Where is Western democracy going?

Bismarck, the historic German leader, is said to have said: “If we do not care about the poor, they will care about politics.” When the poor turn to politics, believing that it is the source of all the affliction, the rules of the game change. Whichever route they take, the street or the ballot box, the results are often disastrous. Political life continues steadily, or shall we say democracy, as long as the poor decide to ignore it, as Hannah Arendt noted in her famous work, “The Sources of Totalitarianism.”

To keep the game away from sabotage, American democracy - for example - was engineered in such a way that it offers peaceful options, but does not offer them at the same time. American opinion polls indicate that half of voters abstain from the two men: Trump and Biden. The American nation seems to be standing on the brink of an abyss, as it has the opportunity to choose between a man who has reached the ugliness of his age, and another with a scandalous criminal record. The American version of “managed” democracy does not provide alternative options for the half of the population who have come to be referred to as those who hate both men. It is a game of the minority in the name of the majority, as Roger Garaudy argued in the 1990s.

Garudi had calculated, through a mathematical process, that Bill Clinton ruled America, and thus the world, with the votes of 15 percent of his people. Chomsky had previously noted a complete correspondence between the two liberal and communist views of the role of “demagogues” in political life, excluding them from it because they lack merit and because they are game-breakers.

Chomsky referred to communist and capitalist theorists who said the same thing in two different ways. In the Fairmont Hotel, San Francisco, hundreds of industrialists and wealthy people gathered in 1995 AD, and decided to proceed with creating more “distractions” that would keep the disadvantaged and the less well-off from being interested in the political game.

Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's national security adviser, gave the idea an interesting name: Titty-Tainment, a portmanteau of the words Titty, meaning lollipop, and Entertainment. When viewed from the outside, liberal democracy seems invulnerable and escaping chaos. The historical context of democracy provides many examples that call into question this claim.

In the Republic, Plato discussed the possibility that the most dangerous models of dictatorship could arise out of the loosest democratic experiments. The Weimar German government, which emerged after World War I, was based on a democratic system that included more than seventy parties.

Germany had never known such a democratic situation before. When political life expands in this way, it usually creates a dysfunctional system. The King of Italy was standing helpless as he saw political life in his country fragmented into dozens of warring parties.

The two democratic models: German and Italian - in the first half of the last century - led to Nazism and fascism. The two countries were blessed with an enormous amount of weak democracy, and this was enough to paralyze all public life. This is an ideal environment for the emergence of populist and fascist phenomena. The Germans rebuilt their democratic model after World War II, and so did the Italians. In the political space, fragmented populist parties continued to emerge, until we reached the present moment, which is a difficult moment for Western democracy.

Instead of satirizing populist parties, the American political thinker Mearsheimer suggests that the West should recognize a basic fact, which is that these populist phenomena are an expression of a structural deficiency in liberal democracy, and did not arise on their own.

Six European countries are under the rule of the extreme right: Italy, Slovakia, Finland, Hungary, Croatia, and the Czech Republic. Other countries where the right stands at the doorstep: Germany, the Netherlands, and Sweden. Under the roof of the European Parliament, right-wing parties were divided into two groups: Identity and Democracy, and conservative reformists.

Last year, 2023, Matthijs Roudain, a political science professor at the University of Amsterdam, and his team conducted a survey of 31 European countries. According to the research, 32% of European voters chose “anti-establishment” parties in the 2022 elections in their countries.

The percentage of supporters of radical “anti-establishment” parties did not exceed 12% in the 1990s.

These parties promise to provide a “strong man.” It seems that the strong man is what the "demagogues" want to see. It is a model of salvation in the northern societies’ unconsciousness about the coming of the Savior when the waves crash. A study conducted by the University of Leipzig last year said that more than half of Germans prefer a strong man to rule the country.

In 2020, a large number of press reporters who visited Trump's election festivals noticed that his voters were insisting on saying that they would bring Trump to discipline them all. In these public outbursts, voters were unable to define who was meant by “all of them.” In the end, the masses who had always suffered the most damage from the chaos of politics simply wanted revenge. That is, to ruin the game, as Hannah Arendt predicted half a century ago, and as Bismarck guessed more than a century ago.

The punishment inflicted by the people on the Conservative Party in Britain was described as historic, and the British nation had never turned its back on a ruling party in this way in centuries.
With reference to Gaza, the Guardian newspaper reminded its readers, in the first days of the war, of the demonstrations that took place to denounce the war on Iraq. The newspaper said; The millions who came out in London in 2003 were unable to stop the war, and likewise the millions who came out to denounce the war on Gaza will be unable.

Political power, whether autocratic or democratic, is not always invincible. From time to time, the mob, as Lenin liked to say, finds a way into the stadium. Why are 22 people playing, and hundreds of thousands sitting in the stands? Why not the opposite, Gaddafi wondered one day in his Green Book.

The Labor Party does not have a magic solution, and there are those who quip: He was elected only once, as his voters will soon see that he has gone down the closed road. Project Syndicate columnist Anatole Kalitsky saw Labour's victory from the same angle: the Tories are being punished, but the winner will accomplish nothing and be no different from the vanquished. The problems created by democratic chaos have become more complex than they can be contained during a single electoral period.

Kaletsky referred to the aphorism of Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa in the novel "The Leopard": "Everything must change in order for everything to remain the same." According to Kalitsky, it is an ideal recipe for escaping revolutions.

The Labor Party may make many changes that do not affect the complex and inflammatory content. He cannot touch the British-American complicity in foreign policy, as in the position on the wars in Gaza and Ukraine.

It is not surprising that the Conservative Party ignored the millions who called for stopping the war on Gaza, as Thatcher previously said: Society does not exist. It would take a long time to explain the reasons that led to the “collapse of tectonic plates” in British politics in particular, and in the Western world in general, but what Bismarck said more than a century ago holds the bulk of the answer: “If we do not care about the poor, they will care.” "With politics."

*Quoted from Al Jazeera Net