The China Fetish Is Getting to Be a Bit Much
The China Fetish Is Getting to Be a Bit Much
Author: Jerusalem Demsas (The Argument) · Published: November 21, 2025 · URL: https://www.theargumentmag.com/p/the-china-fetish-is-getting-to-be
[PAYWALLED — summary only, checked 2026-09-15.] The Argument gates the piece after the opening section. The setup and the thesis statement below are from the free portion; the argument’s development and evidence are not read. Only the free portion is archived.
One-line: America’s inability to build is real, but it is caused by anti-democratic procedures rather than by democracy — and confusing the two is how people end up trading real freedoms for the appearance of competence.
Summary
Demsas opens on something deliberately trivial. During the pandemic her friend group watched reality TV weekly and spent forty minutes to an hour every week deciding what to order for dinner, despite a short list of options and no real dietary constraints — “just the result of a handful of very polite people trying to make a trivial decision.” She proposed rotating picks, a fishbowl, a fishbowl with vetoes, and approval voting. Her friends were “neither amused nor interested by my increasingly desperate attempts to rein in the excesses of our mini deliberative democracy.”
Then the thought that gives the essay its engine: she could simply order food without asking anyone. She discarded it, but recognized it as “a microcosm of an increasingly common phenomenon: where frustrations with process yield authoritarian impulses.”
Scaled up, that is her diagnosis of the era: “When government feels incompetent or incapable, people don’t usually distinguish between bad procedures and democracy itself — they just want someone to cut through the noise. That’s how you get technologists pining for a CEO-in-chief and voters gravitating towards anyone who promises to act quickly and decisively.”
Her counter-claim is the load-bearing sentence: “the real problems we’re facing are not inherent to democracy, but a reflection of anti-democratic processes and institutions that exist throughout our system of government. And if we continue to let these systems fester, people will keep trading away real freedoms for the illusion of competence.”
She grants the premise fully. “America struggles to build important things like housing, energy projects, and transportation projects. Its failure to do so is at the root of our housing crisis, has us on the path to real energy scarcity, and has hampered economic growth and productivity for decades” — an argument she has been making for years.
What she is impatient with is the shape of the two replies she reliably gets from people who agree there’s a problem:
- America’s trouble building is a reason to care less about efficacy — “what, do you want us to turn into China?”
- It is a reason to limit our democracy — “what, do you want us to lose to China?”
The title’s charge is that China has become the fixed reference point in both replies, pushing the conclusion in opposite directions from the same premise. The development of the argument and the evidence for it sit behind the paywall and are not summarized here.
Full text
Free excerpt only, archived against link rot: ../attachments/the-china-fetish-is-getting-to-be-a-bit-much/the-china-fetish-is-getting-to-be-a-bit-much.md
Connections
- The Build-Nothing Country — the counterpoint, and the reason to read them together. Noah Smith’s 2023 piece diagnoses the same failure and locates it in permitting, land use and entrenched local interests; Demsas accepts that diagnosis and adds the political claim Smith doesn’t make — that the fix is more democracy against anti-democratic procedure, not less of it. Smith describes the machine; Demsas argues about what the machine’s existence licenses you to conclude.
- China — used here as a rhetorical object rather than a subject: the essay is about what invoking China does to an argument, which is why “fetish” is the right word for it.
- Abundance — the movement Demsas is writing from inside, and the internal disagreement she is pressing on.
- Housing and NIMBY — the concrete failures she stipulates before starting the argument.
- City Building — the broader question of whether a democracy can still build at scale.