Economic Justice and Democratic Survival
Featured image courtesy IndiaTimes
Social order starts breaking down if people are under profound stress. Then the default position is tribe – us/them, a hostility towards the unfamiliar or the unknown.Barack Obama[i]
In ‘The Obama Doctrine’, his long piece on the Obama Presidency, Jeffery Goldberg writes that Mr. Obama, reflecting on his failures in the Middle East, privately laments, “if only everyone could be like the Scandinavians, this could all be easy.”[ii]
Indeed, but a main part of being Scandinavian is getting economic growth-social justice equation right.
‘A New Beginning’ was the title of the speech President Obama gave at the University of Cairo in June 2009. The speech clearly indicated his determination to ‘reset’ the button on America’s relations with the Muslim world soured to an unprecedented degree by the criminal disasters of the Bush years. To drive in the point home, Mr. Obama avoided visiting Israel during this first visit to the Middle Eastern region.
When the Arab Spring arrived and the US not just allowed but also supported the peaceful ouster of two loyal tyrants, it looked as if Mr. Obama’s hope for a new beginning would be realised. But it didn’t take long for spring to regress, via a numbing winter and a discontented autumn, into a burning summer. The inability of the new governments to provide economic relief to the masses and the unwillingness of the Western world (America included) to sufficiently grasp the historic link between economic injustice and extremism played and continue to play an important role in the snuffing of democratic hope in the Middle East.
Tribal identities and atavistic emotions are what many people revert to when they fail economically. This retrogression happens even in places unfamiliar with tribalism, such as the United States. Donald Trump’s worrying success depends to a great degree on his acknowledgement of the inadequacies of the American economic recovery (presided over by President Obama). Mr. Trump talks to the whites who had fallen by the wayside and the whites who fear a similar fate for themselves or their children, attributing this plight to an influx of immigrants, ‘The Other’ who take away from ‘real Americans’ their jobs and their place in the sun. The fact that Mr. Trump employs low-waged immigrant labour in his own businesses does not matter to those white Americans whose minds are deranged by economic pain, political fear and primeval hate. Atavism is blind and inane, be it in Islamic Middle East, white-Christian America or Sinhala-Buddhist Sri Lanka.
Humane Development and Political Stability
