Electing bigots
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IN recent years, electorates in several states have elected leaders who openly espouse bigoted views. Bigotry is irrational hatred towards groups of different identities or views. Trump, Modi, Netanyahu, Brazil’s Bolsonaro, the Philippines’s Duterte, Hungary’s Orban and UK’s Boris Johnson are all regarded as bigoted demagogues voted in by their electorates.
One can also find bigots who did not acquire power electorally, eg, Ziaul Haq and Idi Amin. Elected bigots are more worrisome because one expects the more open and inclusive political processes of democracy to eliminate bigoted politics. The list above is even more so, for it doesn’t include weak new democracies but three advanced and four established democracies.
The common electoral methods of such bigots include fear-mongering and scapegoating an identity group for the society’s ills, lying, emotional oratory, grandiose promises, simplifying complex problems, violence, insults, folksy posturing and attacking neutral, authentic media sources. Once in power, they institute policies that harm scapegoated groups.
Trump unveiled policies to limit immigration generally and refugees from Muslim states. Modi adopted anti-Muslim policies like occupied Kashmir’s annexation and the citizenship law which excludes Muslims from the list of regionally persecuted minorities that can obtain citizenship in India. Non-Muslims in several regional Muslim states have certainly faced persecution. But the most egregious current cases of such persecution in the region are of Myanmar’s Rohingya and China’s Uighur Muslims. Yet they are excluded from this bill.
Pakistan has yet to elect a bigot.
The success of bigots raises the issue of how they can defeat more rational politicians. Hitler was perhaps the first bigot to win electorally. His win was due to the severe German economic turmoil after the First World War which Hitler promised to resolve via bigoted politics.
While this cause still has salience, it doesn’t fully explain the wins of most bigots today. The US elected Obama twice after the 2008 recession and Trump only after recovery had started. India was doing well economically when Modi won. In Brazil, concerns about crime and sleaze propelled Bolsonaro. So it is not just economics but anxiety caused by financial, social or political problems and failure of both mainstream liberal and conservative politics to tackle them that allows space for bigots who pin these problems on hated groups to win. Thus, major anxiety and the presence of an easy scapegoat further bigoted politics.
Worryingly, since these factors are present in numerous states globally, bigoted politics has much scope to spread. In some states, the absence of an easy scapegoat group precludes bigoted politics, but then populist politics emerges.
Populist politics uses all the methods of bigoted politics except scapegoating, given the absence of an easy scapegoat social group which may have benefited from past affirmative action policies. It rails, instead, against economic and political elites without a well-thought-out agenda to end their power. This is why a bigot is yet to win in Pakistan, even though bigotry has existed here for long, leading to the persecution of minority religious and lifestyle groups. But the PTI’s rise represents populist politics, which rails against elite corruption without providing sensible policies to end their power.
The rise of bigoted and populist politics comes from the increasing mega problems humanity faces due to conservative neoliberalism’s spread and its neglect of equity and environmental concerns. The situation today is similar to a century ago when, too, neoliberalism caused huge inequity problems. It then took humanity the horrors of two world wars and the 1929 depression to accept the left’s solution of national social democracy and global rule-based institutions.
Those solutions helped for a few decades until neoliberalism found ways to undermine them via footloose capitalism which forced states to relax social regulation. It has now again pushed the world towards huge inequity and environmental problems.
Mainstream left and right politics have failed to solve them. Progressive left green politics has some solutions but they are complex and require painful adjustments. The solutions encompass a form of global green social democracy to force footloose capitalism to become subservient to the needs of the masses.
Instead of embracing them, even educated middle-class groups accept a dumbing down of politics to the easy but illusionary ideas of populist or bigoted politics. Such politics tears down the very global institutions needed to implement global green social democracy. Thus, it is very likely that only new global catastrophes may force humanity to embrace such solutions to today’s global ills.
The writer is a Senior Fellow with UC Berkeley and heads INSPIRING Pakistan, a progressive policy unit.
Twitter: @NiazMurtaza2
Published in Dawn, December 17th, 2019
