That global politics over the last few years has seen a tectonic shift has become a trite observation by now. The evidence revolves around the rise of populist demagogues in democracies around the world. The Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, the Polish prime minister Beata Szydlo, and Turkey’s president Recep Tayyip Erdogan are all seen as catalytic agents of the disruptions at play. Pundits often add Narendra Modi to this list. It was however, with the election of Donald Trump that the extent to which ancien régimes across the world has been challenged became clear. The elections of this motley crew, with their limited interest in liberalism, has been dubbed the ‘rise of the right’ across the world. But even if the right is taken — broadly — to mean a catch-all categorisation of conservatives, many of these leaders are hardly conservative in the classical sense. Take Trump for example, channeled through his chief strategist Steve Bannon. Bannon has repeatedly talked about destroying the old order in America. As a self-described “Leninist,” Bannon is precisely the kind of revolutionary Burkean conservatives have sought to keep in check.
Closer to home, Modi’s economics often appear to be that of UPA III. A sign of times we live in is that one can be right-wing without sharing traditional precepts of conservatism. But this applies to liberals as well. If by liberalism one means a core sympathy for all, could Hillary Clinton, who once called Trump supporters “a basket of deplorables,” be considered a liberal? A better characterization of global politics of our age would be to call it an era of “null politics,” a politics of defeasance taking aim at the key normative codes of liberal democracies. The era of null politics is defined by three key characteristics. One, null politics is fueled by dislocation. Consider the improbability called President Trump, whose rise was facilitated by a growing cultural dislocation of the American white middle-class in a country that has become multicultural in a pronounced way. At the same time, the United States’ coastal elites have barricaded themselves in a mental utopia framed by moral relativism and globalised ethos. The middle-class white American male — no more or no less a citizen than a young, poor, African-American woman – no longer felt at home in a country whose terms-of-engagement with its own problems was decided by these elites.
American liberals after Trump’s election find themselves mentally dislocated from the core assumption that the majority enthusiastically shared their beliefs about America and the world. Hence the hashtag, #notmypresident. Two, null politics is fundamentally anti-intellectual. The Trump team advocates “alternative facts” and then there is the president himself proudly exclaiming that he does not read books. A corollary of this anti-intellectual premise is its practitioners feeding off a collective attention-deficit-disorder exacerbated by social media. Mandarins of null politics prefer tweets over opinion pieces, and opinion pieces over full-length papers and books. Three, null politics is deeply anti-establishment. The fact that Trump is a product of an anti-establishment mood is evident. But he is not alone. Democrat Hillary Clinton found herself contending for party candidacy with Bernie Sanders, who was backed by millennials fed on a steady-dose of guilt over their (white/educated/middle-class/suburban) privilege. In France, presidential contender Marine Le Pen may be a poster-child of null politics. But if she is to be defeated, the onus will most likely fall on the “anti-system” outsider Emmanuel Macron. The nightmare is not the rise of the right, as many have contended it to be. The problem at hand is how to break the patterns that produced this politics of defeasance in the first place.
(Abhijnan Rej is a Fellow at the Observer Research Foundation, New Delhi. Views expressed here are personal.)
