The case for a non-hyphenated democracy

Labelling all conservatives fascist is no tribute to democratic values

The victory of Giorgia Meloni and her allies in the recent Italian election has resulted in the usual hand-wringing and name-calling among the so-called liberals. She is being demonised for reportedly having admiration for Italian dictator Benito Mussolini sometime in her youth, and murmurs about Italy moving towards fascism and the far-right have begun in some circles.

 This is a problem peculiar to “liberals” whose faith in democracy gets shaken whenever people they dislike get elected. For the Ayatollahs of liberalism, every democracy, every electorate, must conform to their expectations about electoral outcomes, or else the winner is deemed to be illegitimate, worthy of negative labelling or calumny.

 They must grow up. Liberalism is failing not because some “far-right” element is poisoning people’s minds with fake news and propaganda, but because of its own extreme postures on social and economic issues. Poorly-thought-out ideologies, like Critical Race Theory (CRT) and intersectionality, while certainly well-meaning in their intent to stamp out racism and discrimination, have become ends in themselves, and anyone who disagrees is tarred with the brush of overt or covert racism and “cancelled”.

 The so-called right or far-right, terms relevant to the time of the French Revolution, are still being used to stigmatise parties and politicians who disagree with the left liberal caucus and their definition of political consensus. But here’s the reality: Larger proportions of the electorate in many countries, including the Nordic bastions of liberalism in Europe, are fed up of not being able to speak their minds and voice their fears, whether it is about immigration, multi-culturalism or Islamist violence in their societies.

 Not just Italy, but the right has come to power in Sweden, and has made huge gains in almost all countries of Europe, including France, Germany, Austria and the Netherlands, not to speak of parts of eastern Europe, especially Hungary.  The point to note is this: If the electorate can vote a misogynist or even alleged racists to power, it is trying to tell us something. We must listen.

 The problem with liberalism is not what it seeks to do, but what it is not doing: Living up to its core meaning. Liberalism is not just a label you stick on your back, but an attitude of mind. It is about cultivating tolerance and building acceptance for diversity and difference in society. Anyone can be liberal in practice, where the word is an adjective. But when the word becomes a noun, which you can stick as a label on yourself or deny it to people you despise, it is about discrimination.

 Let us be clear: No human being is purely liberal or conservative. You will be liberal on some criteria, and conservative in others. The key difference between being liberal and conservative is in the number of parameters on which you think or behave liberally or conservatively. And what differentiates a liberal from a conservative is not absolute resistance to change and reform of society or social institutions, but the pace. As Jaithirth Rao notes in his book, The Indian Conservative, conservatives want to change after they know where they are going; liberals want to claim they know where they are going and everyone must want to go there.

 Similarly, LGBTQIA — the liberal alphabet soup keeps growing — are not water-tight and fully differentiated groups, but humans with more of some characteristics than the others. L is the same as B in some areas, and different in others. What liberals have reduced liberalism to is pigeonholing all types into stereotypical and self-limiting categories. If you are not with us, you are racist, Islamophobic, or casteist.

Illustration: Binay Sinha

 

 Look closely, and what the left-liberal intelligentsia has really invented in a new kind of caste system where their own academics and intellectuals are the high priests, the only ones entitled to read and interpret their freshly-revealed scriptures. The rest are sheep who must either follow their diktats or shut up and stay cancelled. Those cancelled are the new untouchables.

 It was not too long ago when the same lot were singing the praises of unfettered globalisation, free trade, free speech, et al. Now that those same ideas are being questioned in the wake of growing inequalities everywhere, they have adopted a new creed —woke liberalism — as the only ideology acceptable. How is this any different from what Stalin, Mao and Pol Pot wanted for their countries?

 In his new book, Snakes in the Ganga, author Rajiv Malhotra says that Critical Race Theory has adopted Marxist dialectic under which we belong to only two categories: The oppressors or the oppressed. And the oppressed must, under liberal guidance, band together to destroy all social structures without letting us know what will replace them. The vision is to destroy first and then worry about what to do next. This ruinous theory, despite all the good intentions that may underlie them, is being fathered by Ivy League academic institutions like Harvard, never mind that these institutions and the bulk of their student communities themselves are products of upper-class elitism.

 Critical Race Theory is being misapplied to caste, by equating Brahmins with racist Whites. Just one number is enough to explain why this is rubbish. Racism in the US may be strong because of demographics. Whites form a majority (over 60 per cent) while Afro-Americans are less than a 10th of the population. Brahmins are barely 2 per cent of Hindus, and the vast bulk of castes are non-Brahmin. In most states, and even the Centre, political power has shifted to Other Backward Classes. It is only a matter of time before Dalits become part of the power structure in greater numbers. Electoral democracy will ensure this outcome without any interventions from Harvard.

 In one line: Democracy works, provided it is not hyphenated and asphyxiated by card-carrying liberals. Democracies may sometimes elect conservatives, and sometimes liberals, and sometimes a mix of the two. We don’t need a teleological approach to “progress” where it moves in one direction, inexorably and inevitably. Progress, like nature, is cyclical. The rise of conservatism is useful to contain the excesses of the extreme left-liberal, just as the reverse may also be true.

 We need democracy without hyphenations. A democracy, whether conservative or liberal, will deliver good outcomes, in good time. Both right and left can deliver, provided they don’t cancel each other out. Diversity should mean diversity in ideological orientation as well.

 The writer is editorial director, Swarajya magazine