Broad Framing the Global Majority Middle Class
Part of the Broad Framing Initiative series
This is the seventh in a series of posts exploring my preference for broadly framing any issue/news story/trend/development in our world. I am on vacation this week.
The rise of a majority global middle class is, as I describe it in America’s New Map, is the single greatest accomplishment in the history of global economics, and America was its primary enabler with the international liberal trade order that we established in the West after the Second World War and then patiently —but only partially —extended throughout the Cold War until we achieved the big breakthrough with the marketization of Communist China and the fall of the Soviet Empire.
To me, that is the WIN of the Cold War struggle — not defeating the Russians but creating the conditions by which a global majority middle class could emerge.
When I look at this chart, I can’t help but recognize just how narrowly wrong our strategic mindset is right now with its implied “containment” of China and its desired enlistment of India in that quest.
Why?
These two countries are the primary current drivers of that expanding global majority middle class, meaning their success is the global middle class’s success. Moreover, when you think about an Africa on the demographic horizon, hoping to attach itself to that larger trajectory now defining Asia (but shifting westward from SE Asia to S Asia to SW Asia), you cannot help but realize that Africa ALSO needs both China and India to succeed and, on that basis, extend and enable global value chains and industrialization/urbanization dynamics to Africa over the coming years/decades.
The West really doesn’t offer any viable alternative to this global pathway, but rather obstacles, sanctions, bromides, and arms transfers.
That puts us in the position of preferring Asia and Africa’s stunted rise versus China and India’s success in extending globalization’s networks there, when, what we should be concentrating on is getting our own neck of the woods organized in terms of much greater intra-hemisphere trade integration across the Americas.
In many ways, India and China are in a race with climate change and their own demographics, in both instances facing far greater challenges than we in North America do. We take a dim view of China because of its single-party-state authoritarianism and we worry about the growing authoritarianism and ethno-nationalism of India when, in truth, both they and the world face darker futures in the event that either or both of their economies truly stall out in coming years/decades (something too many of us in the West are already cheering on WRT China).
China, for example, will not go democratic in an economic stall — just the opposite as we are witnessing already with Xi and his forever-presidency. Meanwhile, anybody thinking that India’s democracy will survive its failed exploitation of its unfolding demographic dividend is being naive in the extreme.
I know that we Americans tend to believe that political success gets you economic success — in that order (i.e., the belief that our “brilliant” Founding Fathers with their Constitution made all this happen), but the truth flows the other way around: economic freedom & success gets you political freedom & success. This is why we should continue welcoming China’s growing economic strength even as we must amp up our own competitive stance as a result.
Instead, we tend to demonize China for its politics, which, admittedly, are bad by our current standards (even I wince when I type that). But, it’s entirely wrong to think we’re going to force such positive political evolutions from the outside, when history shows us time and again that democracy really happens when your middle class gets big enough and angry enough to demand it.
It’s far more dangerous to have a nascent middle class subject to political domination from either the radical Left or the fascist Right, as we witnessed across Europe and Russia when the middle class began to rise there at the end of the 19th century. Those reactions to the rise of a middle class (Bolshevism on the left, Nazism on the right) ended up being catastrophic for the world, ushering in three huge periods of mass slaughter in the form of the Stalin, Hitler, and Mao regimes.
Meanwhile, America threaded that needle with a Progressive Era that firmly centered the political middle on our burgeoning middle class.
THAT is the challenge and opportunity the world faces now as we re-run that historical experiment — this time with truly huge numbers (a global middle class of 6B come midcentury). This is the superpower brand war that I speak of in the book: five superpowers with competing models of integration and development.
Making that global majority middle class happy is THE political task of this century, because, the superpower brand that demonstrates how best to do that will be the one that essentially rules this century — not with its power to force economic failure (rancid Cold War thinking) but with its rules that enable economic success (and the follow-on political freedoms that economic success makes possible).
In short, if America wants the political outcomes, it needs to first enable the economic precursors — not the other way around.
I prefer that America win the superpower brand war, and I see the quickest path toward demonstrating that capacity being the promotion and pursuit of North-South economic, political, network, and security integration in our hemisphere. We show that the American Union can get back in the game of serious integration and outperform a European Union currently outperforming us on that score and we then have a powerful alternative to China’s economic-integration-by-bilateral-domination scheme (Belt and Road Initiative, Huawei’s surveillance state offering [Safe City/Smart City], etc.).
We cannot hector this global future into being; we have to actually build it ourselves.
America needs to demonstrate that, a century later, we still have it: we still know how to make a middle class happy and prosperous and feeling secure about its future.
And YES, that means accomplishing that first within our own borders, addressing all the middle class angst that gets us the Tea Party movement, and Trump, and MAGA, and all the ugly White Christian Nationalism that has attached itself to these deep fears and grievances.
Because, until we can get past these isolationist/xenophobic/trade protectionist instincts, we’ll be in no shape to outperform China anywhere — to include our own “backyard” of Latin America and the Caribbean.
Win the middle, win the world.
That needs to be our mantra for a second American Century.
