To be able to dissect the triumph of Biden, and traditional partisan politics over Trumps new right wing populism, we need to step back, and re-examine what the contestation was all about. Only then can we get what has been achieved, and what lessons it holds for India.
First let us consider what classical liberalism was all about. In the words of Francis Fukuyama: While classical liberalism sought to protect the autonomy of equal individuals, the new ideology of multiculturalism promoted equal respect for cultures, even if those cultures abridged the autonomy of the individuals who participated in them.
Classical liberalism was always focused sharply on the individual, as opposed to the collective. It was an individuals capacity for moral agency, enterprise, and change, that brought progress; and that was always being crushed by collectives, ranging from tribal patriarchy, through oppressive religiosity, to states tyranny.
To offset these pressures from the collective, it was imperative to set the individual free. And classical liberalism sought to do so, without diminishing the tribe, religion, society or state. Instead, it sharply defined some inalienable rights against these very collectives, and sought to harness the state in their protection.
But in the long journey since Renaissance, something more happened.
Again to quote Fukuyama: The left continued to be defined by its passion for equality, but that agenda shifted from its earlier emphasis on the conditions of the working class to the often psychological demands of an ever-widening circle of marginalized groups.
What Fukuyama defines here is the Left-Liberal creep for what needs to be protected in a liberal democracy. Again, it drifted away from the individual, to collectives.
First, in the name of the individuals, the definition of individual itself was expanded from the strictly personal, to the groups in which individuals often associate with, for instance, religious or cultural. When you allow this, you have the absurd position where you are defending a fascist version of Islam in the name of protecting the individual, while denouncing the majority religion on the very same ground.
This happened in India as well, with some misguided liberals vociferously supporting the most outrageous religious demands of some Muslim clerics regarding divorce, right to pray, polygamy, or whatever, while insisting that Hindus shun the very same practices.
Clearly you cant have such an absurd position, and the Right Wing pounced on the absurdity to build a whole new campaign of religious resentment against the liberal state.
Secondly, note what happened to equality in the process of expanding the sphere of the individual. The right to equality of individuals, itself morphed from being about fraternity, to equality for various groups of individuals; some valid, some gross distortions of the very notion of liberalism, in as much as they came to mean a demand for equality between Christianity and Islam in say the US, to take just one example.
Guaranteeing the right of an individual to pray to a God of her choosing is not the same as asking to place Christianity and Islam on an equal footing in the US. This creep in the scope of lefts idea of equality between two cultural groups, flies in the face of the liberal idea of an individual.
But this glaring contradiction was ignored, and the left and liberals combined to create a plethora of new entitlements that werent anchored in the classical liberal idea of liberating an oppressed individual from oppressive collectives.
No wonder, this inflamed passions on the majority side, as unwarranted molly-coddling of minorities, in a manner that would change the very identity of the polity. The Left and the Liberals had walked into a moral and existential quagmire, and in the process, abandoned the individual, in search of new windmills to equalise.
So, the first lesson from the US for Indian liberals is to understand the basic nature of the conundrum; and not to draw false conclusions from Trumps defeat in a hurry. Very few philosophers and thinkers have actually put out the flaws in the liberal case in popular press, though I guess that will happen in due course. There is lot to learn here. The India debate on populism and fascism continues to be singularly uninformed.
In India there is scant realisation why and where the liberals went wrong in aping the USs cultural tropes. We need to understand liberal creep, its inherent logical fallacies, and the consequent popular resentment that fascists have harnessed for taking their evil ideology main stream. Unless we understand why fascism is popular, and fed by hate and resentment grounded in liberal creep, we will not be able to fight them.
Now that we have the conceptual field clear, lets us see how the US was able to hold populism in check and not cede further ground to it.
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Media & courts in US did not bend and Republicans & Democrats are not fighting to overthrow democracy - National Herald