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Wednesday, Jan 12, 2005

Opinion

Opinion - Leader Page Articles

Fundamentalism, American style

By Harold A. Gould

America appears to be on the brink of descending into `authoritarianism by acclamation.'

ATTEMPTS to understand how the United States got hijacked by the political right wing have focussed heavily on the role that was played by so-called evangelistic Christians, that is, the multitudes of religious fundamentalists who turned out in droves to help George W. Bush triumph over his Democratic rival John Kerry. Statistics clearly reveal that this segment of the U.S. population certainly was a decisive factor in certain key States such as Florida and Ohio, where political analysts thought that Mr. Kerry had a real chance of succeeding. Had he done so, he would have won the election by achieving a majority of electoral votes even though Mr. Bush surely would have won the popular vote. Moreover, the religious fundamentalists' massive turnout made certain that Mr. Bush won the States he was supposed to.

To some extent, one is reminded of the fundamentalist Hindu tide that brought the Bharatiya Janata Party and its allies to power in India during the 1990s. For them, it was a kind of redemption for the strident Hinduist fervour that V.D. Savarkar and his successors had injected into Indian politics around the turn of the Century, but ultimately went unfulfilled due to the moral and ideological impediments thrown in their path by Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru, and the Indian National Congress. The fundamentalist fever now seems to have abated somewhat if the 14th general elections are any criterion. India appears to be trending once again towards a more balanced and sensible secularism. Perhaps not as comprehensively so as the Gandhian-Nehuruvian synthesis. But significantly so nonetheless. Perhaps in the long run that will be the outcome in the U.S. as well. The ayatollahs of the American Right, like the Hindutvawallas in India and the Taliban in Afghanistan, may be destined to have their day and then pass into history once it becomes clear to ordinary Americans, as it did to a majority of ordinary Indians and Afghanis, the price that must be paid in terms of social repression and coercive violence for the certitudes that true believers inflict on their fellow citizens.

Singing psalms, waging pointless wars to conform the world to self-serving puritanical political doctrines, and compelling mindless conformity to obsolete moral codes that ban gay marriages, abortions and the teaching of evolution, eventually become a burden and a bore to people who just want to live moderate, sensible, mildly materialistic lives, no less than do the mantras and doctrinal jingoism of strident Hindus and jihadist Muslims.

In the meantime, however, America appears to be teetering on the brink of a neo-fascist twilight; of descending into `authoritarianism by acclamation' driven not so much by one type of fundamentalism, but by the convergence of three types of them. It is the ideological equivalent of the Perfect Storm, that legendary convergence of meteorological phenomena which produced a great natural disaster in the New England States some years ago.

Three types of `fundamentalism' have commingled within the embrace of the Bush administration. These are fundamentalist religion, fundamentalist political ideology, and corporate-driven free-market fundamentalism. This is what makes the immediate future look so depressing, and politically dangerous not only for America but the world.

It comes down to the fact that most of President Bush's key political managers and constituents are true believers in one or more of the aforementioned respects. Dismissing them merely as conventional power-seekers is an insufficient measure of the danger they represent. It has by now become commonplace to view Vice-President Dick Cheney, Defense Secretary Ronald Rumsfeld, Assistant Defense Secretaries Paul Wolfowitz and Douglas Feith, incoming Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, and their circle of neocon cohorts in the media and in the U.S. Congress for what they are: neoconservatives with an evangelistic vision of America's mission in the world. They would employ American power to compel the world "for its own good" to become a stereotyped version of "the American Way of Life."

Professor Eric Hobsbawm recently expressed it very well: "My view," he declared, is that "a group of neo-conservative Americans took this opportunity to, in effect, put forward their claim to world hegemony, world domination." It is their superficiality and naiveté that has led to the mounting fiasco in Iraq. Its outcome demonstrates "the limits of American power to remake the world." Now, ominously, they have a further four-year mandate to pursue this dubious mission!

The Christian evangelists, whose preachers and priests are America's equivalent of the political swamis and kar sevaks of the RSS and the Vishwa Hindu Parishad, and the mullahs and ayatollahs in Pakistan and the Middle East, fit in well with the arcane scenarios of the neocon political ideologues. They supply them with a reinforcing grassroots, religio-political fervour, which affords them legitimacy and ballot-box muscle. It was among this group that Mr. Bush's simplistic religiosity and patriotic fervour found their most resonant audience.

The third ingredient in the Perfect Storm is the American corporate community. Their economic magnitude and the capital resources available to them to influence the course of public policy are unprecedented in human history. The question is what do its dominant elements employ this massive concentration of economic wealth and power for? The answer is that among the private corporate sectors in the Free World, they are the least socially responsible. Their principal chief executives and their entourages of lobbyists and publicists preoccupy themselves in large part with evading taxes, amassing personal wealth at the expense of stock-holders and the public, and cloaking their rapacity in an outmoded doctrine of `free-enterprise capitalism' that would make even Adam Smith blush. They are so mired in their laissez faire orthodoxies that recently they bit the progressive hand that fed them. President Bill Clinton, and his Treasury Secretary, Robert Rubin, initiated policies of targeted taxation that saved the American business community from itself. In four years, they brought them unprecedented prosperity, and correlatively, of course, brought it to the American people. And, all this while producing a $3 trillion budget surplus!

Within one year of Mr. Bush's ascent to office, their lobbying power had so radically reduced their tax obligations that a massive budget surplus was converted into a gigantic and continually growing budget deficit. The result is that a war costing $6 billion a week must be funded by borrowing from abroad. Currently, says Washington Times Editor-at-Large, Arnaud de Borchgrave, "The United States' foreign creditors hold an estimated $11 trillion in U.S. `paper,' or 43 per cent of the superpower's privately held national debt, up 30 per cent since George W. Bush became the 43rd President." Virtually all of the environmental and social programmes designed to improve the lot and the life-quality of the poor, the middle-class and indeed the country as a whole which the Clinton administration had initiated are being systematically tokenised.

The Perfect Storm, in short, for the time being at least, threatens to swallow up every shred of progressivism and civility left in the American political bloodstream. The three fundamentalisms mutually reinforce one another. Their magnitude and cohesion pose a greater threat to progressivism and secularism in America than did the rise of the Hindu Right in India. For a very basic reason.

India's constitutional structure guarantees a highly pluralised polity that provides better safeguards against tyrannies of the majority than does America's. This was demonstrated during Indira Gandhi's Emergency in the 1970s. Her Congress faction could not sustain authoritarian rule for long in the face of the plethora of ideologically diversified opposition arrayed against her. During the 1990s, this same diversity of competing political perspectives prevented the proponents of Hindutva from gaining the majorities that would be required to impose their religio-cultural fundamentalism on the entire society. Political and demographic reality compelled the BJP to adopt consensualism. This was the meaning of Atal Bihari Vajpayee's Prime Ministership. He was the farthest the fundamentalists dared go in the face of India's ethno-social checks-and-balances.

America's constitutional structure, and its less complex pluralism, afford much greater scope for the imposition of fundamentalist scenarios. Executive power that is entrenched for four years, coupled with Republican majorities in both legislative branches, reinforced in the grass-roots by religious fundamentalism, and in the corporate sector by socially irresponsible, laissez faire economic orthodoxy, portend, for however long this Perfect Storm may last, a virtually irresistible plunge backward toward the jingoistic clichés and simple-minded verities that are the hallmark of authoritarian regimes wherever they arise. This is bad news not only for America but for the world.

(Harold Gould is a Visiting Scholar in the Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Virginia.)

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