Mukul Kesavan - Biden as Batman: Dumping the Joker

By Dilip -

Why won’t Democrats take yes for an answer? After being scared out of their wits by the opening night of America’s mad election, you would have thought that Biden’s return from the dead would have been the cue for boneless relief and celebration, but no. As Wisconsin, Michigan, Georgia and Pennsylvania first teetered and then fell for Biden, their mounting horror at the prospect of four more years of Trump was replaced by recrimination and self-criticism. What became of the Blue Wave? Where was the Senate majority that would have given Biden the Congressional muscle to legislate his programme? How would Democrats deal with the loss of state legislatures that would allow Republicans to gerrymander constituencies, ratify conservative judges and generally thwart the liberal agenda? Why don’t metropolitan progressives like AOC and the Squad shut up about socialism and climate change and the Green New Deal and all the other stuff that frightens Middle America?

When did contemporary liberals become so overwrought and anxious? They should take a moment and do what normal people do after winning. Gloat. Gross Goliath is fallen. The Unspeakable Hulk is gone. Old Orange Tan is to be extracted from the White House and relocated permanently in his natural habitat, the Dark Web’s dense undergrowth. And there he will rage and drag his knuckles and beat his breast and pout and no one, not even Fox News, will care. 

Mukul Kesavan - Donald Trump and the global equalization of awfulness

Actually, that’s not true. The leader writers of the feral right will be orphaned. In the spirit of anthropological inquiry, I spent the months leading up to the election reading the opinion sections of The Wall Street Journal and the National Review. It was fascinating to watch these pillars of the Right swaddle Trump’s narcissism, racism and naked self-interest in ideologically labelled diapers: Tax Cuts, the National Interest, Conservative Judges, China, Biden’s Woke Commies, the Mortal Threat to Fracking, the Right to Life or the Imminent Death of the Second Amendment. The spectacle of these well-upholstered pundits trying to harness this lewd, lying bigot to their cause was disturbing then; with Trump toppled, it is merely grotesque now. 

This is why Trump’s defeat is, or ought to be, so cheering. It makes no difference whether Trump loses by one electoral college vote or a hundred. The modern executive is such a political prize, its power to set the national agenda is so massive, that it can make the vilest political ideas and policies respectable. We have seen this in India. The Central government has passed a citizenship law that creates a religious test for citizenship. The chief minister of one of India’s largest states plans a law to prevent inter-religious marriage to stop allegedly predatory Muslim men from battening on innocent Hindu women. Two absolute majorities for Narendra Modi have transformed whispered bigotry into trumpeted policy.

Even if the Democrats fail to turn a single policy plank into law, their defeat of Trump will count as an extraordinary achievement. A second term would have been read as a public mandate for the menu of prejudices he had served up through his first four years. The furthest reaches of the Right — the armed militias, the QAnon anti-Semites, the white nationalists, the climate change deniers — would have merged themselves into the political mainstream. Now that he has lost, the Proud Boys won’t have the president as their scout master, the Bannons of the world won’t have a proxy in the White House, the common or garden racist or the think-tank Islamophobe won’t strut his stuff in the way he did when POTUS was his soulmate. 

Biden’s victory creates the space to inspect the rottenness of the political Right. Political success in modern democracies is its own justification. Trump’s win in 2016 allowed the Republican Party to channel its inner Bajrang Dal, it allowed the GOP’s base to wallow in its baseness. So long as he was president, this new pride in prejudice was worrying, even formidable. But with Trump dethroned, rabid isn’t sexy any more. The spectacle of Rudy Giuliani, the once formidable mayor of New York, devolving into the president’s dogsbody was embarrassing when Trump was in office; it seems like suicide now. To watch Jared Kushner, till yesterday the American Architect of Middle Eastern Peace, flailing about and failing to stop Fox News from calling Arizona for Biden is to know how pallid creatures of the night are made plausible by their proximity to power. 

Trump’s narrow defeat has inevitably produced two bits of faux insight. The first is the notion that Middle America didn’t vote for Biden because they saw him as a Trojan Horse for the party’s progressives. A corollary of this argument is that Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and her Squad, along with the Armies of the Woke, cost the Democrats a more decisive presidential win and the down-ballot Congressional races. Democrats should ignore this. If the margin of victory had been massive, if Biden had won by 400 electoral votes, this too would have been marshalled as evidence that progressives needed to stand down because Biden’s landslide was clearly a triumph of moderation. An argument that goes heads you lose, tails you lose, isn’t insight; it’s propaganda. 

The second ‘insight’ is familiar to Indians. It is the argument that given the scale and vehemence of Trump’s electoral base, victorious Democrats need to be solicitous of its sensibilities. You could be forgiven for thinking that nominating a white moderate from the rust belt as the Democratic Party’s presidential candidate might have covered that, but you’d be wrong. The point of this argument is to absolve the Republican base of racism by sublimating it into something worthy, like resentment at economic neglect and cultural condescension. Indians will recognize this argument as a close cousin of the notion that Modi’s popularity makes majoritarian hostility towards minorities a politically respectable attitude that the Opposition parties should pander to. It is one thing to be swayed by this bogus argument when you are backed up against a wall by a political juggernaut (the plight of non-feral parties in India); quite another to pay it any attention after you have won the biggest prize in American politics.

In contemporary democracies, parties of the centre or the left defeated by right-wing strongmen like Trump, Duterte, Orbán, Modi, Rajapaksa or Bolsonaro know that they have to persuade some part of their base to switch sides. So they have to assume that people can vote for bigots without being bigots themselves. But this doesn’t mean that liberal parties begin to remake themselves in the image of their opponents. No matter how successfully Trump galvanized voters with talk of rapist illegals from Mexico, Democrats can’t go there. To durably defeat a malignant populist, liberals need to spell out a benign populism. 

That is where the Democrats are today. As Chris Hayes pointed out on MSNBC during the long count, they could start by celebrating a famous victory and leave the task of spinning it as a defeat to Trump’s disgruntled Republicans. The Democratic Party has defeated a villain too monstrous for a Batman movie in real life and it has done it through electoral due process. That’s an exhilarating win for liberals and democrats everywhere. It’s morning, and not only in America.

https://www.telegraphindia.com/opinion/biden-as-batman-dumping-the-joker/cid/1796837

Mukul Kesavan: Against forgetting

Mohammed Hanif: The rest of the world has had it with US presidents, Trump or otherwise

You're fired ! Americans taunt Trump with his own catchphrase

Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez ends truce by warning ‘incompetent’ Democratic party

George Monbiot: Ayn Rf the American World

Donald Trump: Democracy’s mirror image? By Philip Manow / David A. Bell - Fascism or Caesarism?

Jonathan Freedland - Donald Trump's plot against democracy could break America apart


Popular posts from this blog

Third degree torture used on Maruti workers: Rights body

By Dilip -
The People’s Union for Democratic Rights on Tuesday alleged that third degree torture methods were used by the Gurgaon Criminal Investigation Agency while interrogating workers of Maruti Suzuki India Limited’s Manesar plant who are accused of involvement in the killing of an HR manager and the violent attack at the plant on July 18. The PUDR alleged that the Gurgaon CIA investigation “did not seem” to be directed at solving the crime or probing the involvement of the arrested workers in the incidents and crimes recorded in the FIR but instead was based on their involvement in trade union activities. Grave doubts  “The use of third degree torture in police custody, and the securing of arrestees’ signatures on blank papers by the police, gives rise to grave doubts regarding the ability of such an investigation in effectively identifying or arresting those guilty. The police and the State seem keener to reassure Maruti Suzuki Ltd. and ensure that production continues,” the PUDR stat
Read more

Haruki Murakami: On seeing the 100% perfect girl one beautiful April morning

By Dilip -
According to Murakami, “1Q84” is just an amplification of one of his most popular short stories,   which (in its English version) is five pages long. “Basically, it’s the same,” he told me. “A boy meets a girl. They have separated and are looking for each other. It’s a simple story. I just made it long.” One beautiful April morning, on a narrow side street in Tokyo's fashionable Harujuku neighborhood, I walked past the 100% perfect girl. Tell you the truth, she's not that good-looking. She doesn't stand out in any way. Her clothes are nothing special. The back of her hair is still bent out of shape from sleep. She isn't young, either - must be near thirty, not even close to a "girl," properly speaking. But still, I know from fifty yards away: She's the 100% perfect girl for me. The moment I see her, there's a rumbling in my chest, and my mouth is as dry as a desert..." read the story: http://www.youmightfindyourself.com/post/22131227
Read more

The Almond Trees by Albert Camus (1940)

By Dilip -
Image
'Do you know', Napoleon once said to Fontanes, 'what astounds me most about the world?  The impotence of force to establish anything.  There are only two powers in the world: the sword and the mind.  In the end, the sword is always conquered by the mind' Conquerors, you see, are sometimes melancholy.  They have to pay some price for so much vainglory. But what a hundred years ago was true of the sword is no longer true today of the tank. Conquerors have made progress, and the dismal silence of places without intelligence has been established for years at a time in a lacerated Europe. At the time of the hideous wars of Flanders, Dutch painters could still perhaps paint the cockerels in their farmyards. The Hundred Years War has likewise been forgotten, and yet the prayers of Silesian mystics still linger in some hearts. But today, things have changed; the painter and the monk have been drafted - we are one with the world.  The mind has lost that regal certainty which a c
Read more

Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism

By Dilip -
NB: This is the text of my address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference held at Ramjas College, the University of Delhi, on March 17.  The details of the conference may be read here . A pdf file of the address is downloadable here  -  DS Satyagraha - An answer to modern nihilism Dilip Simeon Keynote address to the Eighth East-West Inter-cultural Relations Conference Ramjas College, March 17-18 2016 Zilu stopped for the night at Stone Gate. The gatekeeper said, Where are you from? Zilu said, From the household of Confucius. The gatekeeper said, The one who knows there’s nothing that can be done but keeps on trying?  -  from the Analects of Confucius (14:40) What is truth? asked jesting Pilate, and would not stay for an answer – Francis Bacon In fact it is more correct to say Truth is God than to say God is Truth – Mohandas Gandhi Introduction: The human being is the speaking animal, the discerner of good and evil. This featur
Read more

Rudyard Kipling: critical essay by George Orwell (1942)

By Dilip -
Mother of Cities to me, For I was born in her gate, Between the palms and the sea, Where the world-end steamers wait  Rudyard Kipling , To the City of Bombay "Few people who have criticized England from the inside have said bitterer things about her than this gutter patriot" : George Orwell IT WAS a pity that Mr. Eliot should be so much on the defensive in the long essay with which he prefaces this selection of Kipling's poetry, but it was not to be avoided, because before one can even speak about Kipling one has to clear away a legend that has been created by two sets of people who have not read his works. Kipling is in the peculiar position of having been a byword for fifty years. During five literary generations every enlightened person has despised him, and at the end of that time nine-tenths of those enlightened persons are forgotten and Kipling is in some sense still there. Mr. Eliot never satisfactorily explains this fact, because in answering the shal
Read more

Three Versions of Judas: Jorge Luis Borges

By Dilip -
Image
In  Asia Minor or in Alexandria, in the second century of our faith (when Basilides was announcing that the cosmos was a rash and malevolent improvisation engineered by defective angels), Nils Runeberg might have directed, with a singular intellectual passion, one of the Gnostic monasteries. Dante would have destined him, perhaps, for a fiery sepulcher; his name might have augmented the catalogues of heresiarchs, between Satornibus and Carpocrates; some fragment of his preaching, embellished with invective, might have been preserved in the apocryphal Liber adversus omnes haereses  or might have perished when the firing of a monastic library consumed the last example of the  Syntagma . Instead, God assigned him to the twentieth century, and to the university city of Lund. There, in 1904, he published the first edition of  Kristus och Judas ; there, in 1909, his masterpiece  Dem hemlige Frälsaren  appeared. (Of this last mentioned work there exists a German version,  Der heimliche Heilan
Read more

Goodbye Sadiq al-Azm, lone Syrian Marxist against the Assad regime

By Dilip -
NB:  An interesting obituary to a great intellectual. My knowledge of the situation is limited, but as regards this article,  I'm uncomfortable with the argument that there should be no objection to the participation  of communal parties  in a democratic alliance. My views on this are conditioned by the history of religion-based mobilisations in India, where the communist movement has from time to time allied with communal groups of all colours, with disastrous consequences. Some material on this theme may be read here .  Nor can I agree that Islamists, Hindutva groups or Khalistanis etc. can be described as 'religious parties'. I do not mean to justify alliances with 'secular' tyrants, but to remind anyone who cares to listen, that communalism is also an expression of tyranny.  Communalists proceed on the assumption that membership of a religious community automatically produces a political interest, and strive to create that interest. They enter democratic move
Read more