The nationwide protests roiling Iran demonstrate the tremendous courage of the Iranian people, who brave hailstorms of bullets to call for a new and better government. They also reveal how the sweeping changes wrought by the information revolution create grave vulnerabilities for America’s adversaries. But the United States can only take advantage if it stops making its own share of mistakes.
The uprisings in Iran are the most dramatic, but far from the only, evidence that America’s enemies have severe domestic problems. There is plenty of discontent in China too: The China Dissent Monitor has found 14,000 protests occurred in China since June 2022.
Some of the people who speak out against their oppressors want their share of the freedoms that Americans enjoy, but they do so for a variety of reasons. For example, most protests in China are smaller-scale outbursts about specific economic problems. The current wave in Iran began that way before it evolved into a full-fledged rejection of Khamenei’s misrule.
The Chinese Communist Party devotes enormous resources to maintaining its grip on the Chinese people and preventing Iran-style flareups from occurring. The “Great Firewall” that restricts access to the outside world is only one of the many measures the CCP uses to restrict speech and thought. Censors banned Winnie-the-Pooh because an online joke comparing Xi to the bear of very little brains became too popular. The Chinese government also relentlessly oppresses ethnic and religious minorities in Tibet, Xinjiang, and Inner Mongolia.
The internet and other information technologies fuel these uprisings in complex ways. At the advent of social media, such as during the abortive 2009 Green Movement in Iran and the Arab Spring, discontented tech-savvy young people used platforms like Twitter to coordinate protests against their rulers. This is one of the reasons China censors the internet so aggressively, and Iran’s government effectively cut off the country from the internet for the past few days.
As information technologies have matured, they have had much broader effects on politics and economies around the globe. Among other things, they change the way that wealth is created, which in turn affects fundamental aspects of society. For many decades, the Detroit automakers were the model for a successful industrial society. Now, every country wants its own Silicon Valley.
Governments are struggling to adapt properly to these changes. In most parliamentary democracies, insurgent political movements have upended established parties. The Democrats and Republicans have not given way to third parties like the Greens, but new ideological movements have sprung up with surprising vigor.
Dictatorships and autocracies often look like they can handle these changes better, but because they do not regularly give their subjects opportunities to weigh in on how they are governed, they are more vulnerable to violent eruptions. They generally have trouble credibly offering their people better lives too. However much they jibber and jabber that their pet ideology is the wave of the future, they spend much more effort propagandizing against the American way and trying to demoralize the American people and their friends.
That said, the industrial revolution in the United States was more chaotic than in much of Europe, and the information revolution is shaping up that way too.
The need for clear eyes and calm heads is greater than ever, but the demand may outstrip the supply. Thanks to an educational establishment that has abdicated its responsibility to teach young people how to think seriously about difficult topics, America’s youth are demoralized and falling for the distortions and outright lies spread by their enemies. Pew Research Center found this summer that only 41 percent of Gen Z are proud to be American. Two-thirds of the respondents to last fall’s Harvard Youth Poll thought that American democracy was in trouble or had failed.
While the fight for freedom in Iran grows, so do the threats to freedom in our own country. If Americans are not taught in the classroom how to defend their way of life wisely, they will face a much harsher teacher.
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