U.S. President-elect Donald Trump. (Reuters)
Nov 27, 2024 19:27 IST First published on: Nov 27, 2024 at 19:14 IST
Now that the cadaver of the Kamala Harris campaign is being subject to various autopsies, a phrase that is often being heard by pundits and triumphant Republicans is “common sense”, and how the Democrats’ distance from it is a major cause of their defeat. In this narrative, the Democratic Party’s emphasis on identity politics and “woke agenda” and emphasis on issues such as transgender rights alienated them from the average American voter. To their credit, the pundits and Republicans are right about common sense, but for all the wrong reasons.
“Common sense” has always enjoyed a hallowed status in American politics and was the title of Thomas Paine’s famous 1775 pamphlet, in which he argued that the case for America’s freedom from Britain was “common sense”, thus implying that it was self-evident. It is important to note here the dual sense in which Paine was employing common sense. By calling independence common sensical, he was trying to convert what was then a wild idea into something commonplace by claiming that most people ought to believe it because of its inherent “sense” or logic. Conversely, because an idea is common, it becomes an obvious truth or, not requiring any further scrutiny. It is this mundane or obvious nature that gives common sense its power. Common sense can thus simultaneously refer to mundane social reality as it exists (exemplified by the phrase “But that’s common sense!”), and a rhetorical blueprint employed to mould social reality in a preferred direction. In the former avatar, common sense is a stable, almost static form of social reality — a corpus of unchanging ideas.
Most proponents of the “common-sense” diagnosis of the American elections focus on this static understanding. Thus, Trump is (rightly) credited with appealing to certain common-sense beliefs of the American public or making his ideas seem more legitimate by calling them common-sensical. For a population that has been wrecked by decades of inequality and precarity thanks to a bipartisan consensus on neoliberalism, blaming immigrants provides a credible explanation for their problems. And if we were to subscribe to this explanation of a static and homogenous common sense, then the Democrats would have no choice but to pander to the lowest common denominator (which they did). Politics, in this imagination, is reduced to being an instrument of the status quo.
However, common sense is not unchanging — in fact, it is not even consistent. To quote Antonio Gramsci, “One can find there anything that one likes”. While this makes matters more complicated, it also opens opportunities for alternate forms of politics. Political actors can thus go beyond aligning themselves with common sense, they can simultaneously refashion and recreate it by engaging elements of it ignored by their opponents. Common sense here is a terrain which all claimants to political power must navigate and wield to their advantage. But this requires a long-term and sustained approach to politics. So, when we say Trump is tapping into American common sense, it is not a bunch of always-existing ideas, but a decades-long project of sociopolitical engineering by the Republicans that created this common sense.
This is precisely where the current dominance of the global right stems from — it is based on a decades-long refashioning of common sense through the cultivation of popular culture, media, and institutions at the ground level. The liberals/centrists (not to be confused with the left) have largely neglected this and thus have failed to offer an alternate political imagination. Thus, even their successes have been either non-existent or limited, whether it is the opposition in India, or the Democrats’ brief return to power during the Biden administration. Even in Britain, the thumping Labour victory is not an endorsement of Kier Starmer’s tepid vision, but rather a frustration with the Conservative Party (but not their ideas). Much like Kamala Harris, the post-Corbyn Labour Party represents an acquiescence to conservative common-sense and not a break with it. What is perhaps more worrying is that this acquiescence is partially willful — for the centrists, a rightwing return to power that maintains the status quo is implicitly preferable to the dangerous calls for restructuring the world economy and politics in favour of the have-nots.
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Thus, given their inability (or lack of will) to create a new common sense, the advice of the liberal/centrist establishment is to fall back on the existing one. So, the Democratic Party will advocate for stronger borders like Trump, Kier Starmer will stay mum on Gaza, and the Congress party in Himachal Pradesh will look on as minority establishments are vandalised. While it may look like I am drawing a long and flimsy connection between New York and Nahan, they are symptomatic of the same crisis — an age of political opposition without political alternatives.
The author is an Assistant Professor of International Relations, Ashoka University. Views are personal
