trump 2.0., The New York Times, 23 January 2025.]

When launching China Heritage in early 2017, we likened Donald Trump’s shambolic political style to the destructive mania of Mao’s ‘Monkey daemon’. For vastly different ends, both men warned about impending doom and, having created the very crisis of which they had warned, with the aid of their supporters they worked to supplant the very system that had empowered them. Both Mao and Trump successfully carried out an auto-golpe. (We would also note that the early Xi Jinping Restoration — 2012-2018 — evinced similar traits both to Mao’s internal insurrection of 1966 and to the tenebrous dawn of the Trump-Vought-Musk triumvirate in 2025.)

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John Pavlovitz (1969-) is a liberal Christian, pastor, activist and author whose essay Those 107 Days previously featured in Contra Trump. In the following, reproduced from The Beautiful Mess, Pavlovitz considers America’s real Cold War and, in so doing, he brings to mind a common term from the High Maoist era of China (c.1957-1976), 劃清界線 huàqīng jièxiàn, ‘to cut off family ties’. After all, Mao too delineated friends from enemies and wilfully rent asunder the already fragile social fabric of his society.

We May Need to Cut Ties With Trump Supporters

John Pavlovitz

5 February 2025

I really hate this.

I mean, I really didn’t want to be here, to be feeling this, to be writing it, to be saying it.
I’ve always believed in meeting people where they are, in trying to understand those who don’t agree with me. As a pastor for decades, I worked to bridge the divides between people, to champion diversity as our highest calling. My first book called A Bigger Table, was centered around respecting each person’s story and making room in life-giving community, so that each human being was seen and heard and respected.

Then he began his first presidential campaign.

Since them, I’ve devoted nearly a decade of my life trying to convince people who I thought were decent, rational, and loving, not to be deceived by his phony religious pandering or his transparent fake patriotism; to avoid being tricked by the bigotry and fear he trafficked in. I worked tirelessly to let them know that I was for them, that I opposed him because I cared for their safety and well-being more than he ever could.

I realize that in many ways I failed to read the room, even if it was a room I’d spent my entire life in.

I’ve finally had to admit that many of these people were not all that decent, rational, or loving after all; that his cruelty, his violence, his hatred were what they wanted. It wasn’t about them not understanding him, but about me not understanding them. They weren’t manipulated by him, they were empowered by him. In so many cases, he didn’t poison their hearts, he reflected them. They didn’t get fooled by a bigot, they got freed by one.

Honestly, that all feels impossible to process. I have a feeling you understand. Tens of millions of us are sitting with these heartbreaking truths right now. And as we watch every conceivable assault on our systems of finance, education, personal liberty, national security, and human rights being laid to waste in Hell: The Sequel—we need to talk about cutting the tethers to his supporters for good.

It’s only consistent.

We’re boycotting companies who align with and fund him, refusing to patronize local businesses that contribute to his predatory Administration, turning-off news channels that have bent the knee and kissed the ring long before election, unfollowing people on social media who’ve become his nonstop surrogates.

And yet, these things are rather benign in what they require of us, relatively minor in the sacrifice we make for such stands.

In this true Constitutional and existential emergency, I’m afraid we’re gonna have to dig deeper than that.

It’s time for people of faith, morality, and conscience to hold the people in our lives accountable for their willing partnership with this filth.

We may need to finally sever ties with our family members, friends, neighbors, and co-workers.

If they’re going to continue their unwavering allegiance to him as he openly tears apart the very foundation of our democracy, sabotages our economy, preys upon vulnerable people, and alienates us from our long-faithful global allies—at some point we’re obligated to declare unequivocally that this isn’t something we’re willing to compromise about.

At what point does our silence, our tentative peace, and our relational head-turning constitute complicity with the historic barbarism this President is unleashing on this entire planet?

Now, you may have largely disconnected from people over these things long ago, or yourself been excluded by them when they declared your love for diverse humanity, confirmation of your Stage Four wokeness. But there are tens of millions of us who have danced around difficult conversations, endured awkward holiday gatherings, and held our tongues in order to avoid conflict with people who we’ve still ultimately let off the hook by our presence.

Pardon my language, but the time for that shit has long passed.

The harassed, vulnerable, terrorized human beings in this world who deserve willing, visible, and vocal advocates, need to matter as much to us as the perpetually cruel, intentionally ignorant, hopelessly malicious people whose hands we’ve held for ten years, trying to persuade them to be decent humans and to actually care about other people.

Tolerance to a degree is a noble pursuit, one that people on the Center and on Left have always practiced, which sadly, is part of the reason we’re here.

For a painful, frustrating, joy-sapping decade now, many of us relentlessly believed in people’s ability to come to their senses, to have their humanity appealed to, to reject this man’s brutality—if we could only find the right words, if we could just help them see clearly. We believed that given time, their goodness would eventually kick in.

It breaks my heart to say it, but that ship is long gone and it’s filled with years of our lives we’ll never get back.

It turns out, all these efforts at understanding were wasted. I’m not saying they weren’t the right thing, but they led us to where we are now.

And as we stare into the abyss, we’re past the point of healthy compromise or a simple agreement to disagree on debatable topics.

These moments are about things that are not up for discussion:

the inherent worth of every human being,
the beauty found in real diversity,
the dignity each person merits,
the right for people to define themselves as they choose, to love the person they love, to not need to apologize for their sexuality or their pigmentation, or their place of birth.

On fundamental issues that define us, his supporters, by virtue of their decade-long, undying, almost gleeful allegiance are morally incompatible with us and it’s OK to admit that.

The path forward for this nation won’t be about everyone coming together, and it doesn’t need to be. It will be about those of us who will not abide this brutality, standing together against those who are celebrating it.

You may choose, as a matter of faith or moral conviction to keep trying to preserve your relationships with people you know and love who still support him, and I respect that.

But maybe, just maybe, our faith and morality need to show up now, in spines and strength and in voices that finally say: enough.

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Source:

John Pavlovitz, Our New Cold War: We May Need to Cut Ties With Trump Supporters, The Beautiful Mess, 5 February 2025

Contra Trump

America’s Empire of Tedium

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Contra Trump

苦迭打

We May Need to Cut Ties With Trump Supporters

John Pavlovitz

5 February 2025

Contra Trump

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