02/12/2013
Miquel Porta Perales is a critic and writer
In the name of democracy, democracy can be undermined. Let me be more specific: in the name of the so-called "true democracy" and of the so-called "democratic principle", democracy is being undermined in Spain. On the one hand, by the left in its various manifestations. On the other, by peripheral nationalisms. First things first. The old communism, a strayed social-democracy, new social movements, the very new 'indignados' (outraged), and the self-styled committed intellectuals, all seem to have conspired to the enthronement of the so-called "true democracy" in Spain. What do they say? That ours is a bourgeois democracy, unresponsive to citizens, which does not represent the people, which curtails any attempt to break the logic of power. Meanwhile, peripheral nationalisms solely and simply insist on the existence of a democratic principle according to which "the people have the inalienable right to freely determine their collective future".
The former persist in the error of distinguishing between an alleged bourgeois democracy at the service of capital and an alleged real democracy at the service of the people, unaware that our democracy is accountable to the citizens in Parliament and at the polls, they reject the truism that MPs, senators and governors are so because citizens have bestowed their confidence on them through free and democratic elections, they do not admit that the logic of power varies or not depending on those who hold it as they were voted by the sovereign people. The latter are determined to bring to life the entelechy of there being a natural right to decide which would exert itself beyond the own and characteristic legal framework of democracy.
The fallacies and fictions of those who preach true democracy and the democratic principle are summed up in their proposals. The former: A "Participatory Social State" leading to an "advanced democracy"; a democracy "that explores society's mechanisms of direct intervention" and which claims the "rebellious ideal of democracy"; "Real democracy now!", "democracy stems from the people and the government should be of the people", "mandatory and binding referenda". The latter: "start, via a referendum, a process which implements the right to decide so that the people decide their collective political future".
Participatory State? Advanced Democracy? Direct intervention? Rebellious ideal? Real democracy? A rhetorical and deceitful discourse–which draws from the period that goes from 1917 to 1968: the ghosts of the past–with which it seeks to justify the assault on democracy that is being perpetrated today. The referendum which "fulfils the right to decide the collective future of the people"? An emphatic and deceitful proposal–an exact copy of the eighteenth century German Romanticism–which, appealing to the people and the natural law, unilaterally breaking the democratic and constitutional legality in force, intends to break the State.
The so-called "true democracy" and the alleged "democratic principle" provide a good example of demagoguery and populism–use and abuse of words, distortion of reality, systematic flogging of the adversary, contempt of the law–that undermine the foundations of democracy and coexistence. One and the other open the way leading to a deliberate social engineering project that aims to shape citizens in accordance with the model designed by those who, imbued with moral superiority, consider themselves the true representatives of the "people". Circumlocutions aside: formal democracy–parliamentary or representative democracy–is the only existing democracy. Any alternative–as well-intentioned as it may seem–may involve the dilution or cancellation of democracy and democratic institutions. A new attack on open society.