IT is important for an intellectual position not only to be right but to be right for the right reasons; and the near-universal condemnation of Donald Trump’s aggressive imposition of tariffs, though right, is right for the wrong reasons. A pervasive presumption underlying such condemnation has been that unrestricted trade is a good thing for all concerned; and that Trump, in deviating from this maxim, is being both nasty and stupid.

THE Trump administration’s current clamp-down on free speech in the United States is eerily reminiscent of the 1950s when there had been a witch-hunt led by Senator Joseph McCarthy that had not only victimised a whole generation of artistes and intellectuals on the charge of being Communists, but had also left a deep negative imprint on the creative life of that country for decades to come.

DONALD Trump’s foreign policy has left commentators in a real tizzy. His markedly differing positions with regard to Ukraine and Gaza, in the first case apparently pursuing peace, and in the second asking for ethnic cleansing of an entire population, have left them wondering whether his influence on world affairs is a “positive” one or not.

GEORG Lukacs, the renowned Marxist philosopher had once remarked that “even the worst socialism was better than the best capitalism”. That remark made in 1969 and repeated in 1971, no doubt on the basis of Lukacs’ perception of actually existing socialism in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe with which he was familiar, had been treated sceptically even in Western Left circles at the time.

WELL-known Marxist scholar, the late Amalendu Guha, had argued persuasively that in modern India there co-existed in the minds of the people a dual national consciousness: a local, regional-linguistic nationality consciousness, of being a Bengali, or a Tamil, or a Gujarati or an Odiya; and also simultaneously an overarching pan-Indian consciousness. This duality, he had argued, had to be cognized and accepted; an over-emphasis on either one to the exclusion of the other would produce a dangerous reaction.