“Now that many Americans have reposed trust and faith in Trump, the president-elect is at the cusp of an extremely delicate point (call it an inflection point if you may) in American politics and history.”
Wajahat Qazi*
Two fundamental views of society, culture, and nation present themselves in contemporary America post Donald Trump’s resounding victory: one is to craft a new ‘imagined community’ that is zero-sum and exclusionary. The other is imagining and crafting a society and nation that has some degree of an ‘overlapping consensus’ where ‘different groups in a diverse, plural society arrive at some agreement on political justice’ and then derive ‘the institutional matrix of society on this basis’.
Another idea propounded by Martha Nussbaum is that of ‘extended compassion ‘and ‘love’. Which of these would be prudent and actionable? Which could lead to ‘political order in a changing society’?
From a normative standpoint, be it zero-sum exclusionary nationalism, an ‘overlapping consensus’, or even a multi-cultural public sphere are all ‘ideal types.’ None have been or can be crafted to picture perfection in any given society. While zero-sum nationalism, which leads to the primacy of the volk(people)-partly attributed to the great German Johann Herder, maybe by a certain school of thought renders America ‘illiberal’ (or more accurately an ‘illiberal democracy’), a ‘perfect’ overlapping consensus ‘attributed to the classic liberal, the late John Rawls, is well-nigh impossible – even in a homogenous society.
‘Extended Compassion and love’ – no matter their scholarly merit – is too ambitious given human nature. But this does not preclude the option of cherry-picking from each school of thought.
A ‘spaghetti bowl’ menu then presents itself to the president-elect of America, Donald Trump. From this menu, what should Trump choose and discard?
First, a word on the nature of Trump’s stupendous victory is called for: Trump won on a ‘resurgent white vote’ – the kind that, to cite the great American sociologist Arlie Russell Hochschild’s book title, had become,’ strangers in their land’. While a cacophony of reasons defines and describes this white estrangement, again to use the phrase employed by Ms Hochschild, each estranged member of the white superstructure had a deep story (or narrative in prosaic terms) of hurt, betrayal, and anger to tell.
I would speculate that the wellsprings of this ‘deep story’ and hurt emanated from the neo-liberal turn in American politics in the 1970’s. This turn had mostly economic implications that percolated to the social, cultural, and public realms and spaces. The result was a deeply unstable and polarized America where the ‘deep story’ became emblematized in Donald Trump who tapped into it very ably and successfully.
Now that many Americans have reposed trust and faith in Trump, the president-elect is at the cusp of an extremely delicate point (call it an inflection point if you may) in American politics and history. The choices he will make, the politics he will do, and the public and foreign policies he enacts will determine the nature of America for decades to come. How Trump comports is then critical.
Ultimately, the wellsprings of policy, be it domestic public policy or foreign policy- are philosophical and abstract. A paradox is operative in contemporary America: Trump rode to power on ‘deep stories’ of raw political emotion but the ‘solution’ to his country’s problem lies in philosophical abstractions. But the ‘good thing’ is that he has a menu available from which to pick and choose. What should his starting point be?
The answer is ‘Das volk’ (the people) – as delineated by Herder, with emphasis less on pure rationality but more on sentiment or political emotion. But this is delicate or even dangerous territory: if the volk is elevated to primacy, this could have connotations of race and racial superiority and zero-sum exclusion.
The saga of modern American history has been that of zig-zagged and incomplete evolution from a settler society to the civil rights movement to a more heterogeneous society. The spanner in the works has been neoliberalism complemented by the blatant, outlandish, and egregious lies of intellectuals like the late Ayn Rand and the elevation of her acolytes like Alan Greenspan to the highest pedestals of public policy.
Neo-liberalism created atomized individuals with no moorings and along with Rand’s so-called ‘ethical objectivism’ blamed any issue, problem, or misfortune on the character flaws of the doomed individual. Thus were laid the foundations of the dissipation and disintegration of the American community. What Trump can and must do is salvage and recreate this community.
How?
By taking a page from Johann Herder’s romantic notion of the volk where ‘power flows both from the top to down’ and vice versa but in contradistinction to neo-liberal inspired globalism, information must flow from the bottom to the top – all mediated by a sympathetic bureaucracy. What, the question is, should be the nature of this volk? In essentialized terms, the volk can be only the white superstructure of America but the country has changed drastically in recent years; it is, if not a pluralistic society but surely is a heterogenous one.
In a heterogeneous society, the volk cannot be just one component even if it is the essence of America. To craft a community from the volk, Trump must take recourse to the Rawlsian ‘overlapping consensus’ between diverse members of the American firmament. But this is classical liberalism – something Trump’s supporters and Trump himself abhors.
A fundamental and deep paradox is operative here then. How can this be obviated? By taking a leaf from the functional and policy implications of the ‘overlapping consensus’ but not from its philosophical tour de force. In the final analysis, fairness and justice are the animating aspirations of humans.
Consider an example.
Google’s CEO is an Indian-origin American. (To me he seems more like a proxy CEO than a real one but that is beside the point). Google – a quasi-monopolist- pays the man millions of dollars.
At the same time, the janitor at Google’s headquarters struggles to make ends meet. Her overriding thought is how to, given her wages, pay for her son’s college education. She’s been working hard to pay the mortgage, pay the bills, and feed the family. Her son, a bright lad, wants to become an AI specialist but for that, he needs to attend a decent college. Our janitor cannot realistically afford to pay her son’s college fees.
The thought of him doing menial jobs like her horrifies her. While she greets Google’s CEO each time she sees him, beneath the polite demeanor, envy, and resentment seethe to boiling point. Her revenge has been to cast a vote for Donald Trump both in 2016 and 2024. She seriously believes that the election has been stolen in 2019.
Above all, America is her country, not Google’s CEO, who symbolizes the stealing of America’s jobs to her. This hypothetical example is telling: it tells us about both the beauty of America and its severe structural lopsidedness.
A talented man from India, who most probably had access to free education in his country and who would at best be a VP at an Indian software firm has become Google’s CEO. This is meritocracy at its best. But at the same time, a woman who has a serious and organic claim to her country is suffering – in silence.
Can these irreconcilables be bridged? Yes, partly – through the crafting of a volk, a new imagined community that is caring, sharing, and compassionate at the same time without compromising on the essence of America. It would be an American community that agrees on the core principles of the country, where freedom and liberty complement compassion and care – where our lady janitor can reclaim and re-create the ‘American Dream’ for her bright son and where an outsider can, in the least, think of ‘making it big’ in the country.
A cynosure or an enclosure can and must be developed around these broad themes: a clear-cut definition of America and what Americanness means in the 21st century overlaid by ‘community standard’ where no American is left behind.
This can only happen when principles from an ‘overlapping consensus’ over the nature and meaning of justice and how it is reified in American institutions are arrived at. But there is the proverbial caveat emptor operative here: the boundaries and borders of this overlapping consensus must only be determined by those who have an organic claim on America.
All this may be the message delivered by American voters on November 5, 2024. If I were Donald Trump, I would be both excited and worried – the former because I would have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to re-create and reshape my country, the latter because if I would get it wrong, the burden of a legacy and future generations would fall on me.
The onus at this delicate moment in American history lies on Donald Trump. How he manages and deals with the delicate transition moment will determine the nature and form of his country.
Now is the time for Trump to tell a ‘deep story’ to himself and his people that does not have mere resonance but one that is bold and beautiful. To conclude, ‘the volk is dead. Long live the volk!’
*The author is a columnist based in Kashmir.
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The post To Heal America and Make it Great Again, Donald Trump needs to forge an ‘Overlapping Consensus’ first appeared on Kashmir Times (Since 1954): Multi-media web news platform..
The post To Heal America and Make it Great Again, Donald Trump needs to forge an ‘Overlapping Consensus’ appeared first on Kashmir Times (Since 1954): Multi-media web news platform..