We have to admit we live in pretty strange times. Not only is there not much to choose between the political left and the right these days, it’s also because there is so little that differentiates them. There used to be a time, when they were so clearly defined by their ideologies, that it would be sacrilege to switch allegiances. Ordinary citizens who voted were also defined by who and which party they voted for. Those were the days of true democracy, of political parties that represented something, of healthy debates and disagreements and dissent.
I am not merely talking of western democracies on the one hand that followed capitalism and the few communist countries that espoused socialism in the 20th century. That was the ideological conflict that loomed large over the entire world, leading to wars in Indo-China and also the Cold War. Even at a country-specific level, where countries such as US and UK follow a predominantly two-party political system, their ideological differences were wide and distinct enough to maintain a healthy national debate on issues political, economic as well as social. In India too, though the left-of-centre Indian National Congress party dominated national politics for the first three decades after independence, the rise of the Jan Sangh and the BJP created the space for a wider representation of political and economic beliefs.
Fast forward to today, when not only have the ideological differences between political parties blurred, they are depriving people of the chance to make a real and impactful choice when they cast their votes. In other words, politics is now cheating people of the chance to make significant changes with their franchise. At the same time, we also have the paradoxical situation where countries and their electorates are divided and polarized, like never before. The political right has moved farther to the right and the left to extreme left, leaving little space for sensible and reasonable politics and governance.
How did this come about? We all know that national politics shifts in alternate cycles that reflect the wider socio-economic reality as well as geo-political shifts. There is usually a strong correlation with economic cycles, and depending upon which electoral constituency has been neglected or is feeling disenchanted, the electorate’s mood would swing to choose a new government. I think this particular model of democracy might have broken with the wave of globalization and the spread of technology that the world has witnessed from the 1980s onwards.
Then, for the first time, it appeared that trade, investment and economic growth were being distributed more evenly across the world. From advanced and developed nations, capital, goods, services and ideas began to flow across to the so-called third world, and developing countries were only too happy to jump onto the globalization bandwagon. It brought millions of new jobs, access to new technology and high-quality products and services that were not available in many developing and emerging economies before. After economic liberalization unleashed in the West by Reaganomics and Thatcherism in the early 1980s – and their excesses – there followed a long period of more liberal and sympathetic politics and governance ushered by New Labour under Tony Blair in the UK, and by Democrats under Clinton in the US. The Soviet Union opened to the world under Gorbachev, and you could say that the floodgates had opened in a sense. All of east Europe, earlier under the yoke of the Soviet system, was now free and many states broke away from the Soviet Union as well.
It is this confluence of many significant shifts and movements that provided globalization with an even greater impetus. Not merely the Soviet Union, but China too had liberalized its economy, and a decade earlier as well. In fact, it is quite possible that East Europe and former Soviet states embracing western-style democracy and capitalist economic systems, led the West to mistakenly think that China would follow suit. Instead, China continued with liberalising its economy, growing at unprecedented rates, and also investing and trading widely with the entire world, especially after it joined the WTO in 2001. However, China continued to persist with its single party Communist rule, leading many experts to opine that a new system had been created. State capitalism.
It has brought them huge rewards, though not the much-cherished wish of most Chinese I am sure, of greater personal freedoms and democracy. In fact, in recent years, under Xi Jinping, the state has tightened its control of the economy through the Communist Party deciding how even private sector companies are managed. This, and the terrible zero-Covid policies of the regime are still hurting the Chinese economy and its people, even though the strict Covid-related restrictions were lifted at the start of 2023.
As I have written before on my blog, the good years of globalization for western and advanced economies led to the late realization that they had not prepared or trained their workforce well enough to cope with the adverse consequences. And we must remember that globalization was not working alone; there was the rapid growth and spread of information technology as well, including the internet and digital technology. Jobs were going in many developed economies, entire industries were changing or being disrupted, leading to huge disillusionment with governments and political leaders.
In stride Donald Trump and Boris Johnson, from the US’ and UK’s conservative parties respectively, promising to set everything right. In the west at least, this is when things began to get strange: right-wing conservative politics pandering to their electorate with populist policies and ideas. Promises of more jobs and development in up-country places went along with the more conservative policies of cracking down even harder on immigration and yes, even Brexit. After Covid, this has led to even more strange policies in both the US and UK, since governments had no choice but to step in and spend big. Even in continental Europe, we have seen the rise of the far-right parties and political leaders, from Marine le Penn in France to the AFD in Germany and Georgia Meloni’s party in Italy.
This has been the experience of western, advanced economies. But even in the east, right-wing parties have turned populist in the bid to improve their electoral performance. Promises of more jobs, more development and better times are all made with an eye on elections. Right wing parties have now become champions of the working class, and of the poor, in a strange queering of the political and economic pitch.
However, the emergence of this new far-right is different from its earlier avatar. It is populist to a fault, often promising schemes and ideas that were associated with the political left, earlier. What’s more, the political right across many countries now tend to combine sops and schemes with a more muscular nationalism which manifests itself as anti-immigration and economic protectionism. However, the social conservatism that right-wing parties were always associated with, continues, expressed in even more strident, jingoistic, and militant language and tone. Whether it is anti-immigration, racism or white supremacy, xenophobia which is increasingly Islamophobia, religious conservatism, anti-abortion and anti-LGBT rights, and so many other conservative right-wing beliefs have only become more entrenched and more hardline. In India, with our syncretic culture established over centuries, it is terrible to see the resurgence of religious and caste divides, jingoistic nationalism, cultural chauvinism and an even more sexist and intolerant attitude towards women, including at the workplace. In fact, as I have been writing on my blog, women’s labour force participation rate has fallen to abysmally low levels in India.
Sooner or later, cracks will begin to appear in the right-wing’s attempt to hijack the policies and ideas of the left. Because so much of it is only rhetoric and not grounded in reality, it will become uncomfortable for right wing parties to manage the apparent differences between their stated policies and their larger goals. For example, claiming to be pro-poor while at the same time encouraging wealth creation, sometimes at the cost of smaller businesses. Or taking a hard line with a militant form of Hindutva domestically while also expecting to play a larger role on the world stage now that we are an emerging economy, at least in GDP terms. In the west, it is a similar conflict that will play out, with right wing parties promising to create and protect jobs, help the poor, etc, while actually helping large businesses grow and prosper and allowing technology to replace jobs. So much of this is already visible across vast swathes of western and advanced economies particularly since the 2008 Financial Crisis.
The electorate, compelled to exercise their franchise, will be in a bind. From what I have been observing in the past couple of decades, citizens are voting increasingly on deeply emotive issues that make passions run high. This too is the result of the politics of right-wing parties: they appeal to the base emotions, playing on the electorate’s fears and desires. Whether it is Trump painting a dark picture of America if his famous wall wasn’t built, and if he didn’t engage in a trade war with China in order to bring back jobs to America, or right-wing parties in Europe playing on the fears of Europeans losing their jobs to immigrants, or Islamophobia, even as Europe allowed millions of immigrants in in 2015, the formula is the same. In India too, Hindutva is seen as a way to correct the wrongs of history, of identity politics and of victimization. It is a narrative concocted to put fear, distrust, discord and hate in the hearts and minds of people.
This is why it wins them elections, time and again. In India, the BJP election juggernaut is unstoppable, and I wish I could say that it is for the right reasons. The truth is that the opposition is non-existent. Nowadays, elections are not merely about promises, they are guarantees! The party is able to deliver high economic growth post Covid thanks to base effects, but how many of the electorate realise this? Between 2016 and 2020, India’s economic growth was slowing, let us not forget so quickly. The guarantees these days are sops and welfare schemes, not jobs and not good quality, well-paying jobs. Inflation is still high and is a dampener on consumer demand, especially in rural areas, where millions still depend on the MNREGA scheme for work.
Why is the right on the ascendant and the left in decline? One reason of course, is the economic and geo-political situation around the world. Also, as I mentioned earlier, the political right’s policies and ideas have always been closely aligned with big business and multinational corporations. And third, because they have hijacked many ideas and policies of the left, which is the main thrust of this piece. However, in appealing to the poor and the disadvantaged the right shouldn’t be making the same mistakes as the left, which is highly likely when you consider the heavy state spending that it takes to pander for popularity. At an extreme, think of Hugo Chavez and what he did to Venezuela’s economy; people swore by him and Chavista was the order of the day. But his squandering of the country’s oil wealth and mismanagement of public finances was the nation’s undoing.
Enough said about the political right. What should left-wing parties do, now that their agenda has been stolen and they have been rendered ideologically bankrupt? Left-wing ideology at the extreme end of the political spectrum died with the Soviet Union; few countries like Cuba and Venezuela that still practice that form of communism and socialism have also learnt their lessons. China, on the other hand, has reinvented left-wing ideology to accommodate capitalism and make it its own. However, it is not a democracy by any stretch of imagination, nor is it promising to be one. Vietnam, following in China’s footsteps, has also prospered hugely in recent years with its state-managed capitalism.
Then, there are centre-left parties and their ideology which is more commonly found across the world as the alternative to the centre-right. These tend to be more moderate, believe in democratic processes, and tilt toward social welfare for the working classes and the unemployed. In Europe, its most visible form is as social democracy, while in US and UK, it is the ideology of the Democratic party and the Labour party, respectively. However, when you consider just how elitist and urban the Democratic party has become in the past couple of decades, and how rural and middle-America the GOP voter base is, you realise just how much their political and ideological positions have changed. Nothing illustrates what I am writing about in this blog post better than this transformation in the US, and its counterpart in the UK as well. Labour party the more urban, educated and London-centric, while the Tories’ voter base is rural, not so educated and largely unemployed.
Centre-left parties have to reinvent themselves and create new strategies for their future as well as for their countries. And they will not achieve this, by outcompeting right-wing parties who have hijacked their ideas and policies, as the Indian National Congress seemed to be doing in the recent state assembly elections in India. To my mind, centre-left parties should focus on problems that the right continues to ignore, and that globalization has accentuated even more. The lack of adequate education, healthcare and economic development of backward areas. These are vital to a country’s economic growth in the long-term and also to the growth of human capital and potential. These are also areas that are better aligned with the centre-left ideology of inclusive growth and development, and so will help the left-wing stay true to itself and its core. Left-wing ideas and policies should reflect the economic and social needs of today, changed as it is thanks to globalization and the effects of technology. In this respect, New Labour, launched in the days of Tony Blair reflected this need for left-wing ideology to change with the times in the UK and I think Gorbachev too might have had the right ideas about how to make Soviet Union a democracy that includes the welfare of everyone, if only he had the time to see his plans through.
At the moment, the queering of the political pitch by both the left and the right leaves the electorate in a quandary. It leaves countries and economies in an even more precarious position, as it turns on the caprice and the wile of the politician. And extreme polarisation makes it harder to govern.
Peripatetic Perch 