Media & courts in US did not bend and Republicans & Democrats are not fighting to overthrow democracy

To be able to dissect the triumph of Biden, and traditional partisan politics over Trump’s new right wing populism, we need to step back, and re-examine what the contestation was all about.  Only then can we get what has been achieved, and what lessons it holds for India.

First let us consider what classical liberalism was all about.  In the words of Francis Fukuyama: “While classical liberalism sought to protect the autonomy of equal individuals, the new ideology of multiculturalism promoted equal respect for cultures, even if those cultures abridged the autonomy of the individuals who participated in them.”

Classical liberalism was always focused sharply on the individual, as opposed to the collective.  It was an individual’s capacity for moral agency, enterprise, and change, that brought progress; and that was always being crushed by collectives, ranging from tribal patriarchy, through oppressive religiosity, to state’s tyranny.

To offset these pressures from the collective, it was imperative to set the individual free.  And classical liberalism sought to do so, without diminishing the tribe, religion, society or state.  Instead, it sharply defined some inalienable rights against these very collectives, and sought to harness the state in their protection.

But in the long journey since Renaissance, something more happened.

Again to quote Fukuyama: “The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups.”

What Fukuyama defines here is the Left-Liberal creep for what needs to be protected in a liberal democracy.  Again, it drifted away from the individual, to collectives.

First, in the name of the individuals, the definition of individual itself was expanded from the strictly personal, to the groups in which individuals often associate with, for instance, religious or cultural.  When you allow this, you have the absurd position where you are defending a fascist version of Islam in the name of protecting the individual, while denouncing the majority religion on the very same ground.

This happened in India as well, with some misguided liberals vociferously supporting the most outrageous religious demands of some Muslim clerics regarding divorce, right to pray, polygamy, or whatever, while insisting that Hindus shun the very same practices.

Clearly you can’t have such an absurd position, and the Right Wing pounced on the absurdity to build a whole new campaign of religious resentment against the liberal state.

Secondly, note what happened to equality in the process of expanding the sphere of the individual. The right to equality of individuals, itself morphed from being about fraternity, to equality for various groups of individuals; some valid, some gross distortions of the very notion of liberalism, in as much as they came to mean a demand for equality between Christianity and Islam in say the US, to take just one example.

Guaranteeing the right of an individual to pray to a God of her choosing is not the same as asking to place Christianity and Islam on an equal footing in the US.  This creep in the scope of left’s idea of equality between two cultural groups, flies in the face of the liberal idea of an individual.

But this glaring contradiction was ignored, and the left and liberals combined to create a plethora of new entitlements that weren’t anchored in the classical liberal idea of liberating an oppressed individual from oppressive collectives.

No wonder, this inflamed passions on the majority side, as unwarranted molly-coddling of minorities, in a manner that would change the very identity of the polity. The Left and the Liberals had walked into a moral and existential quagmire, and in the process, abandoned the individual, in search of new windmills to “equalise.”

So, the first lesson from the US for Indian liberals is to understand the basic nature of the conundrum; and not to draw false conclusions from Trump’s defeat in a hurry.  Very few philosophers and thinkers have actually put out the flaws in the liberal case in popular press, though I guess that will happen in due course.  There is lot to learn here.  The India debate on populism and fascism continues to be singularly uninformed.

In India there is scant realisation why and where the liberals went wrong in aping the US’s cultural tropes.  We need to understand liberal creep, its inherent logical fallacies, and the consequent popular resentment that fascists have harnessed for taking their evil ideology main stream.  Unless we understand why fascism is popular, and fed by hate and resentment grounded in liberal creep, we will not be able to fight them.

Now that we have the conceptual field clear, lets us see how the US was able to hold populism in check and not cede further ground to it.

US MEDIA SUPPORTED LIBERALS

I must emphasise that I don’t think Right Wing populism has diminished under Trump.  Trumpism is intact. Democracy has been barely able to hold its own in the face of RW hate and resentment for now.  The real war lies ahead.  So, the real question is what helped preserve democracy, and the created the opportunity for the battle that lies ahead.

The liberal fight back was along two axes.  First, the appeal to reason over faith addressed to groups not already sold on RW resentment.  This included attacks on RW absurdities, via parody, humour, reasoned argument, fact checking, and debunking RW lies and absurdities.  Secondly, it was centred on supporting all institutions charged with keeping checks on abuse of power, ranging from the press on one hand, to legislature and courts, on the other.

So, in a nutshell here is how you fight populism.  You confine the ideological battle to the field of reason where you cannot lose.  The opposition tries very hard to make the fight emotive by claiming existential threat to the polity, to bypass reason.  When they do so, the right response is to bring the battle back to the domain of reason by conceding that there could be an existential threat, provided the grounds citied were correct and sufficient.

Every time the RW bolts from the field of reason, it should be cajoled, invited, incited, and beaten back to the fold of reason for a contest.

Remember, the victory here is not to convince the RW protagonist, but to win and keep the undecided in the liberal fold.  That is the ultimate prize to win.  So, focus on the audience, use RW obduracy and unreason to shred their case, bypass their emotive appeals, concede to emotion where necessary, without denouncing it, but bring the battle back to reason.

The Press in the US was a great ally of the liberals.  It refused to buckle under Statist pressure.  It ignored Trump’s fake calls to patriotism and waving the flag, to nail his lies.  It refused to give up on fact checking.  It wasn’t shy in shredding trump’s fakery.

It questioned Trump’s partisan motivation.  It showed up Trump’s policies as sub-optimal and grounded in misguided ideology. In short, the Press as an institution, did what citizens are supposed to do in a democracy and won their support in ample measure.  Despite the enormous power & authority at his command, Trump could not win his contest against reporters and editors of the press, coming away with a bloody nose every time.

This was the main battle in the domain of reason, where Trump was soundly beaten by simple fact checking, calling a spade a spade, and reporting honestly on developments.

This battle against RW populism is the easiest to win, provide the battle can be brought live to the voters via a free press.  In India, the tragedy is that the free press remains beholden to power, money, and unreason.  Or has a vested interest in outcomes via media tycoons, who are weakest link in the media chain, most vulnerable to pressure, when not actively supping with power.

DISSENTERS OUTNUMBER FASCISTS IN INDIA

The second arena in which reason prevailed over emotion was comedy, parody, humour, and the arts.  Here the contest is highly emotive but reason is the clincher.  This is an arena where the creative can be used to show up the falsity of RW outrage effectively, and slip reason into the contest.

The right parody is an art.  Trump was largely a no contest here.  Instead, he provided most of the raw material for the parody.  If the legions of Jim Crow did not swell with new adherents from the cities and suburbs, the credit must go to parody shows and comedians.  India must not only find such art and artists but also learn how to support them and keep them out of jail.  Each great comedian is worth a hundred honest hacks with honest ink and pen.

The third arena in which the liberals contested the RW was political, and here the result is best described as a draw.

I do not think the liberals won a great political victory despite wresting control of the Presidency, the House and the Senate.  But they did a great job in holding on to their own, and correctly aggregating the victories won by the press and the arts, and consolidating them into a solid block of votes.

The lesson for India is two-fold with respect to the political domain.  First, we depend too much on politicians.  But it is not politicians who create a sense of wrong from right in the polity that ultimately guides voters.  That sense is established by individuals reacting to events, the press, the arts, the cultural scene.  An individual rarely makes up her mind because of what politicians say, except for the fascists. It is more important to focus on culture than politics to win the battle in the arena of reason.

On the other hand, politics needs to be able to aggregate dissent from RW populism into a solid vote.  And that means effective politicians who can build rainbow coalitions, and not necessarily potential brainy philosopher kings, who can outwit fascists.

The need of the hour is efficient and effective aggregation of dissent, and that is the biggest hole in India’s fight against RW populism and fascism.  Note for the nonce, dissent outstrips fascist vote-share even in India; in fact, by a larger margin than in the US.

WHY DID US OFFICIALS REFUSE TO BEND?

Last but not the least, US courts, its quasi-juridical officials in election commissions, even cabinet officers etc. did not bend before Presidential authority, and insisted on playing their assigned role in a democracy as they saw fit.  This helped prevent Trump’s perversion of the coercive apparatus of the state to fight his political and ideological opponents.  The US judiciary, courts, and the electoral officials, did a commendable job in the face of tremendous Presidential pressure.

But we must not stop there with our analysis and instead ask why is it that these officials refused to buckle under pressure?  Why, for instance, did they not cave in, like in India, as some sections have?  What enabled them to withstand the pressure?

The answer again lies in two things: firstly, in the nature of contestation, and secondly, in the culture of the people.

Let us take the nature of contestation first.  In the US the contest was never about democracy.  Both sides were, and are equally committed to democracy, and rule of law.  So why were they fighting?

The liberal argument is that RW effort to preserve majoritarian privilege destroys democracy.  The RW argument is that the Leftist effort to equate unequal groups as equal threatened the identity of the polity.  So, it harms democracy by making a nonsense of both equality and fraternity.  It also loses the individual in newer smaller collectives.

Which of the two arguments will weigh in future is difficult to say. But please note, the fight isn’t about democracy but what harms it more.  And the aim on both sides is to preserve democracy.  That is not necessarily the case with Indian fascists who seek to overthrow democracy by using its permissive apparatus.

The second is the role of a nation’s culture in determining the sense of what is wrong and what is right.  You cannot pin this sense to religion, education, nurture, economy, or any single factor.  It is at once a combination of all of these things.  Culture, as they say, eats both ideology and philosophy for breakfast.  It is the key in determining outcomes.

How can we then strengthen the Indian culture for defeating fascism?  In the near term this must fall to individual citizens, the press, the comedians, the bards, poets, philosophers, balladeers, and minstrels.  The more they get involved in defining our sense of wrong from right, the easier it will be to fight fascism.

To quote Friedrich Nietzsche: “The victors don’t write history so much as they write the laws, and the moral codes, to sustain them.  It is through the moral codes that they perpetuate themselves by defining culture.”

WHAT INDIAN LIBERALS NEED TO LEARN

One of the key things liberals in India need to do is make themselves familiar with the intellectual history of India and its great tradition of intellectual contestation.  From Vedic Brahmanical times, Indian intellectual space has never been free of fierce contestation and rebellion against domination by caste or class.

What the fascists think is their greatest source of strength, viz., their control of our ancient history, and their intellectual hegemony over us, based on ancient scriptures, may yet be their biggest weakness.  But these cannot be exploited, and dragged into the arena of reason, which Indian traditions permit, unlike those of say Christianity or Islam, if liberal continue to remain ignorant of them.

Liberals must study Indian systems of philosophy and thought, and prepare to contest wrong application of the same for fascist reordering of our moral codes.  The window on this can be closed by vague blasphemy laws.  So, if liberals are late in taking to their necessary homework, they will lose the most favourable arena for their case to fascists by default.

(Sonali Ranade is an independent commentator. Views expressed are her own)