This was a byproduct of the Cold War but I also don't think its the right lesson to take https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2020-07-07/new-cold-war-with-china-can-make-u-s-democracy-stronger

It's hard to overstate the fear that prominent people had -- beginning in the early 1900s, to be honest -- that democracy was over. That Communism, Fascism, and a number of more obscure isms that did not last even the first half of 20th century, were competitors.

So that fear partly motivated them to undertake domestic reforms that they would not otherwise consider, such as economic constraints on capitalism and concessions to minorities seeking rights and recognition

If democracies could not perform effective centralized planning, they would lose out to Communist and Fascist states that elites -- as it turned out wrongly -- worried were better at it. So the US undertook large scale industrial reforms.

If democracies could not guarantee domestic economic stability, they would risk revolution. So FDR and others sought to save capitalism from itself, borrowing from what they thought were useful ideas from Communist and Fascist states.

Finally, during the 50s and 60s elites were keenly aware that racial unrest in the US would be exploited by the Eastern Bloc and would harm US efforts to compete for the loyalties of the Global South. Without this, it is harder to imagine the pace of reform that occurred.

You will note here, of course, that the key word that keeps getting repeated is "elites thought ___"

The existence of an external threat did not somehow automatically compel policy choices, it was interpreted by particular groups of people in a way that made those policy choices more likely.

For a lot of reasons that are too complicated to sum up here, that group of people, their worldviews, and the various other national dramas that coincided with the external threats were very unique and not necessarily repeatable.

All in all its also easy to imagine a different sequence of events, one in which continued rivalry between the US and the USSR leads to the US becoming a dictatorial garrison state -- an outcome that US Cold War strategy sought to avoid but was very possible

You will note today that public hostility to China does not seem to be bringing out the "better" side of US democracy. It is not spurring any significant non-military investments in education or public goods.

In fact, the exact opposite. It's a race to slash and burn much of the sources of US national competitiveness while embracing racial backlash politics on a scale reminiscent of the 1920s

Maybe that can change for the better if Trump goes in November. I am not so sure.

there is another scenario in which US domestic dysfunction continues, with US internal decline hastening transition to a more multipolar world and a more multipolar world hastening US internal decline.

In this timeline, "competition" with China is mostly a pipe dream of DC wonks, public appetite is mostly for economic protectionism and anti-Asian xenophobia. There is no, say, "we have to invest in education to beat China" because no one can agree to fund education at all

Chinese hostility just prompts the US to do more self-destructive things, which makes China more powerful and threatening, which then fuels more self-destructive actions, and so forth.

I don't see that as inevitable either, but I'd be a fool to dismiss it outright. I mean, I never imagined in 2016 I'd be stuck home and 130,000 Americans would be dead from a virus our government systematically mismanaged.

It goes back to what I said here https://twitter.com/Aelkus/status/1280671310453125126

China can't decide for us what kind of society we want to have and more narrowly how various groups that decide the "what" and "how" pursue their goals and interests.