No Monopoly on Right or Virtue

My brief year and a half stint in the US was way back in 2000, long, long before Trump. Back then, I used to hear the words “liberal” and “conservative” used in American politics and it confused me greatly. Because “liberal” wasn’t always a positive term as used in their political debates. Nor was “conservative” always a negative term!

So what was going on? Much later, I finally got it. “Liberal” in American politics is the equivalent of “secular” in Indian politics. In other words, the dictionary meaning of those terms is totally different from what those terms mean in domestic politics. The former is the literal meaning of the term whereas the latter is based on how people who claim to follow that value actually act.

Fareed Zakaria, the CNN host, recently pointed out how accentuated this trend has become ever since Trump was elected:

“At the heart of liberty in the Western world has been freedom of speech. From the beginning, people understood that this meant protecting and listening to speech with which you disagreed.”

By definition, this included not drowning out “the ideas that we find offensive”.

But here’s what is happening today, says Zakaria, among the self-proclaimed liberals in the US:

“It's an attitude of self-righteousness that says we are so pure, we're so morally superior, we cannot bear to hear an idea with which we disagree… Liberals think they are tolerant but often they aren't.”

What they seem to forget, as Zakaria says, is that nobody “has a monopoly on right or virtue”.

Given how long the left leaners were in power in India, they’d forgotten that sometimes the other side would win. Yes, even the side they found abhorrent. At such times, instead of ranting about every single act by the other side, it would do well for them to remember what Zakaria says:

“Recognizing that while we seem so far apart, we do actually have a common destiny.”

Also, this being a democracy, their side will certainly come to power, later if not sooner.