The eagerness to bury liberal democracy alive and the alternatives of the gravediggers

On November 11, 1947, in the British Parliament, Winston Churchill gave an interesting reflection on democracy.

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People usually only remember one sentence of that quote from the famous British Prime Minister, but I think it's better to read the whole paragraph. I've taken it from the British Parliament website:

"We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of super men and super-planners, such as we see before us, "playing the angel," as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters."

What Churchill captured in these words is the essence of liberal democracy: the election of the government by the people, limited power and individual freedom, as bulwarks against the abuses of politicians and against social engineering projects.

If Churchill uttered those words in 1947, after a world war in which nazism was defeated and liberal democracy emerged victorious (at least in Western Europe: the other half was subjected to the communist yoke), it is because liberal democracy has never ceased to be besieged by all kinds of threats. There are the more direct ones, such as Nazism and Communism, two totalitarian movements that sought to reduce democracy to rubble, but there are also less visible threats, which consist of degrading or perverting liberal democracy to give rise to something else.

Today, both types of threats persist in our society. Nazis are thankfully marginal, but communists still wield considerable influence, not only globally (communist dictatorships still rule a fifth of humanity) but also in the West, where the far left has managed to recover from its fall in 1989 to end up directing a significant part of current political discourse, as we can see in intellectual monstrosities like gender ideology.

Indirect threats also persist and are considerably strong. Those "super-planners" against whom Churchill warned in 1947 are proliferating today under the protection of bloated states inspired by socialist principles. The institutions of the European Union are a clear example of this, with an army of bureaucrats attempting to design and control even the most trivial aspects of our existence. Of course, a state that increasingly encroaches on more spheres of society is not the panacea for liberal democracy, but rather a way of gradually dismantling it, since there can be no effective limitation of political power when it seeks to control everything.

Interestingly, some people attribute to liberal democracy itself the signs of decline caused by those who are destroying it, whether out of ignorance or confusion. This, obviously, generates a certain detachment from democracy itself. Others, less discreetly, intend to bury democracy alive because deep down they detest its essence. They don't want limited political power, they don't believe in individual liberty, and they don't accept that the people should elect their rulers, because in this way they risk the election results not being to their liking.

Whenever democracy enters a crisis (that is, when it suffers serious signs of deterioration or strong attempts at discrediting it), those who detest the essence of liberal democracy try to seize the opportunity to win over those who are confused by interpreting as intrinsic evils of democracy what are actually damages caused by those who seek to degrade it. This entire process is periodically fueled by the reality that Churchill highlighted: democracy is not perfect, just as no human creation is, because human beings make mistakes and our works reflect our propensity to err.

When a moment like this arrives, I always ask the same question: What are the alternatives for those who would bury democracy? We already know that liberal democracy isn't perfect and that it has flaws, and that's why those of us who believe in it strive to point out those flaws so they can be corrected. Others demand the house be demolished because they've noticed a leak, but they refuse to tell us what they're going to build when the plot is empty. Obviously, you don't need to be particularly clever or have the gift of divination to get an idea of ​​what they're after.

When those who want to bury liberal democracy alive are those who support communist dictatorships, those who seek to impose Islamic law in the West (reproducing here the same lack of freedom that exists in Islamist dictatorships), those who yearn for fascism, or those who applaud criminals like Putin and Lukashenko (to cite a few examples of the varied political fauna that readily attends this burial), we can predict the outcome by reading history books or news from countries under dictatorships.

Call me odd or fussy or whatever you like, but personally, I prefer to live in a liberal democracy, with all its flaws, than to be plunged into a dictatorship, of any kind, because I don't want to live under any regime where disagreeing with the political powers means risking death or imprisonment. I'm not alone. Just look at where people are fleeing from and where they're going to realize how lucky we are to live in democratic countries, even though some try to convince us we live in something like Mordor. It's up to us to ensure that this luck doesn't disappear and that our democracy doesn't succumb to those who try to degrade or destroy it, because —I repeat— it's very clear what they're after.

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Photo: Miltiadis Fragkidis.