Dear Editor, I Disagree: America’s politics has shifted after midterms. Has its society?
Indian Express - Opinion · Published 11 November 2026 · Last updated
American political midterms and diversity victories may prove to be a mirage unless the deeper cultural crisis of escalating intolerance and binary discourse across both social and political spheres is addressed.
Key points
- Recent midterm outcomes renewed hope that diversity and inclusion will regain space in American public life.
- Author Bakshi argued that celebrating political outcomes is insufficient because intolerance is not limited to any single side of the social and political sphere.
- The biggest danger to democratic common ground, whether in the US or elsewhere, is that discussions are increasingly being forced into a binary straitjacket.
- The decimation of nuance and grey areas has unfolded over decades due to shifts in technology, mass media mechanisms, and the rise of spin doctors in electoral politics.
- Hillary Clinton made a statement during the 2016 election campaign describing Donald Trump's supporters as a basket of deplorables, which allegedly worsened the cultural crisis.
- The author attended college in Washington, DC, in the late 1970s as a brown woman and experienced an unspoken social understanding where racial prejudices were kept under wraps rather than flaunted.
- In Hindi, the cultural concept of keeping prejudice hidden behind a veil of social shame is referred to as 'ankh ki sharam'.
- Extremist-liberal discourse tends to denounce such hidden prejudice as hypocrisy or doublespeak, while extremist-right-wing discourse terms it weakness or impotence.
- The civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr succeeded by simultaneously recognizing the reality of an unequal society and persuading it to change.
- Martin King Jr held the conviction that African Americans could not secure a better status unless White Americans were simultaneously healed and transformed from within.
Background
- Over decades, structural developments including shifts in mass media and electoral politics progressively eroded the cultural and moral common ground in Western societies.
- The 2016 US presidential election featured intense polarization marked by prominent rhetorical divides between candidates and their respective supporters.
- Historically, the civil rights movement led by Martin Luther King Jr engaged with deep-seated racial inequalities through sustained moral persuasion and peaceful social pressure rather than rigid binary divisions.
Prelims facts and Mains angle for this issue are in the full SWAदेSH note.
Original report: Indian Express - Opinion