Leftist statism, an effective disguise for being authoritarian and avoiding reproaches

The poor health of a democratic system is a problem not only due to a particular ideology, but some people would have us believe it is.

Six Spanish political parties support dictatorships, and all six are left-wing
From tyrants to social democrats: costumes of the communism in the old Marxist Europe

On Thursday, Germany's Tui Foundation published a survey stating that 53% of young Europeans prefer democracy to any other form of government, while a fifth (21%) of respondents prefer an authoritarian form of government to a democratic one under certain circumstances. Significantly, in Germany, where the left is at a low ebb, only 15% of young people are open to an authoritarian model.

However, the Tui Foundation states: "Among young people who position themselves politically to the right and feel economically disadvantaged, support for democracy drops to just a third." This has led some media outlets (such as El Mundo, Cadena SER and Antena 3) to link this increase in authoritarianism with the right.

One might wonder what would happen if this survey, instead of asking about authoritarianism, asked about certain authoritarian measures, but disguised them in such a way that they wouldn't appear so. Consider, for example, that the Spanish left has been attacking judicial independence for decades, a clear sign of authoritarianism, under the belief that the truly democratic thing would be for the judiciary to be elected by Parliament. This politicization of justice is incompatible with one of the pillars of democracy, the separation of powers.

Likewise, the left is promoting a discourse that is increasingly hostile to freedom of expression, under the pretext of combating "hate speech," a term that it applies indiscriminately to any approach that does not conform to its ideological dogmas.

Something similar happens with the freedom of education and religious freedom, increasingly eroded by the indoctrination projects of the left, which insists on imposing gender ideology and the most aberrant theses on sexual matters on children, openly violating the right of parents to have their children receive a religious and moral education that is in accordance with their own convictions, a right recognized by Article 27 of the Spanish Constitution but which the left has never respected.

In May, we saw here that in the Spanish parliamentary arch there are six parties that support dictatorships and all six are left-wing, a situation very similar to that which exists in other European countries. Let's consider, without going any further, that in the Socialist International there are 11 parties that were the sole parties of communist dictatorships, and 7 of them are European parties. However, there is no party on the European parliamentary right that has been in that situation.

Despite the above, many media outlets, associations and academic entities insist on ignoring leftist authoritarianism, perhaps because the statism promoted from that margin of the political map (a political doctrine that, like fascism, considers that the State should control all aspects of our lives) remains a very effective disguise for being authoritarian and avoiding reproach, even when a fifth of humanity remains subjected to socialist and communist dictatorships such as China, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, Vietnam, Nicaragua, Laos and Eritrea.

In fact, one wonders to what extent the use of a democratic disguise by this leftist authorism (something that communism already did by cynically calling a brutal dictatorship the "German Democratic Republic") ends up provoking rejection among many young people, not only towards this left, but also towards its disguise. Obviously, many young people lack the intellectual maturity to distinguish one thing from the other. Those of us with more life experience should help them distinguish the one from the other, but it is a difficult task with a left that cynically wraps its abuses in the banner of democracy, sullying and discrediting it, to the misfortune of all.