Pan Wei: The Pro-Trump Case for American Power and Populism

"In the US, the Democratic Party has closer ties to the military-industrial complex than the Republican Party, which tends to favour ending wars rather than initiating or escalating them."

Pan Wei presents a strangely counterintuitive idea here: that, rather than a symptom of continuing social fractures, the second election of Donald Trump is evidence of strengthening cohesion between America’s elites and the masses. The common description of America fragile internally but strong externally is therefore too negative; America’s current external strength is still dependent, like that of all great powers, on its internal cohesion—which the recent election has strengthened.

Given what we know about Trump and American politics in recent years, this may at first sight seem a surprising claim. It helps to put this in the context of Pan’s intellectual background, which is deeply concerned with explaining social ferment and change. As a relatively conservative intellectual, the core of Pan’s thought is that a nation’s overall strength relies largely on the state’s ability to face social tensions and re-establish cohesion [内聚力] between the elites and the populace. Elite alienation…