The end of the democratic mission?

David Brooks lamented in a column last week that Americans seemed uninterested in the Hong Kong protest movement. Neither major political party "any longer sees America as a vanguard nation whose mission is to advance universal democracy and human dignity," he writes, though he hopes that the Hong Kong protesters will "rekindle the sense of democratic mission that used to burn so forcefully in American hearts." Brooks has an explanation for the apparent indifference of the American left; their unforgiving emphasis on "slavery and oppression" keeps them from seeing the U.S. as "a beacon or an example." He offers not even that brief an explanation for why "the American right no longer believes in spreading democracy to foreigners." If pressed, his explanation most likely would have something to do with Donald Trump, but it's more likely that whatever explains the attitude of the right, if Brooks perceives it correctly, also explains Trump. The right's objections to pro-democracy interventionism are more likely cynical than ideological. American adventurism in the Middle East since the turn of the century probably has disabused many of Trump's constituents of the idea that the mere existence of dictators is an existential threat to the American homeland. The "Arab Spring" in particular put into question whether greater democratization in some places was beneficial to the U.S. Taking a wider view, to the extent that the democratization narrative was tied to narratives of globalization and economic liberalization, it shouldn't surprise us to see Americans grow different to foreign struggles for democracy. 21st century Trumpian nationalism is more concerned with economic than ideological threats to the nation. These nationalists see Hong Kong's Chinese overlords as antagonists, but they don't necessarily believe that unfair Chinese trade practices follow necessarily from China's form of government. Dictators don't threaten us in our pocketbooks, where many Americans feel threatened today. The Chinese threat would seem little different to many Americans, probably, were China a de facto democracy like Japan. If anything, if Americans remember the neoliberal/neoconservative argument that economic liberalization would lead to greater democracy and a stronger economy for former tyrannies, they might well welcome any relapse into tyrannical practices by a major economic competitor like China. Whether Trumpets or others are right to see China primarily if not exclusively as an economic threat is a debate for another time, but while they see China that way what happens in Hong Kong won't make much difference to them -- unless they see it as an opportunity to hurt China's economy with sanctions. If that happens Brooks may see things that look like a rekindling of the old democratic mission, but he shouldn't be fooled by them -- though he probably will be.