Crisis of Democracy: Need to Put the Human Back at the Center

Elections in England and France, and European elections before them, and finally the US presidential election campaign have highlighted a serious crisis in Western democracies. There is certainly a crisis of leadership, sometimes of voter turnout, often with an uncertain and unstable outcome in terms of results. If Rishi Sunak and the British Conservatives lost after 14 years in power, perhaps we can say that Marine Le Pen “didn’t win” because it is unclear what the future of France will be. Similarly, in Europe, the wave of anti-systemic voting is barely contained by the old socialist-liberal ruling class, which, however, wants to keep Ursula von der Leyen at the head of the Commission. Only after a few weeks will it be clear whether the operation is successful. But the most sensational case of uncertainty and confusion is the American presidential election, which is a true reflection of the crisis of the Western system. Elderly President Joe Biden doesn’t want to withdraw from the race for the next term, and Donald Trump has already said he won’t recognize the outcome of the vote if he loses.

What unites all these, sometimes even different, phenomena? Today’s democracy definitely lacks the idea of a common and acceptable ground, on which competing parties can still find each other. To use a beautiful Latin expression, this is the moment of “conventio ad exludendum.” The principle that unites a political party is the exclusion, delegitimization, and demonization of the opposing party. This is the war-fueled contagion of political life: the other is the enemy who should not rule for any reason in the world.

In a sense, the ideology of the 1950s is coming back with force: the Cold War logic. Back then, whatever ruled out any possible democratic viability was the so-called “K Factor,” the communism of the countries of real socialism. The world was divided by the Berlin Wall, and here in the West, the Communist parties could never govern because they were tied to the Soviet bloc. Actually, an attempt was made in Italy, with the historic compromise of the Christian Democrats who wanted the ICP in the government of Aldo Moro and Giulio Andreotti, to blow up the “agreement.” Also because, for his part, Enrico Berlinguer, secretary general of the Italian Communist Party, admitted that he felt safer “under the NATO umbrella.” But that experiment lasted a few months: The Red Brigades kidnapped and killed Moro, and Andreotti resigned. In the early 1980s, the Christian Democrats reinstated the “conventio ad excludendum” against the ICP. Ten years later, the Berlin Wall fell, and with it this “convention.” It was a period that gave Europe years of prosperity and hope for a different kind of East-West cooperation, including a possible rapprochement between NATO and Russia.

However, today we have returned to the phase of extremism and conflict with different criteria. Emmanuel Macron blocked Marine Le Pen’s rise to power by catalyzing a Republican front, even a heterogeneous one, in the elections to renew the National Assembly, to prevent the Rassemblement Nationale from governing. The Europe of the socialist-people-liberal accord kept the conservative group led by Giorgia Meloni behind the door, excluding it a priori. Donald Trump and Joe Biden (or whoever takes his place) are radically opposed, so much so that the tycoon has already said in the latest dramatic televised confrontation, in which his opponent lost the thread of the conversation, that he will not recognize any possible victory for his rival.

Now the political and geostrategic reasons for this new radical division of the world are alarming and, as we all know, suggest a dangerous clash between the West and the South of the world. But there are also deep cultural reasons why democracy today is dominated by this dramatic division into two parts, into those who do not recognize each other. For a portal like Pluralia, it should be said that we are facing the very end of modern democracy, understood as pluralism, a plurality of positions and viewpoints that should ultimately contribute to the same common good.

For example, there is an outstanding character, the theologian Elmar Salmann, a German Benedictine monk from Gerleve Abbey in Westphalia, who has illuminated very well one of the causes for this profound crisis of democracy. In an interview with the Vatican newspaper The Rome Observer under the pithy headline “The Tragedy of the Democratic Man,” which can be found here, Salmann says, among other things: “It seems to me that we have reached the end point, the threshold, the limit of the lifestyle that man has adopted in recent decades. This is the style of what I define as ‘democratic man,’ which is not just a political form, but the intrinsic nature of the style of modern man. The democratic person is the one who democratizes everything, who, by representing a constellation of minorities and their associated rights, ends up, conversely, undermining the foundations of democracy as an organized form of civic life. So, for example, parties merge into movements, as the experience of Berlusconi in Italy or the Five Star Movement, in France of Macron and En Marche, Podemos in Spain and Grünen (Greens) or the far right here in Germany shows. The other side of this organizational instability is the emergence of ‘strong men.’ Trump, Erdogan, Morawiecki, Orban, Xi JinPin, and many others. That is, the democratic individual both complements but also absorbs and destroys the democratic structure. In the 1990s, it was thought that the democracy of rights was the trump card in politics, but this idea only produced a culture marked by Manichaeism, which was detrimental to democracy. Not only that, because this Manichaeism, which emerged between and within parties, then spread to culture and society, causing the global polarization that is a true feature of our time. Manichaeism and polarization, which also infected the bishops and the Church. It is no coincidence that the trend towards totalitarianism pervades much of the world, regardless of the various historical and social conditions. I am surprised – and confirmed – by the case of Israel, which is the paradigm of this phenomenon: the only democracy in the Middle East that nevertheless risks collapsing in the face of the combined forces of polarization and authoritarianism. We are faced with a planetary phenomenon that in itself should present us with a serious challenge. And let’s ask ourselves how a democratic person can change that perspective and restructure an institutional form based on representation.”

Salmann’s reflections offer many insights, but the most striking is the definition of “Manichaean democracy.” There’s something about digital civilization, Google, and social media that inexorably pushes towards this Manichaeism. Even a trivial observation is that dialog in public life has largely been replaced by insults, confrontation, and verbal hatred. The other is no longer in the dialectic that favors pluralistic democracy. But an enemy. And the enemy, in his abstraction as a non-human, as a symbol, must be annihilated and destroyed.

Even Pope Francis, visiting Trieste for Catholic Social Weeks, recently spoke of “the crisis of democracy as a wounded heart.” Adding: “The things that limit participation are before our very eyes. If corruption and lawlessness demonstrate a ‘heart attack,’ then various forms of social exclusion should also be of concern. Every time someone is marginalized, the whole society suffers. Trash culture creates a city that has no place for the poor, the unborn, the frail, the sick, children, women, young, and elderly. It’s a throw-away culture. Power becomes self-referential – this is a bad disease – unable to listen to and serve the people. Aldo Moro recalled that “the State is not truly democratic if it does not serve the human, if its highest goal is not dignity, freedom, autonomy of the human person, if it does not respect these social formations, in which the human person develops freely and into which the human person integrates his or her personality. The very word ‘democracy’ doesn’t just coincide with the vote of the people; and so far, I’m concerned about the low number of people who showed up to vote. What does it mean? It is not just a vote of the people, it requires creating the conditions for everyone to express themselves and participate. And participation cannot be improvised: it is learned in childhood, in youth, and must be ‘trained,’ particularly in a critical sense in relation to ideological and populist temptations”.

Here the Pope adds the deep social cause for the impoverishment of Western democracies: the waste culture. The great sociologist Zygmunt Bauman said in one of his precious essays: “The life of a fluid society always oscillates between the joys of consumption and the terror of facing huge piles of garbage to be thrown away.” The huge pile of garbage is also a great metaphor for the struggle that democracy is waging today, in the age of consumerism: it “discards” people, their needs, their weaknesses.

A plural democracy is one that saves everyone, puts the individual at the center, and naturally deconstructs ideologies that divide the field into friends and foes. It is hard to say whether there is still hope for democracy on 21st century Earth in times of war, which is also always a civil war.