by Ian Hansen, PhD
Pointless War #3: The War on “Bourgeois” Liberty and Democracy
Finally, consider liberty-protecting electoral democracy. Over in these “Western” parts we adore liberty-protecting electoral democracy, of course. But other world players have considered it so evil that Der Fuhrers, Dear Leaders, Big Brothers, Generalissimos, Chairmans and Commandantes have all felt obliged to smash and destroy it with totalitarian enslavement, sometimes garnished with genocide. Though their methods may have seemed harsh, these figures imagined they were merely breaking the eggs necessary to make beautiful, radiant omelets, like, say a thousand-year Reich of Righteousness from the fascist/Nazi side, or True Democracy from the totalitarian communist side (“democracy” embodied in obsequious groveling obedience to The Party). In the totalitarian view, legally-protected liberty and the electoral-parliamentary forms of democracy were the eggs that had to be smashed in order to prevent them from poisoning people’s minds away from these utopian projects. Totalitarians feared that “Western”-style individual liberty and electoral parliamentary democracy would turn the precious volk into capitalists, selfish individualists, bourgeois liberals and rejectors of civilization and sublimity.
But Kerala defies both forms of totalitarian genocidal expectations by being a liberty-protecting, parliamentary democratic kind of place where communism flourishes politically and religion flourishes culturally. Kerala has hammer and sickle flags flying all over. It also bills itself as “God’s own country,” with ordinary people praying, God-believing and religious service-attending as far as the eye can see. So liberty-protecting electoral democracy in Kerala did not destroy either communism or religion there, as totalitarian genocidals might have imagined it would.
And, for that matter, declining to destroy communism and religion did not lead to the implosion of liberty and democracy in Kerala, as anti-communists and anti-religionists might have imagined it would. If anything, bourgeois “Western” electoral parliamentary democracy and individual liberty have grown stronger in Kerala over the years. And they’ve been growing in a fertile soil that combines regularly-elected communism with indigenous or indigenized Indian religions.
In another article, “Reconsidering Communism, Religion and Liberty-Protecting Democracy Through the Lens of Kerala” I present detailed empirical evidence that Kerala is a delightfully free and peaceful communism-inclined state, a delightfully free and peaceful religion-inclined culture, and a delightfully free and peaceful liberty-protecting democratic political entity. I nevertheless argue that in none of these particulars is Kerala an “exception that proves the rule,” at least not in the usual sense of the phrase. Kerala is not, in other words, a bright spot for X (X being communism, or religion, or liberty-protecting democracy) that just throws into sharper relief how repulsively evil X usually is by nature.
When avoiding post-hoc-ergo-propter-hoc fallacies and other failures to account for confounds, the relevant empirical data points in a surprising direction. The data suggests that communism, religion and liberty-protecting electoral democracy are all somewhat salutary to peace and freedom and thus are compatible with each other in their most basic, stripped down, core value-grounded forms. Want to spend another half hour wading through my prose so you can see that data? Read the article here, and don’t forget to click the links.