The local media have joined in the handwringing and self-flagellation of their US compeers for missing the boat on the sentiments of the “ordinary voter” and thereby being completely flummoxed by the election of Donald Trump as the next president of the United States of America.
This lamentation, of course, follows the result of the UK’s “Brexit vote” which was also not predicted by the not so prescient “advanced” pollsters and pundits.
The analyses of those two events already can fill several libraries and will continue unabated for the next decade. But it is more than passing strange the local commentators have not realised an analogous phenomenon has been playing out for the last half century in Guyana and perchance they might be able to offer some advice to the perturbed parties up north.
In Guyana, for decades since the sixties, our political and chattering classes insisted that ordinary Guyanese were “mistaken” in identifying their political interests with their ethnic identity. They engaged in ponderous exegesis of texts written about the European experience and insisted that ethnic interests here were an “epiphenomenon” of more fundamental “class interests” and should therefore be ignored. When the ordinary people refused to buy this argument, which may or may not have been correct, the politicians then began to play a political game that has continued unchanged until very recently.
The reason why the political and chattering classes refused to concede the salience of ethnicity was because their world view was shaped by ideological premises that ethnicity and its “ties of sanguinity” were primeval and therefore “backward”. Class, on the other hand, came out of the “development of capitalism” and therefore was “modern” and progressive. “If only the ordinary voters would see the light,” was the cry by the politicians, even as they adjusted their mobilisation tactics to accommodate ethnicity.
We do not have to go into all the why’s and wherefore of the “ethnicity vs class” debate that helped to leave us mired in poverty since independence. Save to note that it all comes down to the insistence of elites that the epistemological bases of their theories are actually the ontological reality of their societies. Apart from their arrogant assumption that their “what ought to be” – jettisoning of ethnic interests – was right for their society, their public rhetoric became the “politically correct” posture and created increasing cynicism in the populace because of the chasm between rhetoric and reality.
In the UK and Britain, the premises of the neo-liberal “revolution” launched by Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan in the early 1980s became what they insisted was the reality of their people. The consequences of liberalisation – including free trade, globalisation and financialisation – privatisation and stabilisation had to lead to salutary results because the theories said so. A “rising tide would lift all ships” the leaders insisted. Even those across the political divide that were expected to oppose neo-liberalism – Labour in UK and the Democrats in the US – jumped aboard and ignored the inexorable widening of the distribution of wealth in their societies.
Tony Blair crafted his “Third Way” and Bill Clinton deregulated the financial architecture and courted Wall Street with even more fervour than Reagan.
For a while there was a rising economic tide, but as the consequences played out, the ordinary man was forced by his reality to challenge the orthodoxy.
As in Guyana, the media in the UK and the US are controlled by “those that know better” and who snootily look down at the cries of the ordinary citizen as the bleating of “rednecks and yahoos from the sticks.” Up to now the ordinary citizen was ignored. But we predict the politicians from both sides of the divide will now follow the lead of Donald Trump and be more responsive to their ground reality.
As to whether they will be more honest about articulating what drives that reality is left to be seen.
