As I have previously confessed, I became a Tory at the age of six. This was riding home from St Anthony’s, on the crossbar of our family servant’s bicycle, through an angry crowd in Lahore. He’d been sent to fetch me from danger. This beloved man, Bill, whose turban revealed him to be a Christian, chose a long route home, to skirt the crowd. But there was no avoiding them, and in the course of our wild ride, I distinctly remember blood and corpses. The crowd was demanding, as I recall, death for the hostages from a hijacked Indian aeroplane, but in the absence of its intended victims, began taking its violence out on itself. Yairs, a lurid spectacle.
I was not so precocious: it took me twenty more years to sort out what I might mean by the word “Tory.” But the view itself began in Hobbesian fear, that day, with my discovery that “the people” stink. They are mindless animals, and put some wrath in them, they will lose their bashfulness. And of course, not only in West Pakistan; for gradually one makes the further discovery that “the people are the people are the people” everywhere. They need to be tamed, cautioned, repressed, sometimes caged. My response to misty-eyed rhetoric for “democracy” is unfavourable. “Populism” is, in my sight, unambiguously evil — even when its cause be, for the moment, just. Given more time, and the inevitable failure to achieve immediate goals, the cause itself will turn rancid.
David Warren, “Crowds & powers”, Essays in Idleness, 2016-11-08.
November 23, 2019
QotD: Populism and democracy
Comments Off on QotD: Populism and democracy
No Comments
No comments yet.
RSS feed for comments on this post.
Sorry, the comment form is closed at this time.
