Trump Is Winning the Race to the Bottom

The Felon bloviates incessantly about "making America great again," yet his policies are doing great harm to America's future, particularly when it comes to global competition, particularly competition with China.   Federally funded research and development spending is being slashed, prominent universities(including my alma mater) are under attack, scientists are considering moving abroad, and public education is under relentless attack to please white "Christian" nationalists who have long seen an educated and thinking population across racial and socio-economic grounds as (i) a threat to archaic religious beliefs, and (ii) a threat to white male privilege.  If America is to remain the dominant nation in the world, the exact opposite of the Felon's and right wing GOP's agenda focused on Project 2025 is what is needed.  Sadly, self-enrichment and pandering to the anti-elite, anti-education MAGA base is seemingly all the Felon and his political whores care about.  Indeed, like too many of history's past empires, the focus is on preventing change and funneling money to the already privileged and wealthy,  A lengthy column in the New York Times looks at the great harm to the nation's future being done by the Felon and his anti-knowledge regime.    Here are column excerpts:

Confidence. Some people have more of it and some people have less. Confident people have what psychologists call a strong internal locus of control. They believe they have the resources to control their own destiny. They have a bias toward action. They venture into the future.

When it comes to confidence, some nations have it and some don’t. Some nations once had it but then lost it. Last week on his blog, “Marginal Revolution,” Alex Tabarrok, a George Mason economist, asked us to compare America’s behavior during Cold War I (against the Soviet Union) with America’s behavior during Cold War II (against China). I look at that difference and I see a stark contrast — between a nation back in the 1950s that possessed an assumed self-confidence versus a nation today that is even more powerful but has had its easy self-confidence stripped away.

In the 1950s, American intelligence suggested that the Soviet Union was leapfrogging U.S. capabilities across a range of military technologies. Then on Oct. 4, 1957, the Soviet Union launched the first satellite, Sputnik, into space.

Americans were shocked but responded with confidence. Within a year the United States had created NASA and A.R.P.A. (later DARPA), the research agency that among other things helped create the internet. In 1958, Dwight Eisenhower signed the National Defense Education Act, one of the most important education reforms of the 20th century, which improved training, especially in math, science and foreign languages. The National Science Foundation budget tripled. . . . . Within a few years total research and development spending across many agencies zoomed up to nearly 12 percent of the entire federal budget. (It’s about 3 percent today.)

America’s leaders understood that a superpower rivalry is as much an intellectual contest as a military and economic one. It’s who can out-innovate whom. So they fought the Soviet threat with education, with the goal of maximizing talent on our side.  “One reason the U.S. economy had such a good Cold War was that the American university had an ever better one,” the historian Hal Brands writes in his book “The Twilight Struggle.”

Today we are in a second Cold War. For the first couple of decades it wasn’t clear whether China was a rival or a friend, but now it’s pretty clear that China is more a rival than a friend. . . . “Its primary goal is to damage America’s economy and pave the way for China to become the world’s pre-eminent power,” he wrote.

China is a country that, according a 2024 House committee inquiry, was directly subsidizing the manufacture and export of fentanyl materials, even though drug overdose is the leading cause of death among Americans 18 to 44.

Since the beginning of the 21st century, China has moved — confidently — to seize the future, especially in the realm of innovation and ideas. China’s total research and development funding has grown 16-fold since 2000. Now China is surging ahead of the United States in a range of academic spheres. In 2003, Chinese scholars produced very few broadly cited research papers. Now they produce more “high impact” research papers than Americans do, and according to The Economist, they absolutely dominate research in the following fields: materials science, chemistry, engineering, computer science, the environment and ecology, agricultural science, physics and math.

These achievements of course lead directly to China’s advantages across a range of high-tech industries. It’s not just high-tech manufacturing of things like electric vehicles, drones and solar panels. It’s high-tech everything. . . . . The Chinese gains in biotech are startling. In 2015 Chinese drugmakers accounted for just under 6 percent of the innovative drugs under development in the world. Ten years later, Chinese drugmakers are nearly at parity with American ones.

Then along came A.I. Americans overall are fearful about it. . . . The countries most excited by the prospect of that future? China, South Korea, Indonesia and Thailand. The fact is that nobody knows what the A.I. future holds; people’s projections about it mostly reflect their emotional states. Americans used to be the youthful optimists of the globe. Not right now.

Still, America has its big tech companies filled with bright young things charging into the future, so you’d think our lead would be secure. But over the past year, Chinese firms like Alibaba, ByteDance and Tencent have produced A.I. models whose quality is nearly equal to that of American models.

The A.I. race is perhaps the most crucial one, because it will presumably be the dominant technology of the next several decades. “The No. 1 factor that will define whether the U.S. or China wins this race is whose technology is most broadly adopted in the rest of the world,” Microsoft’s president, Brad Smith, told a congressional hearing. “Whoever gets there first will be difficult to supplant.”

So how is America responding to the greatest challenge of Cold War II? With huge increases in research? By infusing money into schools and universities that train young minds and produce new ideas? We’re doing the exact opposite. Today’s leaders don’t seem to understand what the Chinese clearly understand — that the future will be dominated by the country that makes the most of its talent.

Populists are anti-intellectual. President Trump isn’t pumping research money into the universities; he’s draining it out. The administration is not tripling the National Science Foundation’s budget; it’s trying to gut it. The administration is trying to cut all federal basic research funding by a third, according to the American Association for the Advancement of Science. A survey by the journal Nature of 1,600 scientists in the United States found that three-quarters of them have considered leaving the country.

The response to the Sputnik threat was to go outward and compete. Trump’s response to the Chinese threat generally is to build walls, to erect trade barriers and to turn inward. A normal country would be strengthening friendships with all nations not named China, but the United States is burning bridges in all directions. A normal country would be trying to restore America’s shipbuilding industry by making it the best in the world. We’re trying to save it through protectionism. The thinking seems to be: We can protect our mediocre industries by walling ourselves off from the world. That’s a recipe for national decline.

In the progressive era, America built new institutions like the Food and Drug Administration and the Federal Reserve. During the New Deal, Americans created an alphabet soup of new agencies. By 1949, Americans had created NATO and the precursor to the World Bank. Where are the new institutions fit for today? Government itself is not great at innovation, but for a century, public sector money has been necessary to fuel the fires of creativity — in the United States, in Israel and in China. On that front, America is in retreat. . . . .Is China’s dominance inevitable? Of course not. Centrally controlled economies are prone to monumental blunders.

But the primary contest is psychological — almost spiritual. Do Americans have faith in the power of the human mind? Are they willing to invest to enlarge the national talent pool? Right now, no. Americans, on the left and the right, have become highly attentive to threat, risk-averse and self-doubting about the national project. What do you do with a country with astounding advantages but that no longer believes in itself?