Nerve Endings Firing Away

The term liberalism is sprinkled freely in the political diatribes all over the world. But very little is known about liberalism itself. When Howard Dean launched his presidential campaign by exhorting that he belonged to the democratic wing of the Democratic Party, he was received with loud cheers and shouts of joy. Being a moderate, oscillating between the extremes of liberalism and conservatism has always been politically correct and his uncharacteristic statement did not go well with his peers. During my pre-graduate school days, I always likened liberalistic values with cultural norms and equated conservatism in America to be resentful of foreign immigrants. The protection of the “American ethic” was considered supreme to conservative values. Similarly ousting Coke and IBM in the late 70s can be considered a protectionist move by the blatantly conservative Janata Party in India.

I wasn’t totally wrong about the value differentiation but slowly enriched by knowledge of economics, I realized that it was more than the value system that defined this polarization of loyalties. The market behavior is propounded to be a precursor to the inherent value and belief system of the citizens. Conservatives normally prefer a greater role of the state in determining the social welfare of the society. They prefer an overarching parent body to decide what is best for us because the state ought to know. On the other hand, the liberals prefer to let the market decide allocation of resources. They prefer minimal state intervention in the nation’s economy. Based on that knowledge, BJP would be considered a hardcore conservative party promoting nationalism and acting protectionist in the Congress era. But the spate of privatization led by the redoubtable Arun Shourie leads us to think otherwise. So then was Congress more or less conservative than the BJP, considering that it withheld liberalization of the economy for four unproductive (relatively) decades? The values of course are a part of the system. Liberalists empower individual behavior and choice in varied fields; abortion, sexual preference, immigrant acceptance to name a few; as opposed to state-supervised behavior by conservatives in the same set of fields. The latest example being the legislative intervention to reinsert the feeding tube for Terri Schiavo in face of her family deciding otherwise. But in this case, it may seem justified. So it may be difficult to brand oneself as a liberal or conservative if we oscillate between positions depending on the scenario. The blurring of demarcations has just made the scene rosier for the moderates.

Based on this quagmire, liberalism can be divided into democratic liberalism, commercial or economic liberalism, sociological liberalism and regulatory liberalism. Democratic liberalism being the most controversial often depends on the perception of liberalism amongst your peers. Pakistan may claim to be a democracy but India’s refusal to accept the skewed election of a pompous army general doesn’t give it universal acceptance. Countries that claim to be a democracy have to be considered as such by other democratic powers and often will not have major conflicts. The primary conflicts in the past century have been on ideological grounds of democracy and liberalism be it the World Wars or the Cold war. We can safely espouse the Mac Donalds’ theory that countries that have Mac Donalds do not engage in conflict hereby suggesting coherence of values namely liberalistic values in this case.

This brings us back to the dilemma of being something that others do not think you are. I started off my Saturday post with this thought but rambled on a divergent philosophical track. Grounding that on existing realities, do democracies necessarily have to adhere to liberal values and be seen as doing that? Do opinions of other so-called democracies matter? But doesn’t that implicitly mean that power is the controlling factor here — “you are not a democracy because I say so”. Hasn’t the United States used this argument on numerous occasions — some good, some bad? The recent conflict to liberate the Iraqi people sounds like a forced shift towards liberalism. Of course, Saddam was a cruel man but maybe Iraqis necessarily do not want to decide their own fate. They rather prefer it if someone is looking after them. The same applies for people who rather prefer it if someone takes care of them rather than undergo the dissonance that follows self-made decisions.

Shall I link this to the arranged marriage debate? Nah! That is always an entire topic by itself and redundant too. I have subjected you to enough political lessons already. Feel free to differ though.