The flatterers of democracy

by Dimitrios Chatzifoteinos* 

And as hard it may be to propose the reforms needed to deal with a crisis, it is equally easy to target something as impersonal and vulnerable as democracy.

Of course, if democracies are actually so sensitive and frail, one should consider whether this is due to their inherent weaknesses or to flaws that can be amended. Perhaps this may initially seem as a complex question, but eventually it is not very difficult to be addressed. It helps to note that usually the same people who easily raise a question of democracy, are the ones who deify it. But if mechanical reproduction of slogans (such as “democracies have no dead-ends”) shows poverty of actual arguments and shallowness of reasoning, raising every social problem to a defeat of democracy does not only demonstrate a general inability of perception; it shows ulterior motives as well.

Throughout public discourse, the description of democracy as an achievement and not just as a political system, is absent. Understanding that maintaining and improving a democracy requires accountability, effort, defeats, perseverance, dedication, compromises, is deducted out of experience and not because there is some institutional facility to transmit such knowledge.

Hence, former US President Barack Obama included in his Athens speech some thoughts and determinations that eventually had to be loudly spoken out. In contrast with the general superficial tendency to introduce democracy as being naturally perfect and as an end in itself, even sometimes as inheritable, and in response to the sly who invoke it as panacea and as a magical solution that requires neither rationality nor honesty, nor self-criticism, Obama clarified that democracies are not happiness pills and they are not established by a divine right: we, the people, chose them because they provably promote civilization, they provably reduce wars, they provably support social justice.

And equally provably they may result to Trump. Political sense of Americans may differ to that of other nations, but people generally belonging in the common western culture appear to be similarly vulnerable to populism, to conspiracy theories, to dangerously ignorant leaderships and ultimately even to a legitimate corrosion of the basic institutions of their republics, via elections.

On February the 20th Trump stepped in the most powerful political office in the world. Some voted for him to build a wall on the Mexican border, others because they preferred him to Hillary Clinton, but most of his supporters were represented by him aesthetically. The rest, the ones who already are aware of the damage that his election will do to the West in general, who understand that things have a natural tendency to deteriorate and that improvement requires labour, will be difficult to find a reason for optimism, something to prevent them from the almost inevitable cynicism about the future and for the upcoming spins of history’s spiral. 

In Greece for example, after many years of financial crisis, the separation of these equivalent two opponent concepts is now more distinct, as it is clear that their battlefield lies on the European idea. Grexit was never permanently ruled out as an option and its supporters, hidden or overt, acquire as many arguments as granted to them by the state’s incapacity to consolidate its economy. Of course one would not champion an extremely onerous scenario, not even as a necessary evil, if not to prevent a much worse alternative; let alone doing it in openly and in public.

But those who promulgate Greece leaving the Eurozone and returning to drachma do not care for what numbers have to say about this endeavour or for documenting such opinion of theirs with evidence, there is no logical explanation other than that they believe that this option will be in fact beneficial, but not in the public interest: for themselves personally. As much such behaviour is profoundly anti-social and reveals lack of intelligence or moral barriers, it is one that can explain the momentum that populism has gained in the West and the political advancement of personas that are deeply problematic, not only politically, but on a private level as well.

In March 1974, the outgoing Chancellor of West Germany Willy Brandt reportedly commented that “Western Europe has only 20 or 30 more years of democracy left in it; after that it will slide, engineless and rudderless, under the surrounding sea of dictatorship”. If, over the last 40 years, there was something to prevent the fulfilment of this prophecy, it was the European Union. And this is exactly the reason that it has been targeted by those who have the naivety to believe that their interests today would best be served by an authoritarian regime and by isolationism, namely those who would willingly and voluntarily become the useful idiots of the few that will actually benefit from the defeat of the European idea.

*Military legal adviser in the Hellenic Ministry of Defense