China, the U.S., and the Idea of National Competition

What appears to be meant in the U.S. by ‘competing with China’ can be inferred by the rising Pentagon budget, by the failure to raise the minimum wage, by hiring private corporations to get around restrictions on domestic spying, and by appointing a high-level administrator to shut-down inconvenient political opinions on the internet. The political parties are now balkanized to the point where their adherents trust members of their own party, but not the other. What this likely means is an iterative process between ‘wealth of nations’ style economic nationalism and neoliberal internationalism where the only constant is the consolidation of political control by oligarchs and corporate executives. I believe that Italians in the 1920s and 1930s had a name for this type of governance.