The Great American State Fair opened on the National Mall this week, but the heartland is already the focus of international attention. As the United States, Canada, and Mexico host the World Cup, soccer fans from around the world are crisscrossing this country, gawking at the sheer abundance they find in our stores and restaurants.
Their astonishment is a helpful reminder of what makes America great. It gives the lie to the critics of the American way, both on the far right and left at home and abroad, who claim the system is fundamentally broken and rigged against ordinary people. The opportunities provided by capitalism are one of this country’s secret weapons, and our enemies are working night and day to disarm us.
Many of the shocked onlookers come from relatively wealthy countries, but they are nonetheless awed by the sheer variety of choices available to Americans. One of the biggest social media winners of the games is FreddyLA7, the cheery German who is posting about the delights he and his friends find as they zigzag across the heartland. Walmart, long vilified as the epitome of rapacious capitalism and déclassé mass consumerism, is another.
They are discovering the great secret of America: This country, like every other, is struggling to handle the impacts of the information revolution, and there is much work to do, but its people enjoy a standard of living that remains the envy of the world.
It’s not just the Silicon Valley whiz kids and Wall Street fat cats who gain from our free enterprise system. As economist Mark Perry shows with his “chart of the century,” nearly every facet of the U.S. economy has grown significantly more affordable since January 2000, except for highly regulated sectors like medicine and college education.
This was one of America’s most powerful weapons against communism during the Cold War. Many around the world saw the beauty and truth of this nation’s ideals, and they nodded along to the story Ronald Reagan told about a refugee from communism greeting the American sailor rescuing him with “hello, freedom man.”
But “beauty is truth, truth beauty” is not “all ye need to know.” The more pragmatic men who held their country’s levers of power adopted aspects of the American system less out of admiration for our ideals than because they saw the system worked.
Communism aspired to create a utopia for the everyman, but American workers fared far better than even the most privileged commissars. Russian leaders like Boris Yeltsin grew despondent when they saw our grocery stores, remarking, “even the Politburo doesn’t have this choice. Not even [General Secretary] Gorbachev.” Poverty is not the goal of communism, but it clearly was the result. Leaders who wanted their countries to grow wealthy and strong wanted to learn from Washington, not Moscow. Freedom defeated its enemies at the checkout counter.
The resulting collapse of the Soviet system haunts the Chinese Communist Party. The CCP had its own brush with death in 1989 when pro-democracy college students set up camp in Beijing’s Tiananmen Square until the military attacked them. Xi Jinping demands his subordinates stay wary of internal dissent and accurate descriptions of earlier failures, which he calls “historical nihilism.”
The CCP counters America’s secret weapon with a shield and a dagger: It uses international sports events, such as the 2008 Summer and 2022 Winter Olympics, to highlight China’s growing wealth and power and shield it from criticism. It also actively courts social media influencers like the dog-abusing lefty Hasan Piker—whom the Chinese police still hassled during his glowing review of Tiananmen Square—and mostly apolitical streamers like IShowSpeed.
Meanwhile, Chinese propagandists relentlessly denigrate the United States as a hellscape of greedy capitalists preying on the weak and vulnerable. They stab at America’s weak points, some of which Politburo member Wang Huning identified in his book America Against America. The unsubtle message is, as Xi says, “the East is rising and the West is declining.”
Unfortunately, some Americans accept these kinds of arguments. They argue that, rather than refresh and update some aspects of our operating system to meet the information era, the entire project needs to be scrapped. Many of them, like Piker and his allies in the Democratic Socialists of America, sympathize with our enemies.
But as others can see, that is fundamentally wrong. Our prosperity is unique, and the United States is only that wealthy because it is this free. The World Cup guests may or may not like the American system, but they see the results—and they love it.
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