Kanishk Tharoor

Kanishk Tharoor is associate editor at openDemocracy. He recently escaped to London from Yale, where he graduated magna cum laude with BAs in History and Literature. He is a published and award-winning author of short fiction. His writings on politics and culture have also been published in  the Guardian, The National, The Hindu, The Times of India, The Telegraph (Calcutta), the Virginia Quarterly Review and YaleGlobal Online. 

Recent articles

A recent piece on Politico takes the temperature of the Republican base, and sees it reaching feverish desperation. The mood at recent McCain-Palin rallies has turned more "frenzied" and "visceral". Examples of this nastier turn can be seen in the video posted on openUSA yesterday. Are such demonstrations of emotion admissions of impending defeat? Or inklings of a last ditch Republican tactical coup? More likely the former. As Tom Ash pointed out this week, negative campaigning doesn't seem to work.

The video below has been doing the rounds in the liberal blogosphere. Filmed at a McCain-Palin rally in Ohio, it edits together the "ignorance" and racism of supporters of the Republican ticket. I find it difficult to watch, in part because I don't know what to make of those filmed (Do they really believe what they say? How "representative" are they?), and in part because of their casual dismissal by those who watch them (see the comments beneath the original posting).

Growing up in New York, I remember thinking of the "hinterland" as a strange and fictitious world (a disease especially common in New York perhaps). Now, I'm made all the more uncomfortable and uncertain when that world (the interior, the Red state) is made "real" to me (to the coast, to the Blue state) in the shape of caricature. What can we take from videos like this, and what shouldn't we?

03:35 It's over. Early verdict: a stalemate leaning towards McCain. Obama's cerebral tone doesn't lend itself to the (stiff) informality of town-hall debates. But the Democrat chose deliberately to speak up to the American public. Will that make a difference? Can McCain's optimism help Americans forget about the economy that threatens to destroy his campaign (first) and then his country?

03:33 "What I don't know is what the unexpected will be" ... McCain lapses into Rumsfeldian prose.

03:25 A veteran raises the spectre of US involvement in an Iran-Israel war. McCain pets the veteran. Yuck. His answer is quite yuck, too.

Obama speaks sensitively about the vulnerable state of Iran's internal energy infrastructure. 

03:22 Obama on the Georgia crisis: "We should anticipate these challenges and not just be reactive." Obama-style pre-emption?

03:19 McCain recalls Putin's strange K-G-B contact lenses. Spouts nonsense about the Russian threat. Most Americans will probably soak this stuff up anyway.

03:16 This live-blogger is happy... Brokaw's asking good questions, makes the candidates respond to British defeatism in Afghanistan. Obama hits out at the Karzai government. McCain bigs up Petraeus. Throughout this entire debate, McCain has seemed the optimist and Obama the gloomy pessimist. What happened to Hope?

03:14 Bang! Obama brings up McCain's crazy song about bombing Iran, his desire to attack Iraq, and obliterate North Korea. 

03:10 McCain correctly taking Obama to task for his earlier misguided comments about attacking Pakistan. He also slyly suggests that Obama carries a "small stick" (as opposed to Teddy Roosevelt's and his "big stick").

03:08 Best question from the audience so far! Should we treat Pakistan like we treated Cambodia in the Vietnam war? What say you, Barack? Obama quite cautiously emphasises coordination, but promises to "kill" and "crush" al-Qaida.

03:07 Hanoi Hilton, take a bow! 

03:03 Brokaw wades in: What is the Obama doctrine regarding humanitarian intervention? Obama: all atrocities "diminish us", but we can't be everywhere at the same time, we have to "mobilise the international community". Taking community organising to the world stage. 

02:57 Obama: Healthcare is a right. Government must crack down on insurance companies. Clear, honest and different from McCain. I stand corrected.

02:53 McCain's talking down to Americans in explaining his health care plan, and he's winning. Cerebral and detailed is going to fly over a lot of people's heads (including this sleepy one).

02:50 Obama looks solemn and tired, McCain's much more jovial and casual. This really isn't Barack's debate format.

02:47 Obama makes a robust case for his climate change policy, but then McCain links him to a Bush-Cheney energy bill. The cheek!

02:44 McCain mentions Joe Lieberman A LOT. How does that make Sarah feel?

02:43 Brokaw has African Americans ask McCain questions, and elderly whites ask Obama. A bit tacky.

02:40 A window for the Democrat: Can Obama defend his tax plan convincingly? Yes. Confident and smooth.

02:33 McCain talks emptily about all Americans "working together". Obama mentions expanding PeaceCorps. But Obama's floundering here a bit: he's talking vaguely about specifics, not helping his tax argument. The Republican senses it and compares Obama to Herbert Hoover. Ouch.

02:29 McCain confronts defence spending head-on, criticises contractors. Obama may find this disarming.

02:27 Obama: "in ten years, we'll be free of Middle Eastern oil." Not. Going. To. Happen.

02:23 McCain not happy that Obama bought a projector for a planetarium in Chicago. Damn straight. Can't people in pork-barrel Chicago just look at the sky? 

02:20 Ok, maybe that was a bit harsh (but bankers are workers, too, no?). McCain plugs his bi-partisanship credentials again. What's more life-sapping than bi-partisanship? The diffuse energy of town-hall debates.

02:18 McCain: "American workers are the most innovative in the world." So innovative they can turn a world superpower into a financial basket case.

02:12 Obama scores big points. Takes on the question directly and in detail... and mentions McCain's Fannie/Freddie lobbyist.  

02:11 Warren Buffet getting shot-outs from both candidates. McCain launches into a defence of the "suspension" of his campaign before tying Obama to Fannie/Freddie (who was that McCain advisor lobbying for again?). The question was about the bail-out.

02:06 Answering his first question, McCain gets awfully close to the audience and predictably doesn't say anything specific.

02:04 Obama not afraid to mention the Great Depression straight away. Strong. Invokes the middle class (whatever idyll/idol that is). Less strong.

02:00 Cup of tea, check. Pajamas, check. Anodyne BBC intro, check. Here we go. Take us there, Mr. Brokaw!

Ahead of the second Presidential debate tonight, there's food for thought on the New York Times. Three leading economists suggest questions that would best steer debate on the important aspects of the current financial crisis. Joseph Stiglitz, the former Nobel laureate, offers the most left-of-centre frame, while the others take centrist and free-market turns.

Tom Nairn, the eminent Scottish scholar of nationalism, has a provocative piece over on OurKingdom. He revisits Ernest Gellner's modernist theory of nations in which former "imperial" polities - dubbed "Megalomanias" - would give way to more limited, ethnically-delineated states, or "Ruritanias". The transition, for instance, from the Austro-Hungarian empire to the patchwork of states that included Gellner's native Czechoslovakia was that of a single megalomania to a number of ruritanias. So too would the devolution of the United Kingdom - and the rise of small states like Scotland and Wales - follow this trajectory. Nairn goes further, probing how the heartlands of former "megalomanias" are coping with the strains of contemporary globalisation, and in the process he takes a backhanded swipe at Barack Obama.

Globalisation has thus far been cramped and distorted by such left-overs. That is, the residual areas and populations of ex-Megalomanes forced to abandon Bigger-is-Better, but without (so far) discovering any coherent alternative. Ex-heartlands like "Spain" (Castile-Aragon), "England" (United Kingdom minus its archipelago peripheries), hexagonal "France" as distinct from the Bretons, Occitans and Savoiards, peninsular "Italy" (famously distinct from actual "Italians"), Federal-Russians deprived of some of their "other Russias", and Americans less concerned with leading and inspiring Mankind (along the lines favoured by Presidential candidate Obama). Over-addicted to Greatness, such light-house populations (and above all their intellectual elites) find (e.g.) ‘little Spain’, ‘little England’, ‘isolationist’ USA etc. uninspiring. [emphasis added]

The inclusion of America and Obama here is quite unfair. I'm not quite convinced in the first place that the US counts as a "megalomania" in the same way as its trans-Atlantic counterparts (Gellner and Nairn seem to operate with an understanding of the nation and the state mostly informed by the 20th century European experience). But even if we were to accept Gellner's and Nairn's taxonomy, it is incorrect and far too casual to think of Obama as simply some icon of the coasts, the ambassador of America's urbane "light-house populations".

Of course, Obama is incredibly popular in cosmopolitan America, and uniquely mistrusted in the deepest of American ruritanias, the Appalachians. But the very fact that the McCain campaign has already surrendered Michigan - one of the many post-industrial peripheries created by globalisation in the country - suggests that there is real "provincial" substance to Obama. He can win in ruritania. Neither Obama nor McCain exclusively embody the internationalist or isolationist tendencies of American politics. Nor do the hinterlands of America uniformly clamour for some anachronistic separation from the world. To assume otherwise is to fall into that trap - to which Europeans have proven dispiritingly vulnerable - of simplifying American politics and, worse, simplifying American people.