There are images that define a nation and a mood. The photo images of young people — almost invariably college students — hugging each other tearfully as TV stations proclaim Donald Trump’s victories in the key swing states seem to me to define the wave of despondency that has gripped the ‘liberal’ West. At the same time, there are parallel images of a cluster of both young and the old, mostly less fashion conscious and possibly overweight, celebrating the same set of results by boisterously waving the national flag. These images too define another parallel world — inhabited by people who Hilary Clinton debunked as the “basket of undesirables”.
It was not merely on the night/morning of November 8-9 that we saw these images. A few months ago, in the summer this year, we witnessed a preview of the Trump victory as the results of the Brexit referendum in the United Kingdom poured in. On that occasion too we had witnessed otherwise glib, know-all TV anchors suddenly becoming hesitant and even incoherent as the world of media certitude was turned upside down. A week before the Brexit vote I heard a North london friend pronounce grandly that he didn’t know a soul voting for Brexit; in the days before the November 8 election, the fiercely partisan anchor of an Indian news channel who had travelled to the US to join in the grand Hilary Clinton victory party in New York City was echoing that sentiment.
What we witnessed in the two momentous elections of 2016 in the West was the reality of two nations, neither of them talking to the other. After the Brexit results, a crowd of angry cosmopolitans spilled over into the streets of london demanding another referendum to put right the folly of the earlier verdict. In the US, we are witnessing the ‘liberals’ who otherwise swear by democracy and who had taken Hilary Clinton’s victory for granted come out into the streets chanting “Not our President”. In some cases there have also been riots, with rioters being given sympathetic treatment by a media that had egg on its face. Proclaiming piously that the democratic verdict had disfigured the nation as they had imagined it to be, the flag bearers of liberalism have set out to subvert the verdict. In the UK, the old Establishment has pitted the judiciary against the popular will; and in the US, the attempt is to emasculate a maverick winner before he can effect any change.
The parallels with the post-May 2014 India are eerie. Here to we have witnessed a powerful section of the Establishment join hands to ensure that Narendra Modi ends his five years as a purely decorative item in Delhi. First there were the wails over a changing “idea of India”, followed by protests over supposedly rising “intolerance” and now the ancien regime, fattened by decades of dynastic cronyism have teamed up with a cynical media to try and discredit Modi’s surgical strike on black money. Both in the West and in India the phenomenon is eerily familiar: a reluctance of the liberal establishment to accommodate the aspirations of those who feel left out of the power structure.
The reasons aren’t always intellectual, stemming from different assumptions. There is also the grim reality of globalisation, the defining mantra of the post-Cold War world. To see globalisation as a historical inevitability that must not be resisted but generously accommodated is a powerful idea. It also carries with it the belief that nation-states are progressively becoming redundant and the conviction that nationalism is at best a relic. Consequently, just as the Industrial Revolution led to the jettisoning of the peasantry, there is a belief that the human casualties of a globalising world must be kept to the fringes and placated by alcohol, welfare handouts, entertainment TV and oodles of condescension. What Trump and earlier the Brexit vote did was to give these forgotten peoples a chance to kick a smug and arrogant elite a sharp kick.
Modi’s attempted revolution wasn’t so dramatic, not least because the governing elite in India had a much narrower social base and was defined more by a court culture than anything else.
However, whether in the East or the West, the beleaguered but entrenched elite were clear that they had the monopoly over received wisdom and that the outsiders were also barbarians. Consequently, the political war has also been accompanied by culture wars that are being waged in the universities and the media. But, as events have repeatedly demonstrated, the great and the good are no longer idolised. Trump didn’t have the endorsement of any worthwhile media organisation and all the celebrities from lady Gaga onwards signed up for the Hilary campaign. It wasn’t so sharp with Brexit but like with Trump, financial capital was ranged against the popular will.
Is there a way out that stops short of a total warIJ That’s the issue which will dominate the politics of the democratic world in the next few years to come. If the old elite refuses to either learn or accommodate, events could take a truly ugly turn. Simon Schama, one of the new post-Trump dissidents, has suggested that the vanquished should not stay calm. But at the same time he and others who fought to prevent Trump from winning are also writing their obituaries of the old liberal order. This may be too tall an order for those who wave “Not my President” placards and continue to sneer at those who don’t share their assumptions and morality. As of now liberalism is angry but also in denial. The media merely reflects that approach. It too has become part of the problem.