Salvatore Babones is one of the most interesting policy writers you are unlikely to have seen. An American sociologist with a long and distinguished publication record in macrosociology, international inequality and statistical methods – he left the United States for Australia. In Australia, he has become a highly regarded centrist commentator on social issues. (He is still a sociology professor at the University of Sydney.) He has a long-standing interest in both India and China and writes about both prolifically. Readers seeking his first rate social policy discussions can find some of these in his Salvatore Babones Newsletter. https://newsletter.salvatorebabones.com/

I include in its entirety, a recent article he published in that newsletter on the Indian elections. These elections significantly reduced the percentage of parliament controlled by the ruling party, the Hindu nationalist party Bharatiya Janata.. India has a long-standing tradition of robust democracy.

Babones attributes the strength of Indian democracy to widespread patriotism in the Indian population. Talking up the benefits of patriotism may sound happy-sappy to those of us who got our “patriotism” in the form of deadly dull pious lectures in elementary school. However, I think Babones is on to a fundamental point.

Patriotism means one values the welfare of one’s entire country. In the United States today, we are likely to only value the welfare of our political faction. Progressives only value the welfare of progressive America. MAGAS only value the welfare of conservative America. Everyone only values how their side is doing. People on each side want to steamroller the other side. Mutual distrust is sky high.

Valuing the whole country rather than only part of one’s country implies respect for national institutions, respect for the rules of the game and respect for other people in one’s country as citizens deserving of respect. It means honoring the voice of all Americans rather than just the voice of “my” Americans. The United States had that in the 1940s and the 1950s. It did not have that in the era of the Civil War. We are steadily losing that now. Sal Babone’s take on this issue is informative.

See below.

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India's Elections: Is Patriotism the Key to Democracy?

Patriotism may be the reason why Indian democracy has survived when all its neighbors' democracies have failed.

Salvatore Babones

Leonard Mosley’s famous 1961 account of the partition of India, The Last Days of the British Raj, opens with what he considered the self-evident observation that:

You do not need to be a chemist, nor do you need to be in India for very long, before you realize that its widely disparate peoples have one thing in common: a remarkably low boiling point so far as political temper is concerned. Nowhere in the world does a mob respond so quickly or so saveagely to a firebrand’s call for action.

Yet India just held its 18th national election since independence, with only scattered reports of election-related violence. In fact, none of India’s elections — even those held following major outbreaks of civil unrest — has been accompanied by widespread violence. Indians do not riot after losing elections. They do not stage pogroms after winning elections. They accept the outcome, and start preparing for the next polls.

That may be why India’s democracy is rock-solid. Other democracies in countries with socioeconomic profiles that are similar to India’s have proven much more fragile. Consider that India’s GDP per capita is roughly on a par with that of Papua New Guinea (and half that of Indonesia). Or consider that India is surrounded by Pakistan, Afghanistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka. And then consider India’s democratic track record. It is truly phenomenal.

One major (though not the only) challenge to democracy in these other countries has been a lack of consensus among their populations on common membership in a single national community. Most Western democratic scaremongering focuses on the supposed threat from Nazi and Fascist takeovers, but in reality civil war has been a much more frequent cause of democratic collapse. Just think about the only real crisis of American democracy: that’s right, it was a civil war.

Or to paraphrase the American Declaration of Independence: “When in the course of human events, it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another,” all hell breaks loose.

It was with these considerations in mind that I penned my most recent contribution to The Australian:

· Indian Elections Demonstrate that Patriotism Is the Key to Democracy

It’s paywalled (sorry), but the gist of the article is that “in the fragile and febrile environment of a poor developing country, widespread respect for national institutions is needed for democracy to survive” — and good, old-fashioned patriotism is simplest and most straightforward way to ensure that people respect their national institutions.

Survey data from the Pew Research Center show 96 per cent of Indians believe that to be ‘truly Indian’ it is important to stand for the national anthem, 94 per cent believe it is important to respect the country’s laws, and 95 per cent believe it is important to respect the military. In other words, nearly everyone is what we might broadly define as ‘patriotic’. I don’t have comparative data for other countries, but I can’t imagine that many countries match these kinds of figures.

Most political scientists seem to believe that this kind of knee-jerk patriotism is the first step on the slippery slope to dictatorship. But the poor, postcolonial South does not face the same challenges as the rich, postmodern West. When leading American politicians proclaim that the United States is a ‘racist’ country rampant with ‘white supremacy’ (especially among its police forces), there is little danger that members of non-white racial groups will rise up in armed rebellion. Try that trick in Papua New Guinea, and the result is deadly violence at the polls.

Patriotism is certainly not the only ‘social requisite of democracy’, to use Seymour Martin Lipset’s famous phrase. But it is perhaps one of the most important, especially for new countries with contested national identities. More than a century after the death of sociology’s founding father Emile Durkheim, social scientists still don’t understand the origins of social solidarity. To a great extent, we have given up trying. Maybe it’s time that we went back to basics, seeking to understand what keeps society together, instead of focusing so much of our attention on the ways we can pick it apart.

Congratulations, India, on an election well-fought — and best wishes for many more.