Mihir Sharma: Truth and a cartoon

Every now and then, an editorial cartoon — and the reaction to it — serves to crystallise a moment in time far better than 10,000 talking heads. The moment we’re in was awaiting its cartoon, and now it may have found one. About a fortnight ago, the New Yorker published a cartoon, which showed an irate man in an airplane standing up and addressing his fellow passengers: “These smug pilots have lost touch with regular passengers like us. Who thinks I should fly the plane?” Around him, dozens of hands are going up.

It’s funny because it’s true, and it’s sad because it’s true. Across the world, “expertise” is not exactly being rewarded by voters at the moment. The examples are almost too obvious to be repeated: from Trump to Brexit, expertise and experience is being seen as a disadvantage by a critical mass of voters.

The reactions to the cartoon are as interesting, almost. It is, after all, unfair: once you argue that countries are like planes in the first place, then naturally you have to privilege expertise. The fact that it nevertheless struck a chord with so many liberals has, oddly, infuriated the left as much — if not more — as the right. (Perhaps because the left reads the New Yorker, while the right doesn’t even look at the pictures.) The left sees this as another indication that liberals across countries don’t get it: that they have reduced politics to a bloodless exercise in technocracy and expertise, in which being qualified and experienced are somehow considered a relevant criteria for the choice of who governs. This last seems obvious to many liberals; it deeply infuriates many on the left as well as on the right. 

There are two world views that are clashing here, and let’s avoid political labels for a moment. One world view is that, even if there are things that divide us, when you study the empirical facts and analyse the trade-offs, it might be possible to come up with the best path forward for everyone. The other world view is that these empirical facts will themselves be endlessly disputed, and so politics is about persuading the unpersuaded and battling the unpersuadable. As a corollary, the first world view sees compromise as a necessity, perhaps even a virtue; the second sees compromise as impurity, and the first step to existential disaster. 

It is possible that tomorrow’s world will be divided less between left and right than between these two world views. In the US, the Democratic Party is tearing itself apart over whether, in response to Donald Trump, it should turn sharply left or maintain its centrist stance. This battle appears to be only over questions of policy. It is in fact over whether compromise itself — whether with the market economy, with national security concerns, with Wall Street, or with moderate Republicans — is necessary or valuable. In other parts of the world, similar dynamics are visible. When the Congress was in power in India, these tensions were just beginning to be visible — between those who imagined it should hitch itself to the technocratic aura surrounding Manmohan Singh and those who believed the party’s appeal to voters continued to lie in populist, “pro-poor” mobilisation. Even today, many dedicated supporters of the current prime minister are dismayed that his government has in their view chosen to be excessively centrist and compromising. It has paid only lip service to cherished social goals, in their opinion — it has not moved to remove legal protections for minority institutions, for example. 

Effective politicians on the left and right are moving to expand their appeal to those who are anti-technocrat, but on the other “side”. Trump has taken on an entire range of “expert” shibboleths such as the idea that trade helps economies and that climate change is man-made. Most recently, he has signalled that he does not believe in the overwhelming scientific consensus that childhood vaccines do not cause autism. In each of these cases, a corrupt, global elite is suspected of producing “truth” that is nothing of the sort. Climate change apart, the other two also have sympathetic listeners on the erstwhile left — distrust of vaccines is sometimes described as the left’s equivalent of climate change denialism on the right. 

The effect of the past few years is for the word “liberal” to be inextricably linked to the word “elite” in many people’s minds. The idea that to be liberal is nothing more nor less than prizing the facts and expertise that are produced and manipulated by a smug elite has sunk deep roots (including among liberals, who by definition are suffused with self-doubt). Twenty years from now, it may seem like an obvious reconfiguration: the liberal “centre” will no longer be the centre, but one side of the spectrum, with a loose alliance between nativist anti-elitists of the left and right on the other side of the spectrum. 

And I know which side of that competition I would trust to fly a plane. Or, for that matter, to manage a national currency.

m.s.sharma@gmail.com, Twitter: @mihirssharma