The Limits of Alternatives

AS A POLITICAL LABEL, No Labels is a no-brainer. It should be something that comes naturally to the Great Disillusioned in any democracy where the available choices are badly damaged. No Labels, as a ‘movement’, began more than a decade ago in America; now, it senses an urgency, and gets the attention it thinks it deserves in a broken America where labels such as ‘conservative’ and ‘liberal’ have been made irrelevant by their practitioners. Labels, dammit. All the good men and women, from left and right and centre, and driven by commonsense, have been invited to join the unity movement, which, its organisers claim, has more than a million members, among them Republicans, Democrats and independents. According to their ‘Insurance Policy 2024’, “No Labels is working to ensure Americans have the choice to vote for a presidential ticket that features strong, effective, and honest leaders who will commit to working closely with both parties to find the commonsense solutions to America’s biggest problems.” Translation: America needs someone other than Joe Biden and Donald Trump in the White House. This bipartisan idealism may result in a No Labels candidate if the contest becomes a replay of 2020.

De-labelling political nirvana is an honourable mission when a fossilised president with a penchant for verbal faux pas (which no media outlet is indexing as they did with his predecessor’s lies) is most likely to be challenged by his old nemesis still steeped in vengeance and grievance. If Democrats who have not abandoned reason prefer a non-Biden in 2024, and if Republicans tired of one man’s personal agenda of injustice want a non-Trump, No Labels, which is led by veterans from both sides, will introduce a candidate of reason. It’s not about who it will be, if at all there’ll be one. It is about alternatives: what we need is not a revolution but a better version of what we dreamed of once; not a rejection of traditions but a renovation of the present. That is the sentiment alternatives like No Labels, which is elitist in its loftier presentation and safely non-committal in its course of the middle path, tap into in the expanding marketplace of disenchantment. It is as if a movement for change need not go beyond the limited endeavour in restoring decencies in politics and lowering the temperature in argument. Alternatives have limited expectations.

Except perhaps in technology. Switching from Twitter to Threads may not be the perfect example because it is hardly a choice between the old and the new. It’s a choice between the old and the new old. And for the ideologically motivated, it was the end of the search for a Twitter de-Muskified. It is too early to say whether it’s the end, but what is certain is that the billionaire with a libertarian bent of mind, and who is not sufficiently anti-Trump, continues to assault their moral choices. An imitation Twitter soothes the conscience a bit. There are others who use the new because it is new.

Revolution is elsewhere, in AI, and I must resist an argument about its ethical and human cost in every other oped column I see nowadays. As someone has already said, it doesn’t matter if writers and actors go on an indefinite strike in Hollywood. The smarter non-human will write the script for the next Bond, and the alternative to Daniel Craig could be better toned and wired. Who knows, I may live to read The Brothers Karamazov without the Karamazovs, set in the Nineties Mumbai, written by a machine. We don’t know how long imagination and intuition will remain as the last preserves of humanity, and we don’t know how enslaving or liberating it will be to live in a world we once called science fiction. When Darwin is being reprogrammed by Aldous Huxley, we get an idea of what alternatives mean. Still, didn’t we know what was coming? Isn’t the present wonder taking cue from what the humans imagined yesterday? Alternatives have ceased to surprise.

And certainly when a gaggle of incompatibles, suddenly inspired by the sloganeering possibilities of an acronym, fantasises about winning India by chanting I-N-D-I-A. This name of the biggest tent in Indian politics is seen by some as clever. It may have the cleverness of an undergraduate competition on patriotism, desperately seeking words, no matter how unoriginal or clumsy, to fit what the contestants think is a blockbuster invocation. Imagine our current contestants in the newly formed opposition alliance on the stump, asking India to vote for INDIA, so pleased with the phonetics of unity. The problem is that, the corniness of the invocation apart, their collective mind is too small and provincial to contain the real India. Acronyms can’t redeem all those damaged pols envisioning an alternative to Narendra Modi’s India from Bengaluru.

The limits of alternatives do not minimise the passion for change, even if INDIA is home to people who are left behind by India.

AAPBJPCongressDaniel CraigideologyIndiaIndian politicsNarendra Modi