The Elite In Retreat

THE BAD WORD of the new politics—new but its instincts are as old as a nation’s affinities—is ‘elite’. It’s the anger against a malignant minority that powers the politics of take-back-control. It’s the revenge of the abandoned and those who have lost faith in the lofty promises of mainstream parties. Their power was what made liberals panic in Europe, most feverishly in France, where the real winner in the parliamentary election, Marine Le Pen’s National Rally, wouldn’t be forming the government. And it was the anger against England’s natural party of governance that made Nigel Farage the real killer of Conservatives. What was quite staggering in these elections was not who could form the government but the fall of the political elite. It’s as if an obvious choice in a democracy now is the freedom to put the Establishment on trial.

The French story has Europe’s most ambitious centrist as the protagonist, with depleted defences against the radical majority. Emmanuel Macron, liberal elitism’s most alluring mascot, called for a snap parliamentary election when he was rattled by the radical right wave. The result snubbed him, and the far-right National Rally was denied power by a desperate coalition led by the radical left. Even as the ground beneath liberal elitism slipped away, the loser in the election took solace in postponing the right takeover of the Fifth Republic, just for the time being.

In Britain, whose essential social nature is conservative, Labour may have come to power with a historic mandate. Still, more than an endorsement of what Labour stood for, which was not clear apart from the generic slogan of change, it was an angry vote against a party which had five prime ministers in 14 years and consistently mocked popular sentiment. And all the while, Broken Britain was simmering with impatience. The ultra-conservative Farage tapped into it. What mattered in the end was not the number of seats his Reform UK won but the number of seats he made the Tories lose. The default English establishment was under attack.

The possibility of Donald Trump as the next president of the US completes the picture, for he has never fitted into a party straitjacket, Democrat (his original infatuation) or Republican (where he’s still an outsider they can’t avoid). The liberal elitism makes its incompatibility with the popular mind clearer by making the infirmity of the president a lesser evil than the character of the challenger, whose Americanism is shared by the Americans disgusted with the Establishment.

The rise of the new radicalism, left or right, is directly proportional to the decline of the mainstream—politics-as-usual. It may be the case that it’s safer to rule from the centre, no matter the plank on which you win the election. The centrists lost the argument with the grassroots and the middle class as their cosmopolitanism could not read the great disaffection. The most obvious cause was prosperity, and the future promised by the elitist, in London or Paris, was about how to get poorer. The slick salesmanship of a Sunak or the cultivated neo-renaissance spirit of a Macron could not reassure them. They have come to embody the hollowed-out mainstream.

It’s the social context of the politics of prosperity that the mainstream has misread most. For the new radical, the nation has become an endangered entity in the face of immigration, unchecked or unlawful. Preservation of the national character is a stronger political ambition than a world with free movement of people and ideas (of multicultural oneness). The popularity of Trump’s America is sustained by his campaign against the borders Biden can’t protect.

The radicals have become the defenders of the nation, which is getting poorer and culturally corroded. The conservative leadership, for a vast majority of conservatives, has abandoned the nation by abandoning the social morality of being conservative. Conservatives by nature are not expected to be revolutionaries, but they set the stage for revolutionaries from the left and right by failing the nation. The Brexit vision of a Greater Britain could not be realised by the winners of Brexit. The new radicals gain easy access to the mass mind by promising to correct betrayals in retrospect.

The radicals portray themselves as redeemers of the nation, and they win because the nation betrayed by the mainstream parties is more than a populist trope. In a world of technological wizardry and newer means of wealth creation, the diminished nation is a paradox, and the radicals have become its sole spokespersons. For so long elitism in politics rhymed with modernity, but it’s the modernists’ refusal to acknowledge the oldest instincts of the natives that makes it easier for the redeemer-subversives to win the argument against the present. The future is still a battlefield.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

S Prasannarajan is the Editor of Open magazine

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