The Human Soup

28 January 2021

Public memory is fickle say political commentators, however history is full of public memory being elephantine, quite willing to bide their time, as we saw during the French Revolution, in the Bolshevik overthrow of Tsar of Russia, and closer to home, in Chaurichura chowky in Gorakhpur UP when a procession chanting Non Cooperation Movement slogans turned into a mob and gutted a police station along with its constables!

We see in Post Truth world an exact series of posturing that is meant to stave off ‘consequence’ from the tide of political actions and inactions, epitomised by four years of Mr Trump as President. We see how, in an utterly predictable manner, despite the outreach of President Biden, the broad swathe of Republican legislators, as Representatives & Senators, have chosen to remain loyal to President Trump, rather than consolidate the party of conservative movement which has in its legacy President Lincoln, the only American President to have a memorial in the National Avenue, seated on a throne of eternity and watching over the polity as it were!

It is a consequence of their own making, for years of gerrymandering have made Republicans fear more a primary against their own, than a general election, a recipe that places excessive emphasis on ‘loyalty’ to a voter base that has drifted from being right of centre to a more loony rightward fringe, now suffused with crazy Q Anon theories as well as stark and unabashed White Supremacy! This is the base that Trump has latched on to in 2017-20, when he was in office, not one he ran on to his surprise electoral win in 2016 against Hillary Clinton.

Now it is not as if Democrats do not have chinks in their armour. Think of Hillary’s own campaign. If Michelle Obama’s ‘Becoming’ had come out in 2015, the image Trump painted of ‘crooked Hillary’ would not have stuck. Many voters to the left of centre, believed that the Clintons were part of a cabal, of fixers and movers, who remain entrenched in power, no matter who is the incumbent as individual or party in Washington. They were willing thus to crucify Hillary for her Secretary of State tenure where just one incident of Benghazi which led to the loss of four American lives, including that of the US Ambassador to Libya, came back to haunt her, to make her patriotism a doubtful thing. Contrast with how no Republican voter holds Trump responsible for the more than 400000 lives lost by the Americans to this Pandemic, for in both watches, the decisions that led to loss of 4 or 400000 American lives was simply administrative. Democrats have a further problem with their base, where voters by and large, expect them to come in to office to ‘rectify the problems’ which they allowed the Republicans to create in the first place! Further voters in America who are not tied to party ideology too, offer such a free pass to Republicans to weaken the economy, to make government more unwieldy and less efficient and most importantly, leave office reeling in a gross budget deficit. Just see Clinton, Obama and Bushes legacy and you find Biden inheriting a similar mess from Trump of budget deficit, weak economy and diminished America abroad!

There is another pattern of legislative responsibility. When Republicans are in majority in Congress, the onus of passing legislation is always with Democrats. When Democrats are, the onus and entire carriage of legislative business is theirs in any case! Just reading Obama’s A Promised Land triggers memories of Clinton being stymied by Republican majorities, there is excessive deja vu! So the labours of Hercules or the Sisyphus rolling the boulder uphill in Tartarus seems to be the fate of the political caucus that seeks to be ‘progressive’, whereas the inertia or laissez faire approach never delivers a public opprobrium. So if you are Right and Republican, you can Do Nothing, If you are Left and Democrat you have to Do Everything!
It seems to be a broken model. It seems divided. For now, I cannot think of anything more immediate than 2022 when voters will again see action in USA, and if the Republicans can recover their moral compass from the stranglehold Trump has on it, good luck to them! The seeds to weaken American Power like in Roman or any Empire of the past, including the Vijayanagara Empire ( Read Rakshasatangadi by erudite Girish Karnad to know more) are entirely internal.

In Putin’s Russia, in Xi’s CCP, we see a more historically studied and documented set of factors, where a strongman emerges from apparently decadent polity and offers demonstrated actions to retrieve the situation to cement his place in the scheme of things. Putin was a fresh breeze of certitude and cementing Russia after the weakening Yeltsin years, which came in the aftermath of the great dissolution of USSR. Few people now remember how Russia was apparently in further implosion with her smaller provinces in Caucasus aflame with ethnic and religious passions, threatening to further split Russia. Today, much of the Great Tsar Russian maritime and territorial boundary holds, from the east to the west, including Crimea! Yet, Putin is bent on now ruining his legacy with his pernicious actions against dissidents, the latest target being Mr Navalny. Why would you arrest a man immediately on his return home to Russia after he was poisoned and treated abroad? If Putin had ignored Navalny would Russian streets be agog with agitators? Would the world have witnessed these protests? From a elder who was sorting out Belarus’s power struggle, the war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, to now facing Russians calling him a thief, Putin has lost all gains of 2020, when Russia rewrote the Constitution yet another time, to allow him a fresh two terms of office as President if he so chose, and which he was likely to do too!

In CCP, Xi was appointed after his predecessor felt the need to bring in a person with strong reformist credentials. He fashioned an arguably successful campaign against corruption, even though the way communism manifested as a state apparatus, corruption was an essential grease that moved its many parts, that illegitimate individual gratification that overrode the inertia of a Iron Cast Communist Ideology that granted Rights to every citizen as well as assumed absolute powers over them, in their very name! So we cannot imagine Xi’s rise in CCP itself could have been staged without some corruption, nor is CCP now corruption free nearly a decade after he took over. Yet, President Xi has managed to target political rivals using corruption campaign, some very serious stake holders and members of other factions of the CCP inimical to his. So he rides a tiger which he cannot safely dismount, which is why Xi first sought to end the two term tenure clause for Party leadership and Presidency, ensconced now as President for Life. Still, worried that the PLA may group underground and stage a coup, ( an attempt was made when Chairman Mao was nearly overthrown by plotters including his wife when Xi was a teen labouring his way up) he took over all command and executive authority for the CWC last year. Now he has discovered that the grandiose plans of the PLA wresting Himalayan fingers or reuniting Taiwan with the mainland, are both more like chimera, less like a serious calculation of force levels, military stratagem and geopolitical calculus! On top of that, he has seen how China’s great Dam building spree, including the 3 Gorges Dam, have done precious little to control the rampaging rivers during the Chinese monsoons, this year the floods being the worst in Chinese memory ever! Every year, China under Xi has seen flood, some viral outbreak in wet markets, bird flu, swine flu outbreaks, and every sign of a dystopian climate crisis, which explains also Chinese push under Xi to renewable energy, battery operated vehicles and less reliance on coal fired power plants which he has offered an egalitarian Chinese response to Climate Challenge! Most importantly under Xi the Chinese have perfected their currency crookery and their information sieve, whereby neither monetary nor mental manipulations of the Chinese State are visible to its population.

If you think China is the biggest peddler of fake news, think again. It is democratic societies with their RW media groups ( ‘Rwanda Radios’ actually), famously showcased by Rupert Murdoch’s TV and Print Media Empire, that remain the biggest offenders. Narrative dominance is what they indulge in, so much so that citizens in countries from EU, UK, USA to India and Australia are all having a tough time coming to terms with the truth. This environment of ‘snowflakes’ is what has weakened the ability of these democracies to come to terms with various serious issues conflicting over basic issues like citizenship rights to macroeconomic issues like Universal Basic Income and Criminal Reform. But for this narrative dominance of media groups with vested interests and the inability of citizens to break through these prejudices which are milked commercially by their promoters! This and more is the subject of two books by Rutger Bregman, as Humankind & Utopia for Realists. So if societies are failing, it is because of us, humans, who have allowed ourselves to swill in this soup! To break free of these trappings, it is we who must arm ourselves with knowledge, not information. Our future generations must not look back at us as the ‘Stupid Generation’ whose critical thinking and capacity for concerted action was overwhelmed by narrative dominance! The failures of leadership everywhere is because we, the people, let them to! The led are at greater fault than those whose over weaning personal ambitions, narcissisms and greed have empowered their leadership!

To be concluded…