Style over substance in politics and religion

A consideration of Democrats and Divali

A warm welcome to new subscribers in the past two months. I’m glad you’re here. To everyone else, I have been absent again because I was taking another writing course. I’m a masochist because I also started a high-pressure job two months ago. Posts will be less frequent while I get my footing, not that you were waiting with bated breath. I appreciate you all, and know I have been somewhat delinquent in answering comments. Digital overload is real.

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The assessment of style as superior to substance in public and private life is a perpetual thorn in my side. I’m thinking about the truth of our electoral process and the recent entry of Hindu festivals into mass American culture.

Democrats: the symbolic power pantsuit

I’ve written about my issues with Democrats at length, chief among which is that they will always reach for soaring rhetoric and deliver little or nothing once in office. This election is a contest of style on both ends. Trump voters value that he says what he thinks and see his drivel as unvarnished truth. Similarly, many Harris voters and partisan Dems usually refuse to admit that the party has made any major missteps in the past thirty years.

For Democrats, power is an end rather than a means. Once attained, they cling to it for dear life and pander to the right (in their own or the other party) to be the adults in the room. The current polarized atmosphere, though, has seen the opposite. They often refuse to work with Republicans, even on issues that should be bipartisan, although recently, they have surprised. Their frequent, maddening tendency is to be too scared to lose power if they attempt sweeping change, as though the point of winning elections is to warm a seat rather than do something for people.

Another tendency is to insist that the effects of the neoliberal economic consensus in the past thirty years were negligible which tacitly says that they don’t need working-class white voters to win. Black faces in high places, as Cornel West observed, are the salve for their historic base of working-class Black people. Lately, they’ve also been pandering to the other groups through representation. It is a hollow politics that is frankly embarrassing.

Diversification of the elite isn’t a solution for rank wealth and income inequality, but the rank and file will broadly not engage on this topic in good faith. We are exhorted to be excited about Harris’s person and her symbolic representation of ‘progress’. That she frequently speaks in platitudes and nonsensical statements is to be swept under the rug. The one thing I will give her is that she’s photogenic, and it’s about time we had a hot president. But our last hot president, Obama, did nothing for regular people. I expect the same with Harris, who had a landslide victory in the billionaire primary in 2020. Yes, I understand. I have no other choice, thanks. There are, nevertheless, former Dems who will vote for Trump because they cannot stand the lefty PMC who control the direction of the party.

But, you protest; she’s released some economic policies recently! I saw a silly Instagram video with some Zoomer asking how she plans to make having children affordable. Harris is supposedly working with builders to increase the housing supply by three million units. But Auntie Kamala, how exactly are you going to incentivize private entities through a morass of federal, state, and local laws to build these houses? How will you ensure they’re in decent school districts for those hoping to have kids? And how will you ensure they’re reasonably priced starter homes? Why would builders not just make higher-priced homes for the demand we know exists in spades?

That 25k in down payment assistance sure sounds nice, but that amount is nothing when the median home price is >400k for something pathetically small. The cherry on top is that buyers who hope to finance are being outbid by the rich, who can give cash offers to tear down that old home worth 400k to build another worth over a million. This does not address the private equity problem of buying apartments and houses.

Hillary complained that Bernie tried to sell ‘ten-minute abs’; this is no different, and maybe the lesson is that all politicians behave thus, so it shouldn’t matter. Now, perhaps I might be more inclined to believe anything Harris says. Still, she has a history of changing her beliefs and political commitments on a dime according to what the managerial class would prefer.

It’s not the same as changing your mind with new information because she suddenly reneged on every leftist belief she adopted in 2019. I’ve heard many Democrats hope that she would run back toward her record as a prosecutor and moderate, which she has, but that’s not because she realized that her flip flop to leftism and back was wrong, but that the ideology is unpopular with suburban whites and many people of color (something underappreciated).

It’s not that I think Trump is somehow less terrible or is worthy of election. It’s that I expect Harris to be better. I expect her to talk to men as a distinct constituency, whereas right now, she is solely talking to women with her campaign. Her primary issues are those that animate women, and no president will have a mandate by losing men entirely. Trump similarly didn’t have a mandate because he lost women.

Men and women are diverging politically at an alarming rate, especially those under thirty. This bodes terribly for their future family formation prospects since almost no one dates across party lines anymore. Women have become among the most dogmatic about not considering men who don’t agree with every single thing they believe, and I’m sorry, but that’s insane. Suppose women are unwilling to consider any man who isn’t as far to the left as they are; good luck finding a partner. Men with college degrees are increasingly scarce, and women don’t date down. So the math of the situation comes out disfavoring women with college degrees.

The question must be asked if I expected Harris and Clinton to be better than they are because they’re women. The answer is yes. I expect them to be better people than Trump because they’re Democrats, and I’ve always expected Democrats to be better than Republicans; perhaps this is my mistake. I also expect women who men have victimized to use their power with more consideration and empathy than men have toward us. If we’re going to get power, we better not abuse it. However, the sad truth is that both men and women abuse power. As I’ve also written before, there are plenty of terrible women out there. Simply having been victimized doesn’t make a person morally superior. I don’t see this as discriminatory; rather, it is a reasonable requirement for a woman leader of the free world who has herself experienced discrimination.

Style over substance in Divali, the festival of lights

Hindus, referred to as ‘Indians,’ celebrate a holiday a week in the fall. Hindu festivals are national holidays in India despite its secular status, and the majority of people of Indian descent in the U.S. are Hindus. Brahmins dominate. All such celebrations reflect how geography and polity shape diasporic communities. Many of you probably living in prim suburbs have Hindu neighbors and will have seen the elder generation walking in the evenings.

Several festivals specific to certain regions are celebrated in the diaspora, but I will focus here on the most visible, Divali (or Deepavali, depending on a Hindu's regional origin).

Divali is celebrated for a few mythological events. First, Rama (Raam), an incarnation of Vishnu, returned to his homeland, Ayodhya, after defeating the asura king Ravana (Raa-vuhn). Ravana had kidnapped Rama’s wife, Sita, in a fit of lust and terrible judgment. The people lit lamps anticipating Rama’s arrival, so we clean our houses and put ghee lamps in clay cups on our suburban porches. Asura is roughly translated to demon, but that’s not technically accurate. Ravana was half Brahmin and highly learned, also known as an exalted devotee of Shiva. We still recite a mantra to Shiva that Ravana is said to have composed.

Paired with Divali is also a set of rituals to invite Lakshmi, the goddess of prosperity, into your home. She is Vishnu’s consort and the goddess incarnated as Rama’s kidnapped wife, Sita. The kidnapping metaphor illustrates that momentary arrogance and lust can unravel the most upstanding person.

Invariably, this holiday is described as symbolic of the victory of good over evil, but this banal cliché makes my eye twitch. We’ve seen people as essentially ‘good’ or ‘evil,’ especially in politics, leaving for an impoverished culture. No one is either; actions have valence, but people do not. You may act morally or malevolently, but it doesn’t determine your fundamental character forever.

Decisions we make in all contexts affect whether we can assess ourselves as ethical. If you’re upstanding in one part of life and unethical in another, can you conclude that you’re a ‘good’ person? We are too quick to label ourselves as ‘good’ because it’s easy to become trapped by categorical thinking. But one has to start over every day and act virtuously, especially when there’s no one around to notice. We’ve come to make virtue a public signal of our character, which has corrupted it. Leftist identity ideology is odious for this and several other reasons.

Divali has become a celebration of style over substance, much like Democrats. It’s now about exclusive parties and Instagram cachet rather than family, god, and introspection. This is due not in small part to the Hindu diaspora being far more prosperous than any other ethnic group in the U.S. and upper caste Hindus (because who we consider “Indians” are just this) having increased visibility in the media.

These days, the prayers to Lakshmi are largely about material wealth than religious significance. Religious significance has been removed, as though Divali has nothing to do with Hindu philosophy and ideas. I’ve returned to religion, so I find this to be perhaps as big of an issue as Christians take with Christmas having been secularized and consumerized. I get it. I’m starting to wonder if I have more in common with religious and conservative people these days than my liberal and anti-religious peers. I don’t know what to do with this yet. A non-zero amount of you probably think I’m a conservative, and you may be correct. I’m having a crisis of identity at the moment.

So the next time someone tells you that these holidays (including the nine nights of the goddess, not included here) are about the victory of good over evil, remember that good and evil as essences don’t exist in the world. It is a matter of your karma, not your thoughts. Performative liberalism of guilty, privileged people doesn’t make them good or virtuous. Virtue is only the result of deliberately cultivating the self rather than one’s political beliefs. Sadly, we see it as the result of the latter.

Happy Divali.