Dark days far from gone!

Joe Biden took over as the post-madness President of the United States today. We must not forget, though, that far more serious than Donald Trump the individual is the long-developing phenomenon that brought him to power and the legacy that he is leaving behind.

It is a fact that the inclusive, altruistic, cooperative, farsighted movement in human affairs with a pronounced concern for improving the condition of long-disadvantaged people (from the poor to Blacks, women and the LGBT tribe) started ebbing all over the world after the 1960s, and was rapidly rolled back ever since the rise of the Reagan-Thatcher consensus (conservative in social values, free capitalistic in economic conviction) in the west coupled with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the sharp turn of China towards a no-holds-barred materialistic/acquisitive/me-first culture around the same time (India more or less tamely followed suit, with no strong and separate ideology to guide us: real thinkers with constructive visions of the stature of Rammohun,Vivekananda, Gandhi and Tagore had stopped coming into the limelight a long time ago).That rather drastic shift did pay rich dividends, partly because the formerly mentioned movement had betrayed too many ideals, leaving behind a whole range of negative reactions from terror and horror  to merely a bad taste in the mouth, and partly because the opposite  effort sharply improved living conditions for a vast chunk of the human population within about thirty years, along with making billionaires by the hundreds and millionaires by the hundred thousand – the latter naturally got a huge stake in the new dispensation to want to do their utmost to keep it going unchallenged.

However, from the time that seminal book Globalization and its discontents was written (and actually much before that, as readers of J.K. Galbraith and Robert Lekachman know), it started becoming plain to the most clear-eyed observers of world affairs that all was not well with us. a) The physical environment was becoming rapidly and dangerously polluted as an unfortunate but apparently unavoidable spinoff of the kind of high-consumption lifestyles that more and more people were adopting; b) crime and social dysfunction proliferated, even at the family level, everywhere in the world as more and more people insisted that freedom and democracy meant not civilized negotiation, gradual compromise and quiet living but an aggressive attitude of grabbing, self-advertizing and thrusting forward in every sphere of life – every man for himself and the devil take the hindmost began to be taught as ‘wisdom’ in virtually every business school, not just in criminal gangs; c) people by the hundred million, feeling cheated, rootless, culturally disoriented, utterly insecure about the future in a scenario of ultra-rapid change (change which visibly and grossly benefited the already privileged), began to be attracted more and more to every kind of religious demagoguery that promised meaning and stability and community and certainty of better things ahead (even if that meant martyrdom as a terrorist!); and to control all this flux and chaos, d) more and more it became obvious that authoritarian rulers offering neo-fascist dispensations and miracle cures were becoming popular all over the world: they alone were confident of where they were going, they alone knew all the answers, they alone could lead their country towards a new heaven on earth. Their shrill, hyper-exaggerated (and plain lying-) messages were intensively, ceaselessly propagated to their increasingly blind and devoted followers through the bullhorns of social media, which gave them direct, continuous and relentless access to tens of millions of people in a way that Orwell would have marvelled at, and it became the despair of the regular, old-fashioned mass media which decided to become ever more noisy, trivial and sensationalistic to stay relevant. It is against this background that the rise of Donald Trump has to be understood, along with so many other ‘strong men’ all over the world.

It is one of my pet theories – buttressed by a lifetime of close observation and reflection – that any kind of excess in social manners and mores invariably provokes an excessive reaction in the opposite direction. Also, that nobody has the whole truth, nor does anybody tell the whole truth as s/he knows the truth all the time. If you accept these two premises, you will agree with me that democracy, if it is to remain healthy and effective, must always function in the spirit of tolerant debate, adjustment and compromise, consciously avoiding all extreme positions, every participant willing to obey the basic rules and to accept the majority decision taken without threat or coercion – however unpalatable or unsatisfactory it appears to him or her personally. Now a lot of people might dislike my saying this, but that does not change the fact that in the name of change and progress and improvement, far too many people of too many different persuasions have pushed the limits of civilized discourse too far for too long. To take a few examples, those who call themselves liberal democrats in the US and secular liberals in India have, all the while paying lip service to the ideals of democracy and free speech and tolerance, insisted that they alone are always right, and all those who disagree with them must be derided, shouted down, isolated and if possible ostracized, put beyond the pale. Therefore you are instantly branded racist if you so much as mumble that a lot of black people do take to drugs and crime too easily, and need to be dealt with firmly by the law, though never abused; you immediately and forever become a sexist if you dare to say publicly that women can be bad people too; you are instantly branded a religious bigot if you point to statistics which show that members of a certain religious community take to violent terrorism far more than others; they shut you out completely as a heretic if you suggest that capitalism (or socialism, depending on which circle you are rubbing shoulders with) might have a lot of faults; why, they call you a grammar Nazi if you insist on the importance of correct and polite language! ‘(I have every right to mangle a language as much as I please’). Notice, those who take most pride in calling themselves enlightened and civilized created this atmosphere: ‘You only have the right to agree with me: free speech for me/us/what is politically correct right now, not for anyone else’. How dare you say you don’t particularly thrill at the idea of homosexual love, when we in our own little ghetto have decided to worship it?

Top this off with the increasingly ominous development, hugely exacerbated by social media (which have become a major phenomenon only in the current century), that most people neither know nor respect facts any more. Democracy, or indeed any form of civilized discourse and decision making, depends crucially upon people basing their opinions on reason and facts. Now facts have always been difficult to ascertain, fluid and protean: science in the broadest sense has tried to, and hugely succeeded in, widening the ambit of facts that we can be more or less sure of, but, while its success with the natural world has been truly remarkable (physics, chemistry, even biology), the application of the scientific method to social affairs has been far less so. Things have not been improved by the fact that there are far too many ‘experts’ around on every subject these days muddying the waters, so that any fool of a bigot can call upon any number of experts to buttress his opinions, however far-fetched they may be (learn from the pandemic-scare experience). So there are still endless debates over simply what the facts are: are women really weaker than men, are Blacks really lazier and stupider and more criminal minded than whites, are Muslims intrinsically more fanatical and violent than others, are most Mexicans rapists and drug dealers, did China spread the virus to terrorize and dominate the rest of the world? And as these questions have become more and more politicized, so have the debates grown more heated, more acrimonious. The confusion is worse confounded by the fact that more and more people base their opinions on social media inputs (which are known to spread deliberate misinformation with mischievous intent), naively accepting the most extreme opinions disguised as facts most likely to be true, which makes for a very volatile, very explosive situation.

Now consider a third most unhappy development over the last generation: the kind of ‘democratic, egalitarian’ education that has been dished out to hundreds of millions of young people all over the relatively-free world was designed to insanely boost everybody’s self-esteem: everyone was talented, everyone had great potential, everyone could be tycoon, rock star or president; nobody could be called stupid, lazy, delinquent, undisciplined or unsocial any more (especially if he has made big money!). Everybody is, or has to be, a winner, no matter whether that is in a school track race or in a race for the Nobel Prize (people were encouraged to forget that winners need losers much more than losers need them: you can’t win something unless one or many others have lost!) Teachers’ criticism was muted by fiat, examination standards lowered and scores raised to absurd levels for the hoi polloi, at least up to the college level, so that Everyman could develop a swollen ego, brought up to think that they are all wonderful creatures and the world exists to serve their pleasure. No one, from street lumpen to cabinet minister, must say sorry and back down in acknowledgment of being wrong or unfair; self-assertion is the be all and end all. Just look around you, and maybe at the mirror, to check out whether I am right.

Then think quietly and calmly: what happens if this goes on for too long? All those who feel left out, cheated, marginalized, humiliated, even many gentle and reasonable folks among them, begin to yearn for a leader who would articulate their long-suppressed grievances, who would make the world look simple to negotiate again, who would restore at least some old-fashioned values (work hard, take responsibility, don’t abuse the elderly), greatly raise their self-esteem even if they didn’t deserve it, painlessly usher in either a return to a mythical, lost golden age (‘Make America great again’ is the war cry of a man who neither knows nor cares that America looked greatest in the world’s eyes just after she became the generous rehabilitator of half the world, having won a world war before that on behalf of tolerance and democracy!) or a new, crudely imagined heaven (where only upper caste Hindus prevail, or Bible Belt white Americans).

Donald Trump, like Hitler, did not appear out of thin air. Alas, we have stopped reading serious history – that is another great failure of the current era – or we would have known and recognized the processes by which such ‘leaders’ rise to power, over and over again. The most successful leaders, those who rise most meteorically, are the most cunning, most shameless, most callous and most opportunistic: they are guided solely by the raw will to power, and they know how best to knit together the angst of all the disparate disgruntled elements into a tsunami of reaction which will raise them to the throne. And if the volatile, explosive mix that I mentioned above lasts, Trump will be back again (remember, 70 million-plus voted for him still, after four disastrous years!), or someone even worse, because there will be vast numbers of fanatical idiots eager to raise him to power. Also remember, a lot of people manage to be content, if not actually happy, even under regimes like the Nazis and the Bolsheviks – until their nearest and dearest are put on the chopping block. As in ancient Rome, so in today’s world; as in the US, so in India. It bears worrying about.

P.S.: Nishant Kamath’s long comment on my last post on the subject clarifies a lot of things about how someone like Trump came to power. The book I am reading now, the latest from Pankaj Mishra (Bland Fanatics), goes some way to explain the phenomenon in greater detail (though of course I do not condone all his views), and also why it is not going to vanish with the departure of Donald Trump from the White House: the rot is very old, and runs too deep.