Here’s a clip from a 2019 Tablet profile of then presidential candidate Andrew Yang, who is now running for Mayor of New York:

The really beguiling thing about the elixir of attitudes and policies that go into Yang’s formula is that they maintain a residue of civic patriotism without any strong attachment to the actual components of American democracy. Noah Millman captures this point in an article for The Week reflecting on the political vision outlined in Yang’s book, The War on Normal People.

What kind of politics would such a world engender? It’s not likely to be a democratic one — and between the lines of Yang’s book he seems to recognize that fact. Yang’s solutions involve a substantial restructuring of the American economy without massive central planning. But someone will need to construct and maintain the networks through which the citizenry interacts. Someone will need to decide how much of a universal income is optimal, and from what perspective optimality is calculated. Implicitly, the vision is of a world where enormous power rests in the hands of the kinds of people who run firms like Google, and a lot of faith required that those people won’t be evil.

Deciding what is optimal is the language and logic of Silicon Valley and it proceeds from the premise that the optimizer already knows the desired outcome in any given situation—if they didn’t, what would they be optimizing for? One of Yang’s ideas is for a “Digital Social Credit,” a name that invites comparison to the Chinese government’s social credit system. The idea is spelled out in detail on Yang’s website: “In order to spur development, the government should issue a new currency – the Digital Social Credit – which can be converted into dollars and used to reward people and organizations who drive significant social value. This new currency would allow people to measure the amount of good that they have done through various programs and actions.”

In the event of any disagreement over how to measure units of good, or how to track the rewards for designated drivers of significant social value who take part in sanctioned programs and actions, we can count on there being algorithms to sort out such matters. And if some troublesome person should question how we determine a definition of good that’s suitable for all Americans, or who controls the algorithms that make such decisions, Yang’s bet, and he won’t be that last to make it, is that the promise of a thousand bucks a month, a truce in the culture wars, and a brake applied to the dizzying pace of change, will convince most people that they’d rather not push too hard looking for answers.

As readers of Live Not By Lies know, I believe that one way or another, we will have a social credit system in the US. It is going to be imposed on us by technocrats in the government and in major corporations under the guise of being pro-social — same as in China. In China, you get a higher social credit score (and therefore more privileges) for doing good things like helping your neighbor. You also get a higher social credit score for doing things like downloading Xi Jinping’s speeches. It’s all bound together. And you lower your social credit score by littering, or by going to church. See how this works? In the US, under Yang’s system, the woke would be able to turn their activism into dollars. Similarly, activism on the right would either not be rewarded, or perhaps even actively punished.

Do you trust the algorithm-writers of Silicon Valley to be fair under such a system?

The Biden administration is already planning to experiment with a similar model, relating to financial credit. More:

The Biden administration has a big target in its sights, or rather three big targets—Equifax, TransUnion and Experian. If President Biden has his way, he will create a public credit reporting agency (CRA) to compete with the three major credit bureaus and maybe one day replace them altogether.

The push for a public credit reporting agency is part of President Biden’s job and economic recovery agenda. The president’s agenda is inspired by a proposal from Dēmos, a liberal think tank with offices in New York and Washington, D.C. It calls for the formation of a new, national credit reporting and scoring division inside the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau (CFPB).

“Being able to obtain an accurate credit report and score is a critical step for homeownership,” says The Biden Plan to Build Back Better by Advancing Racial Equity Across the American Economy. The proposal suggests that a government-run CRA could fix a credit reporting system that frequently holds consumers back from becoming homeowners due to problems like credit reporting errors and racial disparities.

Numerous credit and lending experts, however, are wary of the new administration’s plan. These experts don’t deny the existence of a racial wealth gap in this country, nor do they dispute that it needs to be fixed. But they doubt that a public credit reporting agency is the answer. Instead, there is genuine concern that a federal credit reporting agency could make matters far worse for the struggling American consumer.

Under the Biden plan, the state would weight credit scores based on race. More:

Amy Traub, associate director of policy and research at Dēmos, said that although credit scores never formally take race into account, that doesn’t mean they’re race-neutral. “[Credit scores] draw on data about personal borrowing and payment history that is shaped by generations of discriminatory public policies and corporate practices.”

See how this works? Remember, under Critical Race Theory, the lower credit scores of blacks and Latinos can only be the result of racism. If Biden gets his way, racism — in this case, of a left-wing kind — will distort the market by altering the information available to lenders to make these decisions. If a government-run credit bureau replaces the private ones, how will banks and other lenders get trustworthy information about the creditworthiness of borrowers?

And what kind of signal does that send to white borrowers who would ordinarily have a lower credit score because of their financial histories, but who cannot get this artificial boost from the government, which would be rewarding borrowers not on the basis of anything they did or did not do regarding their financial histories, but solely on the basis of the color of their skin?

Even if the Biden plan for credit scoring does not take off, it is important to note that it was proposed in the first place — that the Biden administration was willing to manipulate credit scores for the sake of socially progressive goals.

Take note of another way Woke Capitalism and Woke Government are going to work within a China model. Here’s something from the influential economist Jeffrey Sachs:

“The US always attacks other countries, it holds itself sacrosanct.”

Economist @JeffDSachs says China’s human rights abuses in Xinjiang should not prevent the US from engaging with China, considering the US’ own “human rights violations” abroad and at home#Newsnight pic.twitter.com/xqa6kpF06r

— BBC Newsnight (@BBCNewsnight) April 14, 2021

That is an outrageous false equivalence. Whatever the sins and failings of the United States, we don’t put minorities in concentration camps, as the Chinese are doing to Uighur Muslims, and we are not carrying out a cultural genocide against an entire ethnic group (Uighurs). But globalists like Jeffrey Sachs make these false claims to justify morally their own “engagement” with China. Look for woke CEOS, and the woke NBA and woke MLB — which hates Georgia, but is sucking up to China — to begin employing the same rhetoric. They get woke points in the US for speaking out for Black Lives Matter, and also get to use that to cover their culpability for collaborating with a despotic (but very, very rich) Chinese regime committing spectacular human rights abuses.

The other day, Yale School of Management professor Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, who spearheaded a national CEO meet-up to discuss combating GOP voting reform initiatives, told NBC News:

“The overriding spirit is they don’t want politicians using wedge issues to try and solidify their hold on office, because that leads to angry communities and finger-pointing workforces and divided shareholders. It makes their job as CEOs harder to manage these constituents. They want social harmony,” Sonnenfeld said.

Social harmony. Keep that phrase in mind. We are going to be hearing it more and more. In China, to be “harmonized” is to be brought into conformity with the state’s policies. The title of a fantastic book by the German journalist Kai Strittmatter, We Have Been Harmonized: Life In China’s Surveillance State, explores this concept. From a Guardian review:

We Have Been Harmonised is the most accessible and best informed account we have had to date of China’s transition from what scholars such as Rebecca MacKinnon used to call “networked authoritarianism” to what is now a form of networked totalitarianism. The difference is not merely semantic. An authoritarian regime is relatively limited in its objectives: there may be elections, but they are generally carefully managed; individual freedoms are subordinate to the state; there is no constitutional accountability and no rule of law in any meaningful sense.

Totalitarianism, in contrast, prohibits opposition parties, restricts opposition to the state and exercises an extremely high degree of control over public and private life. As the historian Robert Conquest put it, a totalitarian state recognises no limits to its authority in any sphere of public or private life and seeks to extend that authority to whatever lengths it can.

Which pretty well matches Strittmatter’s portrayal of contemporary China under Xi Jinping, its new “leader for life”, who is increasingly looking like Mao 2.0 right down to his Little Red App as the contemporary version of his predecessor’s Little Red Book. Mercifully, though, he does not seem to have Mao’s enthusiasm for sacrificing millions of people on the altar of socialist rectitude. But, as Strittmatter tells it, under Xi’s leadership the Communist party of China (CCP) has been closely following the totalitarian playbook as described by Hannah Arendt and other observers of the phenomenon.

I cannot recommend Strittmatter’s book strongly enough. I drew on it for my own Live Not By Lies. The phrase “social harmony” is a bit unusual in English, so it set off my alarm being deployed in this context. I believe that going forward, we are going to see CEOs and other woke capitalists justifying their intervention in American political life, flexing their considerable muscles to compel conformity with cultural progressivism, by saying that all they seek is “social harmony.” They want Americans to be harmonized. Technocrats in and outside of industry and politics will embrace a social credit system to get this done. You read it here first.