Befitting its status as one of the premier institutions of higher learning, Yale University is housed in a magnificent campus. The university ground is dotted with grand stone buildings, stately trees, manicured lawns, paved walkways and a smooth road network. In addition to ample classrooms, comfortable dormitories, cozy art museums, cavernous conference halls, well-equipped seminar rooms, and some of the best stocked and managed libraries in the world, the Ivy League institution boasts of its own daily newspaper, a multi-media communication complex, a hospital, and its own complementary shuttle bus that connects all such facilities. Little wonder, townies look at Yale with a mixture of admiration and awe.
The difference between communities of New Haven and the university campus is stark: Yale is overwhelmingly White while the majority of townies are people of myriad colors, Black being predominant. Even within the opulent campus, employees of color serve a primarily White body of faculty, senior administrators and students. The adoration and detestation of townies for the university is understandable: They can’t survive without it but find it impossible to endure it. Yale, after all, is the largest employer and the biggest taxpayer of the stagnating municipality.[break]
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The New Haven Greens—a leveled cemetery with the remains of the buried still below the ground—is often a place of encounter between townies and the islanders of Yale. Across the road beyond the Greens, several fast-food joints, posh apartments, swank shops and exotic restaurants attract the university crowd. Incidents of ‘Apple Picking’ have become so common in this area that the university advises its people to guard their iMacs, iPhones and other smart electronic devices whenever they go out into the town. Controlled by an eponymous corporation with a huge capital base, including endowments of over 19 billion dollars, Yale has reportedly spent more than four billion dollars over last few years in renovating its properties. Meanwhile, the city that houses the university is perpetually in need of funds to upgrade its infrastructure.
New Delhi is a world away from New Haven, but Jawaharlal University—though a state-funded institution and relatively dilapidated in comparison to Yale—bears little resemblance to the metropolis where it belongs. The faculty at JNU is fashionably progressive, students take pride in being lefties, but the city is home to the poorest and the richest, the weakest and the most powerful, and the most erudite and the least educated of India. Someone has estimated that over 100,000 families or individuals in New Delhi hold property worth more than 1,000 Crores of Indian Rupees. In New Haven, mugging and homicide are ways of revenge. The middleclass of New Delhi turns its rage upon itself as rape and burglaries multiply with every decimal point increase in the GDP.
Why have two of the most functional systems of government—one the oldest republic, another the biggest democracy—in the world failed so miserably in tackling social inequalities? In the replication of the Roman Empire, it is likely that the US Army would be made up of people different from those who would sit in its Senates and Board Rooms. Guards and cleaners of Gurgaon and NOIDA already look, behave and speak differently from the owners of houses who drive around in cars costing more than the entire revenue collection of small towns in the hinterland.
The question is easier to pose than offer even a tentative answer. However, it is possible to add a supplementary question: Has it something to do with the way republicanism was—to use the title of a Bruce Springsteen song—“Born in the USA”? If that be the case, then new imaginations of democracy for the twenty-first century have perhaps become necessary.
Unequal societies
In describing the success of “Democracy in America,” Alexis de Tocqueville concluded in the mid-nineteenth century that inequalities had decreased to such a degree in the American society that flowering of republicanism was inevitable. He proposed building a “new political science” in order to “… purify its mores, to regulate its movements, to substitute little by little the science of affairs for its inexperience, and knowledge of its true instincts for its blind instincts; to adapt its government to time and place; to modify it according to circumstances and men: such is the first duty imposed on those who direct society in our day.”
Karl Marx, probably oblivious of Tocqueville’s call, proposed such a “new political science,” but without paying any attention to the finer points of “mores, movements and instincts.” He claimed to have turned the Hegelian Dialectics of “Abstract-Negative-Concrete” into right-side—left-side would perhaps be a better characterization of his endeavor—up in the form of Materialistic Dialecticism: “My dialectic method is not only different from the Hegelian, but is its direct opposite. To Hegel, the life-process of the human brain, i.e. the process of thinking, which, under the name of ‘the Idea’, he even transforms into an independent subject, is the demiurgos of the real world, and the real world is only the external, phenomenal form of ‘the Idea’. With me, on the contrary, the ideal is nothing else than the material world reflected by the human mind, and translated into forms of thought.”
The proletarian vanguard would be Tocqueville’s elite “who direct society in our day,” but they didn’t need to be conversant with the vernacular of the life of the mind. The obsession with materialism gave rise to tyrants such as the dynastic regime in North Korea or the aristocrats of China (Four out of the seven Xi Jinping’s colleagues on the Politburo Standing Committee in the People’s Republic of China are reportedly “Princelings”) who claim to hold monopoly over the right to decide what is best for the rest of the population.
Max Weber, yet another German philosopher who thought it necessary to interpret the world in order to change it, took up the challenge of Tocqueville—of building a “new political science”—in a different manner. Monopoly of violence for the state and freedom of the capital class to build fortunes was a heady mix. It would conflate the power of the state with the wealth of capitalists and create an invincible corps of elites. Even more than the Soviet nomenklatura, Chinese mandarins perhaps exemplify Weber’s bureaucracy.
The Soviet Union disintegrated. North Korea tethers on the brink of collapse and wouldn’t survive if the regime in Beijing withdrew its support. The Chinese, however, look robust. That may be so because it has found its own idiom of governance: nationalistic harmonization and materialistic synchronization under a one-party paternalistic state. These are ‘pure’ regime types. The problem of republics and democracies is that they tend to become hybrid. That’s their strength as well as weakness.
Hybrid regimes—monarchic republic in the USA and anarchic democracy in India—give immense freedom to the crafty to prosper while they also provide diversities enough space to survive. That creates stability with dynamism. However, when inequalities cross a certain threshold in terms of spatial and ethnic compositions, ruling regimes have to resort to violence to maintain stability. Violence, unfortunately, begets even more violence, and the downward spiral becomes impossible to check.
Egalitarian idioms
The faculties of political economy at New England campuses are often multinational. The Chinese excel in subjects that have little to do with Shakespeare, such as pure sciences and advanced mathematics. South Asians are more comfortable with social sciences. Some of them appear to be surprisingly abreast of the political crisis in Nepal. The question thrown at visiting Nepalis is often similar in tone and tenor even though wordings sometimes change: Why has identity suddenly become such an important issue in Nepal despite Marxists, Leninists and Maoists?
Once again, there is no easy answer. Probably it has emerged out of the successive failures of different narratives. [King] Mahendra considered nationalism to be more important than democracy. It alienated a majority of population from monarchy. BP Koirala flirted with socialism and paid the price of his beliefs by being expelled from national mainstream for life.
[King] Birendra prioritized development. It failed to deliver emancipation. The post-1990 governments lacked all convictions and peddled snake oil in the name of liberalization, privatization and globalization. The Maoists too seem to have been cut from the same cloth. Who can blame then for the newfound popularity of the politics of identity? If patriotism is the last refuge of the scoundrel, identity is the haven that shelters the “huddled masses yearning to breathe free.” Americans can understand, even though most disagree with, the diagnosis.
Lal contributes to the week with his biweekly column Reflections. He is one of the widely read poliitical analysts in Nepal
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