Jeff, you've worked in both places. You have an understanding of how the systems work.
What is your sense of democratic signs, movements in both countries?
My experience is that different societies have very deep-rooted political cultures and traditions
that extend far back in history, for good and for bad, and that these cultures are real,
they are persistent, they are different, they don't rank on an easy scale that this is the best
and this is the worst, like we want to do, and we need an approach very much like what you said and agree with it.
There are different narratives that are held. These different narratives have merit,
and the solution in a world of different narratives is to speak with each other more than we do.
We in the United States, our political elites, do not speak with Chinese political elites except to point fingers
or to yell at them or to do other things. We certainly don't even shake hands with Russian leaders or diplomats.
But I've lived my whole career for 42 years of active duty, listening to different narratives
and seeing those perspectives from different sides and finding a lot of merit in the various positions
and saying if you would sit down to speak with each other, we'd actually get somewhere.
So let me be specific. China looks today not completely different from the Han dynasty,
a centralized administrative state, and with Confucian culture, with a tradition of excellence of the mandarins.
When I speak with Chinese senior officials, which I do often, they are the best informed professionals I know in the world.
When I deal with them, they know they're brief, they're sophisticated, well-trained, occasionally my students,
and they believe in professional excellence of a decentralized administrative state.
And that political culture is more than 2,000 years old.
When you are looking at Russia, Putin looks a lot like a czar. It's not an accident.
That is a culture of authority and a culture of tradition.
When I look at my own country, the United States, it is a semi-democratic, white-dominated, hierarchical racist society
that aims to preserve privilege by the elites. That's how it was formed in 1787.
It was a slave-owning, genocidal country killing Native Americans for a white culture.
But amazingly, it still looks that way, although we're much more diverse now than we were.
Let me ask you this, Jeff, because this is...
I want to point out that these are deep cultural distinctions.
But we shouldn't just simplify, because we say democracy.
Yes, it's important. What's important is actually the details.
As I mentioned last night, Plato, democracy, that was the last thing on his mind.
That was the enemy. The plus was a philosopher came, of course, in the Republic.
And for Aristotle, it was much more subtle and complex of a system of governance that mixed governance by the one, by the few, by the many, but on the good side of the ledger.
And one more point I want to make about democracy, because we're in a democracy forum where we treat democracy as the good.
The most violent country in the world in the 19th century, by far, was perhaps the most democratic or second most democratic, and that was Britain.
You could be democratic at home and ruthlessly imperial abroad.
The most violent country in the world since 1950 has been the United States.
Jeffrey, stop now.
Jeffrey, I'm your moderator, and it's enough.