Indian lessons
Source: By Mukul Kesavan: The Telegraph
What does the debate about the global resurgence of right- wing populism look like from New Delhi? The eruptions of liberal despair after Brexit and Trump's triumph have drawn ' I- told- you- sos' from both the Left and Right. Both sides have scolded liberals for two connected failures: one, for being blind to the economic stagnation and decline endured by silent working- class majorities and two, for replacing the traditional progressive solidarity with working people with multiculturalism and minority politics designed to create a rainbow coalition.
Like all political generalizations, these criticisms are overstated but they need serious consideration; which is to say, they need to be examined without the easy consolations of sarcasm and snobbery. The notion is the stupidity and bigotry of the half- educated that stops them from understanding what's good for them is a useful example of liberal superciliousness. In Britain this summer, Remainer conversations were disfigured by precisely this sort of exasperated contempt. The main point that critics like John Gray, the conservative English philosopher, make is that liberals or progressives call them what you will, allowed themselves to be co- opted by something called neoliberalism.
Neo- liberalism is the belief that open markets and the free movement of capital and labour will combine with liberal, rightsbased democracy to create a stable, peaceful and prosperous international order. This, argue critics from both Left and Right, was always nonsense because this ideologically- driven globalization created a small international elite of winners (that storied one per cent) and a large rump of permanent losers. The triumphalism that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union transformed the pillars of international capitalism, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund and the Atlanticist powers that ran them, into crusading doctors determined to administer their cleansing neo- liberal enemas to every country too weak to resist their ministrations.
This cure very nearly destroyed post- Soviet Russia. It helped prepare the ground for a kleptocracy ruled by an authoritarian who used the economic destruction and geopolitical humiliation visited upon Russia by the NATO powers to build a revanchist nationalism fuelled by resentment and bigotry. It did destroy the Middle East in the aftermath of the invasion of Iraq.
Iraq, Libya and Syria was serially sacrificed on the altar of democracy and the war against its sworn enemy, Islamist terror. There's a symbolic tidiness to the fact that Paul Wolfowitz, the arch- ideologue behind the invasion of Iraq, was made the president of the World Bank afterwards, fusing in one body the failed economic and political dogmas of neo- liberalism.
Discredited abroad by the disaster in the Middle East, neo- liberalism (indistinguishable from its twin, neo- conservatism) was discredited in its Anglo- American home by the Great Recession of 2008. This meltdown made the economic prospects of working class communities in the 'rust belt' in the United States and in the northeast of England seem even bleaker than they had before, leaving them ripe for mobilization by right- wing populists like Nigel Farage and Donald Trump. This line of argument can be extended with minor variations to other European countries where the political centre of gravity has moved to the right: Hungary, Italy, Poland, Austria and France. Gray has for some years now, been an advocate of Brexit, arguing that the European Union is the perfect example of the failure of the economic integration advocated by neo- liberals. Working- class communities at the receiving end of economic liberalization do not want their factories disappearing abroad and resent the fact that they have to compete for the jobs that remain with foreigners. Gray argues that this is not xenophobia — though it can be harnessed as such by politicians — but rational self- interest. He chides liberals for stigmatizing popular feeling born of firsthand experience as right- wing populism: why, he asks rhetorically, does an electorate become a racist mob when it returns answers that liberals don't like? There are many objections to be made to this seven- league- boots style of argumentation, the most obvious being that the margins for Brexit and Trump were so small that they can scarcely sustain the weight of these generalizations.
Multiculturalists and the rainbowcoalition wallahs could ( and do) point out that that the Republican Party has systematically cultivated a white rump as its base for decades, and therefore to assign Trump's win to working- class discontent and not to a racist mobilization is simply to give the white working class and its prejudices a pass routinely denied to others. The Economist might argue that the case against a globalized economy is just wrong and point to the hundreds of millions that have been lifted out of poverty by free markets and ability of capital to cross borders. People on the left, the world over, will point to the fact that theirs was the original critique of finance capitalism, that they were the prophets in the wilderness years after the collapse of the Soviet Union, who cried themselves hoarse warning that the collapse of capitalism was nigh.
These responses make serious points but they sound plaintive and unpersuasive. The doomsayers of the Left might have been right but since the Soviet Union collapsed and took Marxism with it, the Left has failed to produce an agenda for popular mobilization. Bernie Sanders's barnstorming campaign and Occupy Wall Street were important movements, but the centrist political establishment of the Democratic Party succeeded in defeating and co- opting them. Sanders might have been on to something but he lost and lined up behind Hillary, effectively neutering the Democratic Party's ability to channel Middle America's insurgency. If white Americans were as racist as the Left claimed, how did Obama achieve the approval levels he did at the tail end of his presidency? As for The Economist 's use of China as a defence of globalization, Gray points out that China succeeded because it was the only one of the great powers that had a rational ( that is, achievable) sense of what it wanted from the international order. This was foreign capital and foreign markets; it did not include liberal democracy or the free movement of people. China has less than 1,500 naturalized citizens. China didn't drink the Kool- Aid; the Atlanticists did.
Gray sees Trump's election, Brexit and ( as he sees it) the imminent break- up of the EU as a return to an older global arrangement: the inauguration of an era of Great Power rivalry based on realism in foreign policy and measured protectionism for the management of national economies. It is a pragmatic view of the world, self- congratulatory in its detachment, but it's worth our attention, coming as it does from a man who opposed the West's intervention in Iraq, and who, in his book, False Dawn, pointed to the fragility of global capitalism a decade before the near- collapse of the world economy, and who foretold Brexit and the Trump triumph before they happened. (Gray is also something of an ideological chameleon, having serially supported Labour, Thatcher and New Labour before arriving at his present anti- globalist stance.) What relevance does this explanation of the West's recent past have for us? Gray's most pertinent thesis is that when the middle classes and the poor are disoriented by the upheavals of economic liberalization, they turn to the right for consolation, not the left, because the Right has always had at its ideological core, the idea of the People as a beleaguered community that needs to be protected from predators both within and without. The Left, hamstrung by its rhetorical internationalism and its concern for minorities, seems less attentive, less willing to invoke a People, lest it call forth a monster.
Desi liberals knowingly tell their foreign friends that Trump's victory and the progressive hysteria that followed filled them with déjà vu. They had been here before, in 2014, when Narendra Modi won an absolute majority. They are wrong; Narendra Modi is not Donald Trump. Modi comes out of the mainstream of Hindu nationalism and its institutions; he isn't a maverick outsider. Perhaps our maverick populist lies further down the road.
What if our resident sorcerer, having made our money disappear, fails to complete his trick? If demonetization permanently damages the economy and creates widespread discontent, by the time the next election comes around the principal beneficiaries mightn't be the anti- Bharatiya Janata Party opposition, but some unforeseen Trump- like figure from the right who moves to annex the BJP in the name of a new, more fiercely majoritarian agenda. He would have to be a recognizable face and a pan- Indian brand. He would boast of his success as a self- made man able to purge a corrupt system from outside.
He would have the money to underwrite his political ambitions. He would be Hindi- speaking, more saffron than Modi, more bearded, and, most importantly, more telegenic. He would, in short, look remarkably like Baba Ramdev.
Here's a man who is the face of a company estimated to be worth billions of dollars, a saffron sant whose image is plastered all over Patanjali's products, whose television audience via devotional channels like Aastha rivals Trump's television presence, whose political ambitions are obvious to anyone who has followed his career. When a journalist friend of mine mooted this nightmare scenario, I thought he was insane. After Trump and post- demonetization, this future, or one like it, no longer seems impossible.
Jayalalithaa's death is a good moment to think about what a secular populism looks like. The traditions of welfare and affirmative action inaugurated by the Dravida Munnetra Kazhagam and MGR and carried forward by Jayalalithaa helped Tamil Nadu achieve high scores on the United Nations human development index. Routinely rubbished by economists and pundits, this ' populism' helped educate its people and empower its women without noticeably compromising Tamil Nadu's economic performance relative to India's other states. More to the point, it helped these Dravida parties consolidate political constituencies. There's much in Dravida politics to criticize, but their ability to mobilize electoral majorities that aren't majoritarian, isn't one of them. Given our Modi- fied present and a future where political babalog are routed by juggernaut babas, the liberal- Left in India had better embrace populism, instead of disdaining it.
