Topsy turvy world: Both Left and Right are mourning the death of the Elite

“It’s a very strange situation: this crisis should be ideal for the Left, but it doesn’t have any answers”. – Slavoj Žižek

Over lunch one afternoon last week, a friend from Kerala who was in Bombay on a work visit expressed happiness over the recent election results in his home state. Without a hint of irony, he praised the new chief minister Pinarayi Vijayan as an effective, pro-market administrator. Although I’m aware the CPI(M) has been Marxist in name only for decades and that there’s little to distinguish the economic policy of any mainstream Indian party today from any other, it was a small jolt to hear a businessman so enthusiastically endorsing a communist leader.

The ideological drift that characterises today’s Left is playing out internationally in peculiar ways. When the United Kingdom joined the European Economic Community in 1972, the left wing of the Labour Party favoured staying out of the common market while the centrists aligned with Tories in the push to join. Forty four years later, the configuration was reversed, with the Tories split between a relatively centrist pro-European Union wing and a right-wing insurgency that wanted out, while Labour was united in supporting Remain.

Those on the Left who had hoped that Syriza, the socialist party elected in Greece on an anti-austerity platform, would take a stand against the European Union’s bullying were disappointed when it meekly acquiesced to German diktats. In the end, it was left to British nationalist conservatives to reject the Union’s excesses.

The Trump card

The situation in the United States is as topsy turvy as that in Europe, with Donald Trump, otherwise manifestly racist and running to the right of recent Republican candidates, having outlined an anti-globalisation economic platform. His call for protectionist tariffs has forced Hillary Clinton to abandon Barack Obama’s push for the Trans-Pacific Partnership, a trade agreement with Asian allies. Trump’s message is resonating with the American counterparts of Britons who voted to leave the European Union: older, poorly educated, white, working class people living in small towns and rural districts.

In contrast, ethnically diverse metropolises; university towns bustling with energetic students; and cities that have witnessed urban regeneration while transitioning from industrial centres to globally connected finance, media and entertainment hubs; the San Franciscos, Manchesters, Oxfords and Austins voted to stay in the EU or will vote for Hillary Clinton over Donald Trump.

It’s easy to uphold the second group as the future and dismiss the first as a curmudgeonly bunch longing for an unrecoverable past. It’s worth reminding ourselves, though, that the unrecoverable past included steady jobs, a good shot at climbing the economic ladder through effort, and a strong tradition of solidarity between workers. Who can blame them for wanting it back when the present and future hold such little promise?

Not only did all the hip places vote Remain, the intellectual elite were almost entirely on one side, as they will be in November in the United States. I haven’t come across any election before where there was such a strong consensus among elites about which the better option was. Every major economist, a host of Nobel Prize winners from different fields, the chancellors of every major British university, most of the best known politicians on both sides of the aisle, business leaders and union leaders all lobbied for a vote to Remain. Michael Gove, one among a motley group of Leave leaders, dismissed the weight of those opinions saying, “People in this country have had enough of experts." He was right.

The notion that expertise is irrelevant has taken hold in India, too. Our best film school, a world renowned graduate university, an economist widely considered among the world’s most important, have all found themselves in the midst of controversies and faced astonishing torrents of abuse. Jawaharlal Nehru spoke in his Tryst With Destiny speech of the moment when, “the soul of a nation,long suppressed,finds utterance”. Fans of Donald Trump, the people who voted Leave in the UK, and Indian Twitter trolls who hate Nehru and the university named after him, all represent a contemporary form of the soul of nations finding utterance after a long period of suppression. That utterance is angry, frustrated, and often seems incoherent because no ideology or framework exists that can make something hopeful from it.

One can point out that the scapegoating of immigrants by Trump and the Leave camp is misguided. West Europeans tend not to bear many children, which has created an aged population and made immigration a demographic and economic imperative. Those who voted for a Brexit based on hopes that immigration would be curtailed and some foreigners would return to their homelands will only get their wish if the country’s economy collapses, not an outcome they’d ever choose. One can point this out, but one can’t offer a positive alternate scenario.

Leftist myth

Andrew Sullivan, a conservative English political commentator based in the United States, who came out of semi-retirement to take on Donald Trump, mourned the death of the elite in his first essay after his return to journalism. He wrote, “If late-stage political democracy has taken two centuries to ripen, the media equivalent took around two decades, swiftly erasing almost any elite moderation or control of our democratic discourse… It seems shocking to argue that we need elites in this democratic age – especially with vast inequalities of wealth and elite failures all around us. But we need them precisely to protect this precious democracy from its own destabilising excesses.”

A surprising echo of Sullivan’s thinking was recently heard at the opposite end of the ideological spectrum. The Slovenian Marxist Slavoj Žižek, in the interview where he admitted the Left has no answers to present crises, bemoaned the Leave vote, called direct democracy “The last Leftist myth”, and expressed a preference for "the appearance of a free decision, discretely guided by a discerning elite”.

Both Sullivan and Žižek agree that the elites have made disastrous choices, but both nevertheless want their dominion to continue, trusting or hoping they will learn from past mistakes. It’s a remarkably depressing outlook. I don’t know if any past era has been as bereft of new political ideas as we find ourselves today. The lucky ones, and I count myself among them, form a cosmopolitan elite who benefit from freer trade and easier movement between nations. For those that globalisation has left by the wayside, we can offer no way forward, only an assurance that there is no going back.