“Mao’s America,” Xi Van Fleet, Center Street, 2023.
“Putin’s Playbook: Russia’s Secret Plan to Defeat America,” Rebekah Koffler, Regnery, 2021.
When was the last time we felt this threatened from so many adversaries and places? We know things are not going well, at home and abroad, and most of our dread stems from the knowledge the threats are in many cases self-inflicted. Two recent books incisively lay out the threat that faces the United States from enemies within and without; the reader reaches the conclusion that neither foreign threat can succeed as long as Americans remain united around our founding principles.
One should not be surprised that these perceptive books are written by two women born in foreign countries. After all, the best study of American political culture was arguably De Tocqueville’s Democracy in America, written by a Frenchman nearly 200 years ago. I say “born in another country,” because Xi Van Fleet, the author of Mao’s America, and Rebekah Koffler, Putin’s Playbook, were born in China and Russia respectively, but as great American patriots are warning us about the threat we face at home.
Xi Van Fleet first warned at a Loudoun County, Virginia school board meeting that the US was undergoing a Chinese Cultural Revolution, which had blighted her childhood. National media interviews and the writing of Mao’s America followed. The Red Guards are in our streets, she charges, cultivated by teachers who are themselves trained activists. Xi describes our mobs of young people who cycle angrily through “transgender rights,” “reproductive freedom,” climate destruction, and gun control protests, finding meaning in the act of protest. They have most recently latched onto “Palestine,” although Xi could not have foreseen that, since Mao’s America was published before the Hamas terrorist attack against Israel last October. They have sought to kill ideological enemies in riots, blocked highways, terrorized campuses, and taken advantage of the prevailing lawlessness in many of our cities. Their cry “speech is violence” is solely intended to shut down speech with which they disagree.
The Red Guards tore down statues and temples and destroyed all vestiges of the traditional culture, with the ultimate goal of building a new, more enlightened society on its ruins. Our Cancel Culture is simply “Destroying the Four Olds” by another name. Xi observes that Mao Zedong was more hostile to Christianity than to any other religion, because he recognized its profound challenge to the very premise of Communist state power. Today our elites attack overt expressions of Judeo-Christian belief, and relegate Christian belief to the corners of society, because “they know that (the principles of) Christianity (are) core to the foundation of the United States and…the Constitution.” Surveys reveal that US youth today are less religious and not surprisingly, least supportive of Israel, than any other US generation.
Identity politics were key in the Cultural Revolution, since people—otherwise not distinguishable by race—were divided into landlords, rich, middle, and poor peasants. Each group wore different color ribbons to be identified. In America, class politics doesn’t resonate, so instead our woke elites are imposing identity politics based on intersectional race, sex, and disability categories instead. As before, some are inherently deemed oppressors to be punished and others are “marginalized” victims exalted by their alleged suffering. Critical Race Theory, which Xi calls “tailor-made for America”—is injected into American society to divide us and dilute our sense of shared peoplehood. Schoolchildren are taught to view America with indifference, if not hatred, as no different from any other country, and likely worse. Activists “problematize,” and ultimately aspire to destroy the family, which competes for children’s loyalty and promotes bourgeois values that facilitate personal integrity and self-government. In Mao’s China, as in Soviet Russia, children were encouraged to report their parents if they strayed from revolutionary fidelity.
Mao even sought to demolish the traditional gender distinctions, depriving women of expressing their femininity; today the war against gender attacks “toxic masculinity,” or the spirit that at its best leads men to protect women and the vulnerable. Daniel Penny, a former Marine, faces trial in New York for trying to protect subway riders from a criminal who inadvertently died as Penny restrained him.
The prosecution of Daniel Penny will deter others who might have instinctively intervened to protect the weaker. Xi describes how recently in China, 18 people ignored a toddler girl who had been struck by a car and was lying in the street; she later died in the hospital. The compassion of Judeo-Christian culture is giving way to the harsh dictates of a filter of identity politics in which there are no absolute moral dictates. Relativism based on identity politics is the order of the day. Xi noted that ‘in China today, it would be rare for someone to help those in need in public spaces…”
Two additional insights are relevant. “Politics is downstream of culture,” Xi warns, which means that a pro-liberty election result or even several elections will not be enough to stem the tide. “The changing of political party control does not mean that culture will be changed as a result…we can ban CRT in every school, but that won’t stop Marxist teachers from injecting their beliefs into their instruction, mentorship, and coaching.” The religion of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion or DEI, has sunk roots so deep that we can only save ourselves by jointly pushing back against its March Through the Institutions. Nor can we depend on “the few superheroes to fight against the Marxist machine for us.”
Second, China and the US are becoming more like each other. “China is becoming less and less like the West, while the West is becoming more and more like China…Western-style democracy has been defeated in its infancy in China while Chinese-style authoritarianism has been exported and is gaining ground in the West.” Xi cites the pandemic as when this trend became clear, but the waging of “lawfare” against the current president’s leading political opponent and his supporters has brought the lesson home to all but the most deluded.
Mrs. Van Fleet also comments in passing on Chinese President Xi Jinping’s ambition for China to replace the United States as the world’s leader. But China is not the only adversary sensing opportunity in American turmoil.
As Rebekah Koffler, a former DIA analyst who followed Russia for years points out, Russia is not a friend of the United States. US policymakers tend to mistake periodic quiescence from Russia for acquiescence to US leadership. Koffler argues that unless we try to understand President Vladimir Putin’s makeup, and that of the Russian culture which prizes strength and unity over individualism, and thus largely accepts Putin’s rule, we will continue to simultaneously underestimate and mischaracterize the threat. Putin is not insane, but rational within a Russian context that US intelligence analysts lack the cultural knowledge and language skills to fully comprehend.
Koffler identifies Putin’s KGB career, his judo practice, and the fall of the Soviet Union as key to understanding the man who also is confident in his ability to manipulate others. His intelligence background, judo-driven philosophy and comfort in the information warfare environment find expression in Russia’s use of a game theory concept called “reflexive control.” In “reflexive control,” the target’s environment is shaped so that he eventually will make choices in accordance with constraints controlled and shaped by his adversary. Think “gaslighting,” although Koffler never uses that word. Putin knows that Russia is too weak to defeat the US militarily, but it can “prepare the battle space” by sowing division through political interference in the US and cyber mischief.
She quotes an analyst who works for a Putin-serving think tank on what the destabilization campaign entails: imposing damage to critical infrastructure, and the information and communications system, exercising massive psychological influence to alter countries’ politics; sabotaging the political process and creating an internal opposition within an adversary’s state. Could any neutral observer disagree that all this has been happening in the last decade? The dissension that surrounded and followed the 2016 presidential campaign (“collusion!”) were exactly what Putin sought to accomplish. He did not need to burrow within a campaign, let alone Donald Trump’s, but according to Koffler, he gave the scent to the hounds who have since generated eight years of chaos.
If you want to read about Russian military hardware and cyber strategy, Koffler, a former military analyst, gives it to you. But her book is equally interesting as an indictment of a sclerotic and intellectually arid intelligence community. Her forced departure from DIA after a strange episode on a US airline cannot help but make one wonder whether the IC is “in it to win it” or to just going through the motions of a superpower in genteel decline.
In Koffler’s view, the Russians are doing exactly what one should expect of them, if one only bothered to learn what makes them tick. President Putin and President Xi would doubtless agree that the best way to topple the US from the pinnacle of global leadership is by steady—and increasingly less stealthy—undermining of our patriotism and unity. I am also afraid they would agree the campaign is succeeding. The next step is ours.