Foreword

THEN CAME ALONG LUIGI MANGIONE to provide an epitaph of retribution to 2024 that not just America, considering his viral status on the internet, but the world itself could have lived without. The killer of America’s topmost healthcare executive had already become Our Man of Justice for a silent minority of young radicals before he was arrested. The mythicisation of the handsome 26-year-old Ivy Leaguer as the hottest assassin with a conscience—and calling his ‘fall’ a personaltragedy and the death of a business leader an inevitability—speaks of how seeking answers is a problematic choice for many, even if you live in the world’s most indulgent democracy. Adding the aura of folk heroism to a murderer, who also happens to be a devotee of Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, the mathematician who went on to become a killer-Luddite and anarchist-hermit of Montana, is a perverted revolutionary instinct which sees the means of wealth and the ways of capitalism as a corruption of humanity. This amoral morality, or wokeism with a 3D-printed pistol, is bound to be normalised, or even romanced, in a political environment where the extremism of the Left has already gone mainstream.

It may be the right to react that makes democracy a better choice, despite the sceptics’ alternative therapies that can fill a bookshelf. The Che Guevaraisation of Luigi Mangione by the radical residents of the internet only shows even dissent at times could be a disease in a democracy. Still, that is not what sets 2024 apart: it’s the year in which democracy had the widest canvas to play out its passions. The sheer number of elections itself was a measure of popular choice—and the right to react—that would make Luigi Mangione an aberration. True, ‘illiberal’ has become democracy’s most frequent adjective, and ‘autocracy’ its familiar evolutionary tale. The shrinking of civil society and the new definition of the Maximum Leader may have necessitated the alarmism over stage-managed democracy. In the year of elections, it’s clear that the robustness of the system can withstand the new strong leader, whose trajectory is perhaps the ideological event of 2024.

Earlier, the supreme leader could only build his empire on the inheritance of revolution; and it was his duty to define freedom according to the demands of the perfect state—or the purest state. Historians may have called their reign the Great Terror or other such rhyming horror but for the children of revolution, absolute power was a pre-requisite for the survival of the socialist state. The new maximum leader is very much a product of democracy, and whose reign is marked not by the restriction of freedom but by balancing freedom with cultural responsibility. He has become the consolidator of an alternative that defies the received wisdom of both Left and Right. He may be on the right side of the argument in a broader sense; what makes him a cultural interpreter of the nation is his allegiance to conservative ideals. Think of a Viktor Orbán in Hungary and a Javier Milei in Argentina—two kinetic forces in the politics of ideas. The first an apostle of national conservatism; the second a flamboyant disruptor who calls himself an anarcho-capitalist. If politics occasionally needs an infusion of ideas that can set off a new argument about the future, the Argentinean president provided one on wealth and well-being. In 2024, all the action was certainly on the right.

The play of the nation made it possible, and its chief protagonist was the man who, by the force of his faith in himself, would become politics’ biggest second-chance story. Donald Trump has been campaigning for the presidency since 2016. The humiliation of missing a second term to an anodyne Democrat in 2020 only hardened his fight for getting back what he, in the delirium of grievance, thought was stolen from him. With his sensational comeback, he has not just authored an epic in personal vindication; he has become the most influential American politi­cian since Ronald Reagan. The Gipper’s blue-blooded acolytes are unlikely to accept the conservative space modelled after Trumpism, but, as a counterpoint to entitlement and elitism, Force Trump waylaid a million pieties institutionalised by the Left, especially its progressive wing. He may have descended from the Golden Tower; he fronted America’s mobilisation of the right to react from below, embodying the ultimate strongman sanctified by democracy. Like the other strongmen in his league, what he sought most was restoring the nation—Make America Great Again. In 2024 they all sought validation from the nation.

That was the story from the other big democracy too, despite the cultural variation. Narendra Modi, the most popular leader in a democracy and whose endurance is only matched by the intimacy of his conversation with India, renews the covenant with every victory. The new strongman of the East is not, any longer, the market-friendly helmsman of the People’s Republic still afraid of democracy, the forever deferred Fifth Modernisation. He is democracy’s most rewarded leader today, and he, too, owes his success to the popular endorsement of his pledge to the nation. If it is the cultural shift in poli­tics that has made national conservatism the most widely shared ideological choice after Brexit and Trump, Narendra Modi’s India has given it the civili­sational flavour of Hinduism. Modernisation with a cultural accent is a national project that has been further validated by the India of 2024.

Alarmists may still argue that applied democracy has made the world more illiberal, that the market­ing of fear has superseded the promotion of free­dom. On the eve of 2025, we can only look back with gratitude: an outpouring of democratic instincts has not constrained but clarified freedom.

About The Author

S Prasannarajan

S Prasannarajan is the Editor of Open magazine

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