Donald Trump has been stirring things up in a variety of startling ways. And everyone is busy either despairing about him or ridiculing him.
That’s fine except for one thing. No one is asking the only question worth asking, which is: why did so many Americans vote for him that he became president once again with such a majority?
The anti-Trump camp refuses to engage with this question, just as the anti-Modi camp in India, saying both Trump and Modi appeal to the baser instincts of voters. But they forget that democratic electoral politics is mainly about baser instincts, not lofty ideals like altruism.
Indeed, as the Nobel winning economist Kenneth Arrow showed in the 1950s, democracy is about what the majority wants, not what the minority needs — which sometimes can even be a swift kick in the pants. The tail can’t wag the dog.
There’s another feature of the status quoist world-views that we are seeing now in the US and have been seeing in India since 2014. This is that those who question the status quo are always reviled and derided as junglee people. That’s been the pattern throughout history.
Ramanuja, Martin Luther, the Republicans in France who caused the revolution, William Gladstone in Britain, Abraham Lincoln in America, Vladimir Lenin in Russia, Margaret Thatcher in Britain, Franklin Roosevelt in the US, Mikhail Gorbachev in the USSR, are some names that stand out.
But you know what? All of them had, intuitively, deep inside, grasped what people were actually thinking and suggested ways of achieving it. This is exactly what Trump is doing. Such people change the paradigm or the accepted way of thinking and doing things.
Thomas Kuhn’s paradigm shift
Here it is worth recalling an American philosopher and historian called Thomas Kuhn who invented the idea of ‘paradigm shift’. He said this shift happens when scientists start looking at things completely differently.
He said that the bias for the known is always very strong and that initially the existing lot scorned ideas that threatened the current paradigm. The “Novelty”, he wrote, “emerges only with difficulty, manifested by resistance, against a background provided by expectation.” He then went on to describe the tension between the old and the new and the crises this tension generates when anomalies emerge between what is accepted and what actually happens.
Thus, Europe is finally going to stop its defence free riding. Illegal migration is finally going to stop. And America will finally stop playing Uncle Sam — or as the American official called it, Uncle Sucker — to ungrateful countries like China.
This is not to say that the liberal American idea was bad. It wasn’t. But once Mexico and China — immigration and trade — started misusing it, it should have been clear that the idea was past its prime.
The problem lay not in Trump’s lack of idealism but in the cynicism of Mexico and China. That must be explicitly acknowledged. So as Rajiv Gandhi once famously said that when a big tree falls, the earth trembles. That’s exactly what’s going to happen. But that’s not the interesting thing.
What’s interesting is that for the last 1,000 years, often the first quarter of the new century always throws up new paradigms. To put in another way, the notion of status quo is a mirage and any particular system lasts only for about fifty years, or two generations.
I will not give you the full list. You can check for yourself. But take the period from the end of the 16th century. It suggests a clear pattern.
The cabinet system of government was born between 1715-30. This decisively shifted political power to parliament.
The end of the Napoleonic wars introduced the idea of ‘super power’. It came to be known as Pax Britannica. Basically, it meant the overwhelming power and influence of one country that was globally accepted.
The first quarter of the 20th century saw the idea of communism take hold. That led to the formation of collectives or groups for trade and security. If countries didn’t hang together, they’d hang separately.
The first quarter of this century has seen a complete reversal of these collective action groups. Ironically, the country that built these groups, America, is the one dismantling them. What the Lord giveth, he taketh away too.
What next?
It’s very hard to say what lies ahead. But one thing is certain: to quote Thucydides, “Right is only in question between equals in power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must.”
The BJP’s IT cell exhortations notwithstanding, India is quite weak economically and militarily. It is going to be very badly placed in the forthcoming contest for markets and materials. It will have to “suffer what it must”.