Can Sinophobia save the U.S.?

Ross Douthat perceives an encouraging "bipartian, pan-ideological" consensus emerging in response to China's attempt to intimidate National Basketball Association personnel into silence on the ongoing Hong Kong controversy. He hopes that this perceived outrage will become "a permanent factor in U.S. politics," believing that "it might take the looming-up of a rival power to remind us of who we are and what we do not want to be." But I wonder whether this consensus of outrage exists beneath the surface of the media and the political class. I can understand why Douthat would expect freedom of speech to be a rallying point for all sides in American politics, but all sides seem increasingly hypocritical on that particular point. One person's freedom of speech could be another's hate speech , after all -- or, depending on your perspective, treason. Leaving partisanship out of it, many Americans might well believe that Hong Kong really is none of our business, or at least nothing worth compromising profitable relationships like that between the NBA and the Chinese market. More generally, my suspicion for a while now has been that 21st century partisanship, exacerbated by social media, is making Americans increasingly skeptical of the absolute value of free speech. Whether you're partisan or not, and perhaps especially if you're not, you've probably had cause to question whether at least some opinions you've seen or heard were worth expressing. Our increased ability to have our opinions seen really hasn't clarified or elevated our political conversations. It may instead have encouraged the suspicion that the opinionated person is just an asshole who's part of the problem rather than part of the solution -- presuming that he reserves the right to object to all solutions. Perhaps we shouldn't be surprised if fewer people acknowledge genuinely principled objections to political proposals; all the noise seems to boil down to, "I object as a black/Christian/gay/gun owner/etc., etc." Of course, Douthat may be onto something if he anticipates Americans overcoming their objections to each other to agree that those foreigners can't tell us to shut up about anything. But in a column in which he worries about the global appeal of the Chinese authoritarian model, Douthat may underestimate the extent to which American democracy has undermined its own appeal or its will for self-defense.