Modified¶
The Outside in preemptive disillusionment with Indian reaction in power is already on record. Nevertheless, this is going to be big. Over half a billion people went to the polls to make it happen. Progressive teleology isn’t heading where it’s supposed to. (UK communist media are covering it quite well.)
Congress, one of the most despicable political organizations on earth, has been crushed like a bug. The implications of that are roughly comparable to the detonation of a dirty nuke at Davos, so a modest period of celebration would be wholly understandable. Unfortunately, while Modi’s historic victory is a massive global lurch to reaction, it is also a surreptitious triumph of democracy, and we’ve seen the way this plays out before.
From the Thatcher / Reagan experience in the West, there are lessons about the democratic limitation of general application to the Right. The first, already briefly touched upon in the previous Modi post, is that democracy demands populism. Since capitalistic deregulation triggers a demagogic counter-attack from the Left, it is inevitably supported — politically — by a platform of ‘social conservatism’ that is driven into ever cruder atavism, until it cannibalizes the policy agenda of the government. The more a regime seeks, under democratic conditions, to move the economy rightwards, the more it is politically compelled to appeal to tribal emotion, while diverting its energies into totemism. Eventually, all that remains is a culture war, in which a confused Right is reduced to the pre-defeated posture of seeking to slow change down. When the pendulum swings — as democracy ensures it will — it exposes the archetypal political truth: a fast-left party then replaces a slow-left party, with the eventually victory of ‘progress’ never having been seriously in doubt.
Any democratic ‘right-wing’ party in power has won an election, and is thus infused with a sense of its popular virility. This is a psychological catastrophe — and in fact a latent psychosis — from which it never recovers. The ratchet, patiently, continues.
Democratic politics also corrodes right-wing economic policy even more directly. The lesson from Reaganism is especially stark. From the beginning, political competence is expressed by a single dominant insight: any gains made by a right-wing administration in the direction of fiscal responsibility is simply a savings account for the opposition. It can be predicated, with absolute confidence, that each step painfully taken away from public insolvency will be reversed, with opposite political sign, as soon as the Left gets its turn once again. Thus, the Reaganite stance that any intelligent conservative government is bound to the proclamation ‘deficits don’t matter’. It is only by keeping public finances hard up against the edge of bankruptcy that fiscal laxity can be prevented from reverting to its natural state, as a fund available for the promotion of leftward social acceleration. Private saving is profoundly compromised by democratic governance. Public saving — or even moderated indebtedness — is simply impossible.
There is no way at all that Modi can restore Indian fiscal health under the democratic conditions he inherits (and which he will certainly preserve). The idea that he might attempt to do so is a delusion.
Nevertheless, there are things a Modi regime could do, which are worth doing. In rough order of priority and practicality they include:
(1) A holocaust of red-tape, in the interest of industrialization. The Indian manufacturing sector, employing approximately 15% of the workforce, is half the size that might be expected if business conditions were less impaired by legal-bureaucratic obstruction. Huge economic gains could be made relatively quickly if companies could be created more easily and closed down without any need for official permission, while hiring and firing employees according to market signals. Modi knows enough to see what is required. First ask the Marxists to describe their most nightmarish conception of an exploitative capitalist labor-market, and then do that.
(2) While fiscal continence is politically impossible, it should at least be possible to re-orient public spending towards infrastructure (and away from transfer payments). Copying China would be sensible. High-speed rail networks, urban mass-transit systems, roads, power grids, water and sewerage, high-bandwidth communications, space-programs … since vast amounts of public money have to be wasted, those are the ways to do it. They accumulate capital, create business opportunities and employment, teach technical skills, and leave something real behind when the bubbles pop.
(3) Scrap as many affirmative action quotas as possible. This is an opportunity to do cynical culture wars stuff that actually does some good.
(4) Prepare for the return of the Left, by decentralizing government, empowering the states, reducing inter-regional economic transfers, innovating constitutional obstacles to socialist policy, and building right-wing economic redoubts capable of resisting a future Leftist central administration. This is all very obvious, but it’s equally obvious why even seriously conservative central governments find it difficult to do. It would help if they more clearly understood that they’re going to lose — that’s what democracy means — so they should seize the opportunity to get their revenge in first.
NRx shouldn’t make a fool of itself by getting excited about Modi. What’s happening in India isn’t nothing, though. It’s nowhere close to being nothing.
ADDED: Tavleen Singh —
… I tweeted that I had covered every election since 1977 and had never seen anything like the frenetic fervour of the crowds on the streets of Benaras. This caused a torrent of insults on Twitter, so I went that evening to Papu’s chai shop for a reality check. At this teashop in a teeming, squalid square near the Assi Ghat gather politicians, thinkers, philosophers, political analysts and students. They sit on wooden benches near an open drain and discuss the problems of the world. On an earlier visit, I discovered that the level of political discourse was higher than in Delhi because people speak without worrying about being labelled ‘fascist’ or ‘communal’.
ADDED: Some cautious optimism from Geeta Anand and Gordon Fairclough in the WSJ, but: “Modi is unlikely to substantially undo any of the subsidy programs on which millions rely for jobs and food. […] Analysts think big-bang reforms, such as changing labor laws to let companies hire and fire more easily or undertaking large-scale privatizations of state enterprises, are unlikely.” Still — “Tales of [Modi’s] bravery are chronicled in a comic book that shows him swimming through crocodile-infested waters to plant a flag on top of a Hindu temple.”