LIMITATIONS OF DEMOCRACY
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The electoral victories in late 2023 shocked the enlightened liberal opinion. First, the victory of Freedom Party (run by Geert Wilders) which became the strongest party in the Dutch parliament. Since Wilders is anti-immigrant, anti-feminist and anti-EU, this result may signal the final death-blow to the EU. They are both specific variations on the right-wing turn.
Usually, people who advocate socially liberal attitudes (pro gay and abortion, etc.) are also open to immigration and oppose islamophobia; Wilders – in a way which is quite logical – combines socially liberal attitudes (he is pro-gay and pro-abortion, etc.) with an anti-immigrant stance. He is “trying to protect the liberalism Dutch people currently enjoy. He’s pro-gay and women’s rights and doesn’t want to see immigration from Muslim countries undermining that. He’d see it as intolerance of intolerance.”[1] Wilders’ position thus in a way brings out the inconsistency of the Left-liberals who advocate Wokeism and trans values but at the same time show great sensitivity for cultural differences when someone demands the same values to be applied in a critical way also to Muslims (for the Left-liberals, to cover your head is for a Muslim woman not a mark of male oppression but a free choice to avoid becoming an object of male gaze). The standard liberal credo is that Muslim women should be free to choose (to wear a veil or not) but the notion of choice is here largely an illusion: women from Muslim families do not live in neutral air above concrete historical universals, they live in a concrete world which severely limits their choices. If they make a “wrong” choice, they risk a total excommunication from their life-world which can sometimes even endanger their lives.
The standard “radical” Leftist reaction to this is the one proposed years ago by Alain Badiou: cultural differences are secondary, one should focus on the essential – the antagonisms of the global capitalism (how our poor workers and immigrants are both exploited by the big capital, with capital using cheap immigrant workers to keep the wages of our own workers low, etc.). Cultural differences are thus mobilised to cover up the true differences which run across the system itself, and with regard to which both sides (our poor and the immigrants) are on the same side… OK, but why, then, are so many ordinary people caught in racist passions? Hard work awaits us here, we can’t just dismiss half of Dutch and Argentinian people as crazy, or laugh at them for falling into a trap – if we laugh at them too much we may well die laughing. The fact is that the rise of new liberal populists like Wilders and Milei demonstrate how there is a whole strata of dissatisfaction which we, the liberal “enlightened” guys, ignore, a strata which cannot be reduced just to deeply embedded traditional racism.
Another strategy used by the liberal Left to avoid confronting the true problem is to assume guilt: OK, there is some immigrant fundamentalism, but we are guilty for it because we are not ready to integrate immigrants… really? What if many immigrants don’t want to integrate? The old Marxist saying is that proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains – however, many of today’s immigrants enjoy their ideological chains and are in no way ready to drop them. This is why we should abandon the search for a privileged agent (“revolutionary subject”) that could set in motion a radical emancipatory project insofar as its objective social position deprives it of traditional ideological illusions. Plus, last but not least, do OUR fundamentalists also not also have the right to practice their way of life?
This, then, brings us to Argentina, to the victory of Javier Milei, a self- designated “anarcho-capitalist” who, on November 19 2023, won Argentina’s presidency on a platform which advocates that the only way to make the poor less poor is to first make the rich even richer. Milei follows Donald Trump, who declares himself the partisan of the impoverished (white) working class – the perversity of his politics is that “devastating the working class was actually part of the plan: now that the American middle class has gone from over 60% of us down to a mere 43% of us, Republicans are trying to harness the outrage people are feeling and then use it to tear our society apart. Out of the chaos, they believe they can rebuild a nation on the foundations of hypermasculinity, racism, religious bigotry, misogyny, homophobia, and threats of violence.“[2]
So, you first cause a catastrophe for the ordinary people and then you present yourself as their saviour… This logic was brought to its extreme by Milei who promised to “slash government spending, dollarise the economy and eliminate the Central Bank as well as key ministries, including those of health and education. An admirer of former US President Donald Trump, he has likewise presented himself as a crusader against the sinister creep of global socialism with plans to purge the government of corrupt establishment politicians.”[3]
What Milei means by anarcho-capitalism became clear when, in his electoral campaign, he seriously proposed (as a means to reduce extreme poverty) to legalize the sale of human organs and of children by the poor - this is anarcho-capitalism at its worst, extending our freedom to the “free” sale of parts of our own body.[4] Such a notion of freedom is so perverted that the figure of a leader preaching it cannot any longer sustain its own dignity: it has to act as a directly obscene master. K.S. Arsh is right to point out that the obscene masters “now dominate the political field. India is, I believe, a good example where what may have been the facade of the last few decades, of capitalism with a human face, has been brutally stripped off in the last 9 years with the BJP in parliament enjoying an overwhelming majority. Yet, this I think is discernibly no simple majority as the right wing party still relies on even threats of direct violence as an electoral strategy when it is fighting pitched electoral battles such as in the state of Karnataka against the more centrist Congress party. Amit Shah, the ex-president and senior leader of the BJP went on to threaten riots on the streets if Congress were to win. This flirting with danger has become almost a rhetorical signature of the right wing authoritarian party in the recent decade and voices which support such a stance include Modi himself who once said what amounted to ‘Yes, there is a fear that now runs through the country. This is a fear instilled in traitors and it is good.’”[5]
In such conditions, every stance of religious fundamentalism immanently turns into its opposite; a figure of moral decay. Our basic moral edifice is not just hypocritical (as it always-already was), it loses even the hypocritical force of appearance – in it and with it, appearance effectively becomes just an appearance, no longer an appearance which contains its own truth. Along these lines, Arundhati Roy’s remarked that, if the Gaza bombing will go on, then “the moral architecture of western liberalism will cease to exist. It was always hypocritical, we know. But even that provided some sort of shelter. That shelter is disappearing before our eyes.”[6]
Crucial is here the idea that, in spite of its hypocrisy (or, why not, because of it and through it) the liberal moral edifice nonetheless “provided some sort of shelter.” Why not simply say that the disappearance of the hypocritical shelter is a good thing since, in the US at least, as Malcolm X said, “democracy is hypocrisy,”[7] so that, by way of dispelling hypocrisy, it will enable us to construct a more authentic moral edifice? The answer is that hypocrisy is infinitely superior to any brutal display of violence: it keeps alive standards which allow us to judge what we are doing. At a more general level, the same goes for universal human rights: yes, they were hypocritical, but they set in motion a long process of their self-rectification. Brutal dictatorships dispel with appearances of formal freedom, and what we get is not actual freedom but the rule of naked force.
This is why one should insist on “universal” topics like human rights and resist the temptation to “deconstruct” them as a tool of imperialist domination, against the anti-Western self-destructive stance of cancel culture. However, to complicate the situation even more, it is important to approach the question of democracy without taboos, not only in Third World countries. One should be absolutely without any prejudice: when society cannot come to terms with itself, even the army can play a positive role. The intervention of the army is not necessarily reactionary or Fascist, it can also be progressive, as was the case in Portugal when the army overthrew the Salazar regime, or in some Latino American countries. Since today’s civil society is also immanently antagonistic, it is often a fact that civil society resists the state’s progressive measures (anti-racism and anti-sexism).
So when we are witnessing a rightist populist rebellion, there is no excuse for not ruthlessly using state mechanisms of repression - when the Capitol was invaded by the Trump mob on January 6 2021, the police should have intervened with all force. If Trump wins the next election, one cannot exclude the possibility that the US Army will have to exert pressure to maintain civil peace. When there were public protests in Algeria and Egypt (mostly organised by an educated secular youth), it compelled the military elite to allow free elections, the silent majority of Muslim fundamentalists won, so the liberal-secular protesters grudgingly approved a new military takeover. If there were to be “true” democratic elections in Gaza, how can we be sure that Hamas would not win again? What if the common phrase “Palestinians in Gaza are not Hamas” is false and obfuscates a deeper link?
What this means is that a true emancipation of the Palestinians does NOT have to go through their acceptance of Western liberal democracy. There is also a case to be made for enlightened dictatorship – take Ruanda, one of the African success stories, with Paul Kagame as its enlightened de facto dictator who enforced peace between Hutus and Tutsis and brought relative peace and prosperity. If he were to be overthrown, ethnic tension would flare up again in free elections. Western democracy is not universally applicable even in the West itself. Jon Elster was right to remark apropos the notion, fashionable today, of democracy under threat: “We can reverse the common dictum that democracy is under threat, and affirm that democracy is the threat, at least in its short-termist populist form.”[8]
Exactly as in the case of Cancel Culture where the threat to inclusion and diversity are inclusion and diversity themselves (when they are practiced in a way that shows/displays extreme exclusion). This tension echoes another one: although partisans of trans claim they have nothing against the standard heterosexuality, they just want all forms of sexuality to be accepted as equal, they de facto sustain a suspicion that heterosexuality is as such excluding other forms as inferior, so that to guarantee actual inclusion and diversity one has to keep heterosexuality in a subordinated position.
[1] Geert Wilders is just the latest example of how British people misunderstand the Dutch (msn.com)
[2] Republicans are fiddling with fascism while the shutdown is looming | Opinion (msn.com).
[3] 'Non-negotiable': Argentina's president wants to wrestle Falkland Islands back from UK (msn.com).
[4] One good thing about Milei is nonetheless that his victory marks the end of the reign of Peronism which was the main reason for the economic falling behind of Argentina from 1930s.
[5] K.S.Arsh (personal communication). The obverse of this obscenity is a new trend of brutally attacking politicians as stupid we can observe all around the world - see the campaign against Justin Trudeau in Canada and US and against Annalena Baerbock in Germany.
[6] Arundhati Roy: The siege of Gaza is a crime against humanity. The world must intervene (scroll.in).
[7] Malcolm X Speech "Democracy is Hypocrisy" - YouTube.
[8] Jon Elster, ‘Some Notes on “Populism”‘, Philosophy and Social Criticism, vol. 46, no. 4 (2020)..
I think the wrench in this formula is the force of evangelical Christianity in American culture — you couldn’t have a pro-abortion populist in America because these positions are separated by the gulf of evangelicalism and the two-party system. Every time I’m in Europe, I’m a bit taken aback by how their party lines are so much more transient.
Perhaps my largest critique of Marx’s ideas is that he often operated under the presumption of knowing what is best for the “proletariat” whilst genuinely being too far removed from them throughout his formative and even adult life (despite running out of money during his later years). I think he nailed the nature of bourgeois on the head largely because he was enveloped and educated alongside those very circles.
Where I see the intellectual Left stumble most often, is they often operate under these very similar false presumptions of knowing what’s best for peoples whom they do not thoroughly understand. To the point where they come off as chiding and elitist, and therefore to the average member of the working class - untrustworthy.