Modi, who believes that ancient Indians flew aeroplanes, combines his historical revisionism and nationalism with a revolutionary futurism. He understands that resonant sentiments, images and symbols rather than rational argument or accurate history galvanize isolated individuals. Mazzini and then Sorel had insisted that myths are necessary to involve and mobilize ordinary human beings in mass politics, along with leaders who embody the collective agent of history. The early twentieth century produced many such myths and leaders across Europe; and in The Revolt of the Masses (1930), José Ortega y Gasset voiced a paternalist liberal’s complaint against the arrival of ‘raving, frenetic, exorbitant politics that claims to replace all knowledge’.
It is now the fate of many more countries to suffer the avalanches of bitter know-nothingism, or myths, that the Spanish philosopher feared. Marshalling large armies of trolls and twitter bots against various ‘enemies’ of the people, the contemporary demagogues seem as aware as Marshall McLuhan that digital communications help create and consolidate new mythologies of unity and community. Yet the despotisms of our age of individualism are soft rather than hard – democratic rather than totalitarian – and they emerge as much from below as from the strongmen on top. Today’s raving, frenetic, exorbitant politics – an extravagantly rhetorical idealism about nation, race and culture – is often the product of people unconnected to political parties or movements. It is also they who appear willing to give up hard-won civil liberties, and acquiesce in, even zealously support, pre-emptive war, extrajudicial killings and torture.
Tocqueville captured the phenomenon of invisibly creeping despotism in atomized societies devoted to the pursuit of wealth when he wrote that people ‘in their intense and exclusive anxiety to make a fortune’ can ‘lose sight of the close connection that exists between the private fortune of each and the prosperity of all. It is not necessary to do violence to such a people in order to strip them of the rights they enjoy; they themselves willingly loosen their hold.’
There is also something else going on in societies defined by the equality of conditions. Claiming to be meritocratic and egalitarian, they incite individuals to compare themselves with others and appraise themselves in an overall hierarchy of values and culture. Since actual mobility is achieved only by a few, the quest for some unmistakable proof of superior status and identity replaces the ideal of success for many. Consequently, the pitiless dichotomy of us-versus-them at the foundation of modern nationalism is reinforced.
People seek self-esteem through a sense of belonging to a group defined by ethnicity, religion, race or common culture. Mass media, popular culture and demagogues fulfil and manipulate their need for psychological dependency, and fill up their imaginative lives with a range of virtual enemies: immigrants, Muslims, liberals, unbelievers and the media itself. Professional groups, such as doctors, lawyers, small businessmen, once categorized as the petite bourgeoisie, are particularly prone to thinking of themselves as besieged.
If they belong to ethnic and racial minorities, they feel the inequality of opportunity most intensely. The postcolonial world since the mid-twentieth century has experienced multiple insurgencies by people who felt cut off from their share of power and privilege: Tamils in Sri Lanka, Kashmiris and Nagas in India, Muslims in the Philippines. But what explains the fact that many individuals among even relatively privileged majorities stand ready to support murderous leaders?
A ‘taste for well-being’, Tocqueville wrote, ‘easily comes to terms with any government that allows it to find satisfaction’ – and any kind of atrocity, he might have added. Modi, as he rose frictionlessly and swiftly from disgrace to respectability, did not only attract academics, writers and journalists who had failed to flourish under the old regime – the embittered pedantocrats and wannabes who traditionally serve in the intellectual rearguard of illiberal movements. Ratan Tata, the steel-and car-making tycoon, was one of the first big industrialists to embrace Modi in the wake of the anti-Muslim pogrom in 2002. Mukesh Ambani, another business magnate and owner of a twenty-seven-storey home in the city of slums, Mumbai, soon hailed his ‘grand vision’. His brother declared Modi ‘king among kings’.
At the same time, Modi positioned himself in the gap that a democracy dominated by a liberal elite had opened between itself and ambitious lower middle-class Hindus. Claiming to be a self-made man, he accused this elite of pampering Muslims while condescending to honest Hindus, and preventing them from unleashing their entrepreneurial energies. He made many poorly educated, underprivileged laggards – people brought up on Ayn Randian clichés of ambition, iron willpower and striving – feel masters of their individual destinies.
In their indifference to the common good, single-minded pursuit of private happiness, and narcissistic identification with an apparently ruthless strongman and uninhibited loudmouth, Modi’s angry voters mirror many electorates around the world – people gratified rather than appalled by trash-talk and the slaughter of old conventions. The new horizons of individual desire and fear opened up by the neoliberal world economy do not favour democracy or human rights.
In 2016 middle-class voters in the Philippines overwhelmingly chose Rodrigo Duterte as the country’s president, at least partly because he brazenly flaunted his expertise in the extrajudicial killing of criminals.
Modi’s assault on Muslims – already India’s most depressed and demoralized minority – may seem wholly gratuitous. But it was an electorally bountiful pogrom; it brought him a landslide victory just three months later, and now seems to have been an initiation rite for a ‘New India’ defined by individual self-interest.
This is why Modi only superficially resembles the European and Japanese demagogues of the early twentieth century who responded to the many crises of capitalism and democracy by merging corporate and political power, and embarking on massive state projects explicitly negating the axioms of liberal individualism. He and his fellow strongmen, supervising bloody purges of economically enervated and unproductive people, and consecrated by big election victories, are exponents of the dog-eat-dog politics and economy of the early twenty-first century.
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