Truth, trust and democracy

In his column carried on February 2, 2022 by the newspaper, The New York Times, John Freidman had it right when he wrote that “truth and trust provide the foundation on which democracy rests. We could always count on enough of us trusting enough of us to collaborate to do big hard things together. And we could always count on enough of us embracing the same truth to collectively navigate our way out of any crisis.” He equated fragility of American democracy to the fragility of the climate in which the country was living. “Because without a minimum level of truth and trust, everything becomes politics. And when everything becomes politics, there is no neutral, sacred ground for leaders to gather and collaborate in national interest. This means that our democracy, like our climate, is much more fragile than we think.”

Friedman wrote his column when there was no doubt in the minds of serious thinkers that the United States political system was under a great deal of stress. It was brought to that situation by one man, Donald Trump, the 45^th president of the United States. Trump founded his rise as an enormously consequential political figure by following two somewhat contradictory beliefs. The first was that there was so much anger in the country that could be exploited to build a political base for a politician who was not a political figure and was entering politics without any experience. Those who were angry did not have a political voice. Trump provided them with one. There were several reasons for this anger but two were by far the most important. The first one was the economic squeeze that was applied to these people because of what economists called “globalisation” and the second was because of the demographic dilution of their position in society.

Globalisation had lowered the traditional barriers to international commerce and the movement of people across international borders. Since trade could take place with fewer constraints, enterprises could locate their operations to sites where it was profitable for them to produce. China became a major destination for jobs that were located in what was once America’s industrial belt. Trump responded to this anger by identifying China as the main enemy of a class of American people that had become the most important part of his political base.

The second source of anger was demographic change brought about by a significant decline in human fertility and immigration from foreign lands. Both developments were contributing to a serious and palpable decline in the proportion of White Christians in America’s population. While the level of fertility was hard to influence by public policy, the entry of foreign people could be controlled. Those who were attempting to enter the United States mostly illegally were people of colour. Legal entry of people through a process called “chain migration” that allowed those who were citizens to bring in their family members many of whom were Muslims. Anti-immigration and anti-Muslim elements in public policy became components of public policy under Trump. The president called his policy preferences as parts of his effort to Make America Great Again, or MAGA.

However, for public policy designed to protect the people who felt they were in danger, democracy had to be shackled. One of the basic premises of a functioning democratic system that follows Western liberalism is to use elections to put policymakers in their jobs. However, if elections produced results that were not aligned with the wishes of the political base, they should not be accepted. That he had lost the November 2020 election to the Democrat Joe Biden was, Trump said, because of massive rigging by his opposition. He encouraged his followers to prevent the formal adoption of the result by Congress which they did by storming the Capitol on January 6, 2021. The Liberal elements in the American society called the assault an “insurrection” that is being investigated by a special panel of the House of Representatives.

What is happening in the United States has relevance for a country such as Pakistan that has been struggling to define for itself a mode of governance that would be acceptable for its “people”. I have put the world people within quotes for the reason that it has been difficult to define who are the people that a constitutional system is supposed to serve. The preamble to the United States Constitution began with the words “We people” but those who wrote and adopted the document in 1787 did not mean all people. The country’s black population brought in as slaves were treated as “two thirds” of a white person and had to wait for nearly two hundred years before receiving the right to vote. The same happened to the country’s female population.

Closer to home, we have the example of the evolution of the Indian political system that for decades was seen in Pakistan as a model that could be followed. However, ever since the emergence of Narendra Modi as the country’s most powerful political person, the definition of people in India has begun to exclude even large minorities such as Muslims who number 200 million in a population estimated at 1.3 billion. The lower caste Hindus now called the “Dalits” also have very limited rights. Their situation has been described in a documentary, Writing With Fire, that has been nominated for an Oscar award. According to The New York Times’ Farah Stockman, the documentary “is a road map for how to stand for democracy even in the face of great danger. In 2017, Yogi Adityanath, a Hindu monk, who once announced that he was preparing for a religious war in Uttar Pradesh, took the helm as chief minister in Uttar Pradesh. Members of the Hindu Youth Brigade, an organization that he founded, brandished swords in the streets, vowing to protect Hindus and punish Muslims.” Her coverage of the move includes a report on the role being played by a digital news output called Khabar Lahariya which sent out its correspondents, mostly women, to investigate the state of Indian democracy. One of them interviewed the leader of the Brigade who said that “my absolute priority is to protect holy cows.” Continued Stockman: “Some high-caste journalists expressed shock at how quickly the political culture in India turned. In a matter of just a few years, people once considered extremists were suddenly running large swathes of the country.”

Massive political change is occurring all around Pakistan’s borders. India is no longer a truly democratic state, able to comfort all segments of its very diverse population. To the northwest is Afghanistan, which has in power a religious group whose leadership does not believe that Islam and democracy are compatible systems of beliefs. Iran of course has been a theocratic state for decades with no ambition to become a democracy. And to the east is China, where the Communist Party has tightened its hold on the country and Xi Jinping, its president, has said that the system he manages serves its people better than Western liberalism. The party has given him time to stay in his position longer than two terms that had become the standard in the post-Mao Zedong period. What will be the influences on Pakistan of these developments? We will have to look to time to answer this question.

 

Published in The Express Tribune, February 7^th, 2022.

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