THE RADICAL, ILLIBERAL AGE: CHALLENGES AND WAY FORWARD

• Text of my talk to Asian Pathfinders, a knowledge-sharing platform, on 21 November 2020

There was a time in late 1980s when the political philosopher Francis Fukuyama had hailed liberal democracy’s triumph over communism as the end-point of mankind’s ideological evolution, a period that he saw produced the final form of human government. Even his much vaunted article was famously titled ‘The End of History’.

Almost three decades later, an older and much wizened Fukuyama has become critical of his own earlier assertions and today warns about the crisis facing 21st century liberal democracy in the wake of what he calls “identity politics and new tribalism”.

Curiously, the situation is more grim than Fukuyama’s admission would have us believe. Over the last couple of years, celebrated political philosophers of our times such as Graham Allison, Niall Fergusson, Coelgan and Koehane and JJ Mearsheimer have in their several papers announced that the Trump administration may have already ushered in the dreaded post-liberal world order.

Graham Allison (left) and Niall Ferguson

In fact, if we were to read some of the top news stories of the world in the last one month, we will find how beyond the curve the new normal lies. Just about a week ago, we received the tragic news that the supposedly defeated terrorist group ISIS had turned a soccer pitch in Mozambique into an execution ground where its gang beheaded more than 50 people and then set fire to an entire village.

In another development earlier this month, a UN report told us that the Chinese government has locked up to 7 percent of its Muslim population in internment camps, and that its agents stay, eat and sleep in households of the imprisoned Uyghur men as Hanification of the Xinjiang demography goes on. Then in France last month, Muslim bigots stabbed three people to death in Nice, after the beheading of a schoolteacher Samuel Paty on 16 October – a tragic and gruesome killing in whose response the French government projected offensive cartoons of the Prophet on government buildings which in turn drew the now familiar madcap protests of enraged Muslims across the globe.

It was again in this very month that we witnessed Donald Trump – the leader of the world’s sole superpower and its freeworld – refusing to accept the results of the presidential elections and failing condemn the violence of White supremacist groups and he even called the extremist White group Proud Boy to stand by as somebody’s got to do something about the Left.

On gleaning through such news within the span of one month around the world, it becomes difficult even for the most ardent of counterterrorism and counter-radicalisation experts to keep up the hope in their counterterrorism operations or police run counterradicalization programmes aimed at overcoming, or thinking to reverse the cycle of violent extremism and radicalism that is rapidly proliferating around the world. Is violent extremism and radicalization just a security-related problem or has it become a larger societal issue, if not a major civilizational challenge, which now affects not one or two but most cultures, societies and religions across several continents.

In all, has the time come to accept the cynicism of some people who view the enormity of the challenge posed by radical ideologies and violent extremism in the 21st century as the onset of a radical and illiberal new age that is a full blown antithesis to Fukuyama’s liberalist utopia.

Such a proposition is in itself too dire to contemplate, at a time when the world has shrunk into a global village and all rightminded people would rather hope that the young Fukuyama of the 1990s proves to be right or all hell might break loose. Technology has made mankind so interdependent that we cannot the run the risk of reviving old atavistic conflicts and hazard the near extermination of the human race. As John Dobson puts it, the collapse of liberal democracy matters because it would lead to autocracy and history tells us that autocracy frequently leads to war. In fact, both World Wars were very much wars between liberalism and authoritarianism and right now the wolf has again started baying at the gates.

One thing is very clear that it is only through the assimilative and egalitarian tenets of liberal democracy that the future of mankind can be secured. No other ideology, religion or belief system on its own could bring together human civilization at this critical moment of its historical evolution.

Thus, it is in order to salvage liberal democracy from its present predicament that we have to study how and where did Fukuyama’s end of history claim for liberalism go wrong and what can be done to ensure that his wishful thinking becomes a lasting wish fulfillment.

To this end, we will have to acknowledge the widening trust deficit between people and liberal democratic governments in the present times. According to a survey by the Economist in 2019, only 32 percent of the French public trust in their government, while the global average is 47 percent. The rise of the Yellow Vest movement for economic justice that erupted in 2018 in France is seen as a reflection of this widening gulf between legislators, the government and the common people.

In a similar survey conducted in 2019, the Economist found that only 17 percent of US citizens trusted their government, compared to 40 percent of the population in 2000. The problem of lobbying by big corporate houses in US politics and the murky world of campaign funding has eroded public trust in their elected representatives. The interest of big business and shadowy foreign interests, is generally thought to have drowned out the rights of ordinary citizens.

The other critical reasons for the decline of liberalism is the growing irrelevance and the consequent decline of international organizations that were formed after World War II. The rise of nonliberal states, such as China and violent nonstate actors as well as multinational conglomerates with bigger turnovers than the GDPs of several countries operate with virtual impunity on the global stage.

Faith in the United Nations is presently at an all-time low. The World Health Organization itself has come under severe criticism, and not entirely unjustifiably, over its handling of the current coronavirus pandemic. Meanwhile, the World Trade Organization seems to be incapable of mitigating an American-Chinese trade war. The United States has already quit UNESCO in 2018 just as The United Kingdom exited the EU and many countries have started leaving the International Criminal Court. The Security Council brokered P5+1 and Iran nuclear deal, the JCPOA, is another disaster whose consequences for global peace and security may be felt for several decades. In fact, there is a growing sense that most international organisations have outlived their purpose and many have already started folding up. No less than a third of the international organisations established between 1905 and 2005 have formally ceased to exist, according to a NestleOR report.

Another curious development is the rise of totalitarian state capitalism in Asia and Middle East, which are devoid of liberalism and democracy, and yet have become supposedly successful models for governance. For a long time, Western political scholars made us believe that the path to economic prosperity and scientific progress required a liberal intellectual outlook, free enterprise and capitalism and an inclusive democratic polity that champions individual human rights. In principle, I still believe in this ideological premise but in the short term the authoritarian leaders seem to be ruling the roost.

Today we find totalitarian states, headed by strongmen such as Xi Jinping in China, Vladimir Putin in Russia, Recep Erdogan in Turkey, Crown Prince Muhammad bin Salman in Saudi Arabia trying to effect an economic revival and even being successful to a large extent without caring much about liberalism or democracy. There are even democratically elected leaders who are challenging liberalism, like Hungary’s Prime Minister, Victor Orban who proudly boasts of creating an “illiberal democracy”. Orban’s close friend in neighbouring Serbia, Aleksandar Vucic is also a nationalist demagogue. Next to them is the virtual neoOttoman Sultan of Turkey, Recep Erdogan, busy turning historical churches and museums into mosques and openly supporting jihadist groups in Syria, Lebanon and Libya. These leaders of the Balkan region point to a very dangerous sign for global security, as this has been the tinderbox of many big wars in the past. Winston Churchill once famously said that the Balkans has “produced more history than it can consume”.

But if one were to study the decline of liberal democracy in the West and the rising tide of far-right extremism, one can largely agree with Derek Thompson who attributes it to three contemporary trends: low birth rate of Western societies, the fragility of European welfare states and the rising wave of foreign migrants.

The far-right groups blame the general permissiveness of ‘neo-liberal’ mores and the advocacy of LGBTQ rights as responsible for the “death” of the institution of marriage leading to declining birth rates in the West and a consequent need for foreign workers.

Similarly, neo-liberal support for environment protection is misconstrued as being detrimental to Western industries forcing these companies to shift their centers to Asia, leaving behind predatory “too-big-to-fail” financial institutions for Western populations to fend.

The far-right claims of state repression of ethnic and racial identities and of states ‘compromising’ national interests at the altar of a technocratic, globalist leadership that is impervious to local and national interests is a complaint which now resonates even in moderate segments of Western societies.

The last match to light the tinderbox has been the swarm of Muslim refugees from Syria, Libya and other Middle East states entering Europe in recent years bringing economic uncertainties to the continent and a series of terrorist attacks.

Ironically, the rise of right wing ideologues have also been able to drum up a narrative against the progressives and Left of promoting identity politics. It is claimed that after championing the cause of the economically deprived working class, socialist parties have overplayed the issue of rights for racial and religious minorities as well as for the feminist movement, and it is these excesses that have led to the support for radical Islamist groups and Black extremist gangs.

With growing economic challenges that began way back in the 2008 global recession, the appetite for special privileges for minorities as well as for political correctness has started withering away.

But the big question is how do we address this litany of complaints against an apparently dysfunctional system. There is also a growing chorus of scholars today who argue that with the exception of Karl Popper and few 20th century thinkers, democracy was never considered an ideal system of governance by political philosophers in history and the present problems are in fact the exact symptoms that many of them had warned us against about democracy. After all, Socrates was executed by a democratic vote for simply having undemocratic views. Plato and Aristotle both objected to the dumbing down of intellect and tastes in democracies and the catering to the lowest common denominator of mass intelligence.

The Death of Socrates (1787), painting by Jacques-Louis David

Even later philosophers like Montesqieu, Jean Jacques Rousseau, Friedrich Nietsche, Martin Heidegger, James Harrington, Oswald Spengler and many others have either questioned the aristocratic nature of representative democracy or the influence of plebeian and non specialist opinion on policies of democratic governments. John Locke, the great liberal but himself a slave dealer, opposed universal suffrage. Others have pointed to the threat of majoritarianism, continuous social and class unrest, populism (which refers to politicians pandering to the emotive and irrational side of the masses and not addressing real issues), demagogy, rabble rousing and policy confusion and paralysis as the bane of democratic governance. I was surprised to find that the founders of the United States, particularly the framer of the constitution John Madison, considered democracy as a threat to liberty itself, particularly individual liberty. For this reason, The United States is constitutionally a republic and is not the democracy it presents itself to many countries as a model worth emulating. This is very evident from its complicated system of electing its president or members of Congress. As the US favours individualism against collectivism, it considers democracy as having a collectivist streak, which becomes more pronounced in other modern mass movements like fascism, communism and Islamism.

The problems with capitalism itself are well known, some of which were brilliantly enunciated by Karl Marx, even though some of his diagnosis and his prescriptions arguably couldn’t stand the test of time. But there is one particular French philosopher Emile Durkheim who best enunciates why modern liberalism and capitalism often leads to religious and racial radicalism among youth.

Durkheim says that the absence of an alternate ideology to Western capitalism leads young people to develop radical ideas, even suicidal tendencies. In his seminal work Le Suicide written in 1897, Durkheim looked into one of the most inexplicable conundrums of his times. His surveys found that as countries become wealthier and more industrialized, the rate of depression and suicide also increased. Even today, many Nordic countries of Europe with highest indices of ‘happiness’ have ironically very high rates of mental illness and suicide rate, particularly in the age group between 16 to 24 years.

Durkheim found several factors that lay behind the unhappiness of people in modern societies and their reversion to religion and pre-modern ways of living. According to him, the breakdown of social structures and families in a highly competitive environment and rise of individualism creates sense of insecurity in the population, particularly among the young.

The failure to achieve professional success and financial prosperity weighs heavily upon minds, as it is believed capitalism makes it easy for anybody to be economically successful. Durkheim contends that education and intelligence does not always provide the comfort and solace that religion, mythology and strong familial and tribal structures do. Thus, according to Durkheim, religious groups have always “established strong community ties of thought and action, virtually eliminated individual divergences, and thus achieved a high degree of unity, solidarity, and integration,” than individualistic societies of the modern age, which promotes free enquiry and thereby questions beleifs causing doubt and confusion and a great deal of existential angst.

In addition to Durkheim’s theory of suicide and depression in the industrialized world, a few words can also be said here about the decline in the scientific temper, if not science itself in our times. By becoming the preserve of big corporations and government agencies, science today has started moving away from the ken of the common man.

Just like religious institutions of yore, the average Joe has now started associating science and technology with a highly influential industrial and political elite — cold, distant if not alien. Science is no longer the problem solving ally of the past, but even the cause of many of people’s current problems — such as unemployment (particularly one caused by automation), pollution and climate change as well as the production of WMDs.

Even computers and the Internet are today being vilified as insidious means of mass surveillance or agents to bring about socio-political unrest. It is in this atmosphere of growing estrangement and mistrust that the irrational and diabolical messages of traditional and ultra-religious/nationalist ideologies have created a yearning for simpler and less wired lifestyle.

Even in contemporary science fiction, the fanciful flights of futurism, the expanding horizons of space and time and the promise of medical breakthroughs have been replaced by grotesque dystopian constructs, post-apocalyptic futures and irreconcilable moral dilemmas caused by failed scientific experiments.

It is also ironic that even prominent advocates of modern science and rationalism such as Richard Dawkins, Lawrence Krauss and Sam Harris espouse hard determinism over the principles of freewill, long championed by votaries of liberalism. Man is no longer an agent of change or progress as that role has been assumed by large profit-making corporations driven by highly mechanised and self-automated technology. Humankind is on the defensive as machines are at the cusp of gaining mechanical singularity with minds more superior to humans and more unpredictably independent.

In conclusion, I would say that it is hubris of liberalism and democracy that has brought us to the current state of pass. Contemporary movements of violent extremism have no inherent intellectual merit to stand the test of time but are simply reactions to the frequent lapses and failings of a malfunctioning liberal democratic dispensation. Modern radical counter-movements are not ingenious enough to provide any valuable socio-cultural or political alternatives on their own.

The world was aware of the problems with democracy, which in the absence of strong liberal institutions like a free press and judiciary, will invariably deliver totalitarian demagogues and rabid megalomaniacs. With poor education and non-critical thinking, media will try to dumb down its message to reach out to a wider audience.

No one can argue with Churchill when he said: ‘Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.…’

It is for this reason that Bill of Rights in the US Constitution and Fundamental Rights in our constitution are part of the basic structure. Liberal democracy was not a self-operating panacea but a goal we all have to constantly work for even when we achieve it. Liberalism and democracies have to be mindful of their inherent pitfalls and should be the first to acknowledge them. But I have faith that it is only liberals and the democratically oriented that will be the first to take heed and self correct, for the radical extremists are denied such a privilege. THANK YOU!