Puri - Delusional Politics

Be humble, for you are made of earth.

Be noble, for you are made of stars.

Serbian Proverb

A re you psychic or what? First Brexit and now Trump!

This was the essence of a crisp message from our younger daughter Tilottama on the morning of 6 November 2016 when it became abundantly clear that Donald Trump was going to carry the electoral college.

No, I am certainly not a psychic. However, forty years of professional life has taught me to see the fault lines in a flawed narrative. My instincts have, over the years, been sufficiently honed to see through a situation in which a narrative is contrived. Producing an erroneous narrative is bad enough. But then to market it as the dominant mainstream narrative suggests a more serious underlying problem. Anyone can get an assessment wrong or make a wrong prediction. But if the expertise is suspect and the analyst or commentator has a vested interest in producing a flawed narrative, then the very essence of the democratic process stands undermined.

My friend Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan: The Impact of the Highly Improbable, Anti-fragile: Things that Gain from Disorder and so many other brilliant books, called this a global riot against pseudo-experts. Learned commentators the world over got both the Brexit and the Trump victory wrong. Many reputations should have been destroyed, including those of CNN and the New York Times. But instead of gracefully accepting their mistake(s), they dug in and decided to join the battle. They refused to come to terms with the fact that Trump could or, more importantly, should be allowed to win. Brexit and the election of the forty-fifth President of the United States (POTUS) were just the beginning of a process. Social media had already altered the dynamic. Once Trump began to settle down, well before he completed a hundred days in office, the battle to set the narrative started in the right earnest. Factsas per the normal way they are understood, as being empirically verifiableappeared no longer sacrosanct. Their alternatives began to enter and occupy considerable space in the lexicon and the framing of narratives. The era of alternative facts and alternative narratives had finally arrived. It had been in the making for some time.

The world was in sufficient disarray and already in an advanced stage of entropy well before Brexit. Brexit and Trump, however, signalled the unveiling of an entirely different narrativeone only partly anchored in domestic mismanagement and influenced to a considerable extent by the processes of globalization.

Over the past quarter century, I have failed to be persuaded that the Western liberal democratic order represents the closest approximation to what is best for human civilization. The emphasis on human rights is laudable. The gains of globalization are also truly impressive. The model based on the processes of globalizationthe Washington Consensus and trade liberalization, which in turn produced unprecedented economic growthis, however, not without problems. Trade certainly helped individuals and nations to grow wealthy but has never been entirely free but managed. The so-called magic of markets is, at a certain level, a camouflage for rigging by elites.

That globalization produces winners and losers is a no-brainer. What has so far been underestimated is the angst of the marginalized and alienated voters among the losing segment. It is that angst which the intelligent politician taps into for political advantage. Taking advantage of something like public anger for short-term gain to seek political power for a larger good is one thing, quite another if that angst is used to unravel a society and country and to facilitate uncertainty and turbulence.

What is that trend and, if it is so, the process called? For want of a better term, populism, which is on the rise globally. Why? There must be several explanations. In order to outline the Setting for this book, I will confine myself to only a few.

Populism provides a vehicle, at one level, to secure power quickly. This vehicle is not powered and driven by intellectual rigour and careful analysis of facts and trends. Nor is there any attempt to sift facts from fiction, to distinguish between objective reality and contrived narratives.