LESSONS FOR KAMALA HARRIS-1
And for the rest of us.
Hard times require tough readers: I had promised to publish my essay about my views on the just concluded American Elections yesterday. My apologies. Not being paid to write (by NYT, Guardian, or WSJ) I have enormous flexibility to do justice to the inordinate complexity of the subject- and your intelligence. Hence you will be receiving at least three back-to-back essays on what I call ‘Lessons for Kamala Harris’. Herein I will explain what the elite of the cosmopolitan world don’t understand about democracy (or life on plant Earth).
If you are reading this the chances are that you are a product of the post-World War 2 liberal-world-order. Me too. Liberal values gave me a moral framework, liberal philosophic discipline taught me how to think, and liberal politics allows me to live freely as a global citizen.
If you are like most of my liberal (and progressive) peers, you must be reeling from Trump’s victory. How could someone (so obviously despicable by our cultural, intellectual, political and moral standards) become President? Again.
Of course, it is possible that years of shocks to your system have numbed you. Perhaps your dreams have been shattered so many times that you have become cynical. Perhaps ‘The Future is Female’ memes are starting to look like a cruel joke. Perhaps since you’ve given up on bringing kids into this world, you don’t give a damn anyway. Or perhaps you have been energized to fight, protest, and resist until the evil regime is destroyed. Regardless, here you are reading this- so you must be open to hearing a different perspective. So thank you for your service.
Over the next few weeks you will hear the pundits, in newspapers, television and social media, analyze the election and its result threadbare. Many, including your friends, will try to explain why Kamala Harris lost. You will hear about the American public’s misogyny, systemic racism, and the stupidity of those who vote against their own interests. You will hear Biden blamed for clinging on and the Billionaires blamed for subverting the elections. You will also hear about the outrageous price of eggs and the hidden costs of being black. You will hear warnings of the rise of authoritarianism and the end of democracy. You might even hear about imminent human extinction.
Just Stop! There is no better moment to stop panicking. This is also a good time to stop fighting (despite Harris’s advice to her supporters). It is an opportunity to do something that we like to talk about a lot but seldom do- question our assumptions, reflect upon our stances, and unlearn the world. However passionate and certain we might be about our political or moral positions- we now have one more chance to rethink and relearn- everything.
Those who take my courses will remember me saying that things are almost always simpler than we fear- and far more complex than we assume. Given our resistance to introspection when faced with a tragedy we instinctively assume someone else is to blame. Needless to say, it is far too lazy to blame misogynists, racists and dictators for Kamala Harris’s inability to shatter the glass ceiling. If we don’t stop taking the easy way out, before long it will not just be ceilings that we will have to worry about- but doors, walls and floors.
Worse still, we would have ignored not just an extraordinary gift, but a final warning.
Lesson #1: Reality is never toxic, ignoring it is. There are costs to rejecting the way the world works. Ladies and gentlemen of our sophisticated (and insulated) elite, what we have received this week is an icy-cold shower. The pain we are feeling comes from the iron fist of reality whacking us across our heads. Our shock may be embarrassing, but our ignorance is wholly unforgivable.
To be sure, reality has been trying to get our attention for decades, but we have effectively inoculated ourselves against it. Instead we have been single minded in recreating the world in our own image.
Democracy, progressivism, or social justice- the liberal vision of democracy is a thing of poetry and moral imagination. It seeks to transform the world so that we can eliminate poverty, injustice, inequality, and… even pain wherever it exists.
A century or two of unprecedented progress on all fronts, material, political and social, has left us with the idea of eternal progress- the confidence that anything is possible- if we work hard at it. Just to be clear, this is a distinctly Western and modern assumption. Our ancestors weren’t as optimistic that the future would always be better. In fact they had good reason to believe that any good times they were fortunate enough to savor would just as certainly be followed by the bad.
But our optimism and positivity have been baked by decades of unceasing progress. Not only did we abolish slavery, and free previously colonized nations, we even raised hundreds of millions out of poverty. Most importantly, the civil rights movement of the Sixties and Seventies gave black people the vote, gave women unprecedented opportunities, and created protections for gays and other minorities. Alas, as always success breeds hubris, which in turn almost always leads to overreach and subsequent collapse.
Two centuries of technological conquest of the planet as well as social engineering (moving millions from villages to cities, farms to factories and retraining them first for the factory and then for the service industry) had convinced us that everything, from mountains to rivers, families, societies and even nations could be transformed and shaped into anything we want it to be. We have had a good run even if, in the process, we forgot the lessons taught to us by our ancestors, lessons they had learned through painful experience. Corrupted by our spectacular successes, and buoyed by seemingly unending economic, political and social progress we liberals made many mistakes. Some of these were understandable, some were foolish and some were unforgivable. Here are three broad and fundamental mistakes made by the elites of the Democratic Party that helped sink the Vice President’s campaign:
The Western elite (in particular the Democratic Party) have for decades presumed that social progress was inevitable. They even mistook a lyrical idea (“the arc of history bends towards progress”) to be a political truth. This inspired them to stick with agendas even when those at the receiving end protested.
Her supporters imagined that strenuous political action- organizing, protesting, and legislation- would force change upon the oppressive ‘system’. They also counted on their activists exerting immense social and civic pressure to change long-established social norms, traditional cultures and the structures of society itself.
Most dangerously they told themselves that the change they desired was an unadulterated good and that it would come without major cost to themselves or society. The fact is that for decades society, communities and families have been paying the price for it. Now those who have suffered the most, white working class people, men in general, and (legal) immigrants have finally reacted.
Every time people in the real world (the world that continues to be run by the laws of chemistry, biology and physics) tried to warn us that we were messing with the ways of nature, we accused them of not being imaginative or idealistic enough. We were so certain of our own moral high-ground, that anyone who opposed us was oppressive, toxic or a sell out. We, were the good people. We, were well-meaning. We, were committed to dismantling systemic racism, sexism and anything else we might presume to change!
What could go wrong (https://shorturl.at/36EuH)?
Lesson #2: Hard times require tough leaders, not peaceniks. Desperate times require barbarians. Neville Chamberlain, an otherwise admirable politician turned out to be a weak and vacillating leader at the time of Britain’s (and Europe’s) greatest crisis. He was a bona fide peacenik so traumatized by the slaughter of World-War-One, that he was willing to sue for peace at almost any cost. Under his watch, the Nazi’s would have had a free reign of the world. History is replete with philosophical, sensitive and artistic monarchs who led their kingdoms to ruin. Even Plato’s ideal of the philosopher-king was required to train in warfare even if he was not expected to be a great warrior himself.
Much of the confusion about leadership arises from confusion about the primary role and function of any system- be it a nation, organization or community. Any system biological or social is programmed to survive and perpetuate itself. In other words, the greatest priority of a society is to maintain life. The quality of that life is a privilege and comes later- it can be said to be the gravy.
We’ve gotten so used to our relative peace and security that we have forgotten that our civilization was not designed by us, its current inhabitants. All civilizations are but a thin veneer forced upon us by society, our elders, and the powerful. It is always just a crisis or two away from dissolution.
Despite humankind’s rich artistic history, smart cities, museums, multiculturism and celebration of diversity, we cannot escape our biology. Despite our social and intellectual sophistications we continue to be almost wholly ruled by emotions and instincts. It takes very little to regress back into our primitive ways. The world has always been a jungle, and through most of human history most people have lived in fear of violent death. After the mass slaughters of WW1 and WW2, the last eighty odd years of relative peace have lulled many, especially modern Westerners, into believing that we had transcended senseless violence and mass killings. The deaths in the Balkans, Ukraine, Palestine, Sudan and Myanmar should have disabused us of our delusions. If we need more convincing we should pay close attention to the plans that North Korea, Russia, China, and Iran have for the democratic and cosmopolitan world. Hint- they don’t include respecting pronouns.
The retreat from Pax Americana (US imposed peace) places an enormous responsibility on leaders of all nations today. A leader’s primary job is to keep the nation and its citizens safe. This requires that borders, the economy, streets, homes, and the way of life need to be protected- at all costs. If leaders fail in any or more of these, if they actively campaign to change the demographic, or mess with the culture, they would be seen as having betrayed their people. Conversely if a leader succeeds in protecting these, he can be forgiven for other failings.
Except in a liberal democracy- and only as long as it survives.