The Rationality of a Hatred
This new modern hatred of democracy has an agenda: “to attribute, ingenuously or cynically, the limitlessness of wealth [capitalism] to the voracious appetites of democratic individuals, and to make this voracious democracy the major catastrophe by which humanity shall destroy itself.” Every country in the world claims to live in a democratic state. Even North Korea officially goes by the term “Democratic People’s Republic of Korea” and they hold elections. Yet in all of these government democratic claimants democracy is being, to varying degrees, systematically discouraged or repressed without actually calling into question the democratic institutions of these states. “Strictly speaking, democracy is not a form of State. It is always beneath and beyond these forms. Beneath, insofar as it is the necessarily egalitarian, and necessarily forgotten, foundation of the oligarchic state. Beyond, insofar as it is the public activity that counteracts the tendency of every State to monopolize and depoliticize the public sphere. Every State is oligarchic.” Every oligarchy suppresses democracy more or less.
In this real world, a representative system (or form) of government “is regarded as the crucial criterion for defining democracy.” But as we saw last time representation contradicts democracy and is therefore already a corruption of democracy. However given the reality of representation in our world, “we can specify the rules that lay down the minimal conditions under which a representative system can be declared democratic: [1] short and non-renewable electoral mandates that cannot be heal concurrently; [2] a monopoly of people’s representatives over the formulation of laws; [3] a ban on State functionaries becoming the representatives of the people; [4] a bare minimum of campaigns and campaign costs; and [5] the monitoring of possible interference by economic powers in the electoral process.” These rules do not make a good democracy they are meant to stop the worst form of government: “the government of those who love power and are skilled at seizing it….In a word: the monopolizing of la chose publique [public affairs] by a solid alliance of State oligarchy and economic oligarchy….The evils of which our ‘democracies’ suffer are primarily evils related to the insatiable appetite of oligarchs.” It is important to understand that any rights or freedoms that we may possess are not gifts from oligarchs, they are democratic victories of the past against the oligarchs. Each and every one of them are naturally eroded over time.
Rancière gives a common example of bad democracy, which he labels as majoritarianism, and is very close to the situation in here in Canada. Majoritarianism is a system that eliminates parties on the fringes or extremes (good and bad) and gives power to alternating strongest minority government parties who rule without serious opposition for a number of years. These government parties, in doing their best to retain power actually crowed out democracy by mobilizing people to “choose between identical representatives of a State oligarchy that constantly flaunts its mediocrity, if not its corruption. And the democratic passion that so belittles the ‘government candidates’ is no consumer whim; it is simply the wish that politics be more than a choice between interchangeable oligarchs.” The notion of choosing the least worst candidate or of strategic voting to prevent a particular party are expressions of democratic resignation and lack of real choice. However, they are the only actionable choice (even if they are fake choices) left to us in an oligarch state.
“Our governments’ authority thus gets caught in two opposed systems of legitimation: on the one hand, it is legitimated by virtue of the popular vote; on the other, it is legitimated by its ability to choose the best solution for societal problems.” When these two principles are balanced or the popular sovereignty principle is stronger, the oligarch state is limited. However if the second principle (when experts are in charge) is dominant, the oligarchy is in ascendancy. “There was a time when the division of the people was active enough and science modest enough for the opposing principles to maintain a coexistence. Today an oligarchic alliance of wealth and science stakes a claim to all the power and proscribes the possibility that the people divide and multiply.” With the people divided democratic power diminishes; with the multitude exclusively concerned with their multitudinous private interests, common and public interest wanes.
There are many techniques for how an oligarchic alliance of wealth and science tries to get the upper hand. One example is in the use of the word “populism”. “The hope is that under this name they will be able to lump together every form of dissent in relation to the prevailing [oligarchic] consensus, whether it involves democratic affirmation or religious and racial fanaticism. And it is hoped that a single principle will come to be ascribed to this thus-constituted ensemble: the ignorance of the backward….Populism is the convenient name under which is dissimulated the exacerbated contradiction between popular legitimacy and expert legitimacy, that is, the difficulty the government of science has in adapting itself to manifestations of democracy and even to the mixed form of representable system. This name at once masks and reveals the intense wish of the oligarch: to govern without people…without any dividing of the people; to govern without politics.” The use of the word “populism” is often derogatory; it is used as a slur to diminish the will of people who ask for things from their government. It is used as a put down or belittling of people who express different values from the prevailing oligarchic orthodoxy.
Another word that had a lot of currency at its inception was “globalization”. It is a word of faith. Faith that “the free circulation of capital demanding an ever more rapid profitability is a providential law that shall lead humanity to a better future”, is part of the modern religion that we all, as consumers, adhere to and which we are constantly being asked to give outward signs of our devotion. Those people who disagree are labeled as ignorant. But the really is that what they are being “reproached for is simply [their] lack of faith.” Their lack of faith is in the knowledge, theories and models of experts. This again is an example of the oligarchic “compulsion to get rid of the people and of politics.” Getting rid of people and politics in this context means having a united will of the people without conflict and that happens to agree with what the oligarchs and experts think.
The use of language is often used to confuse as can be seen by the relative lack of knowledge around democratic theory and practice. “In a sense, then, the new hatred of democracy is only one of the forms of confusion affecting this term. It doubles the consensual confusion in making the word ‘democracy’ an ideological operator that depoliticizes the question of public life by turning them into ‘social phenomena’, all the while denying the forms of domination that structure society. It [the new hatred of democracy] masks the domination of State oligarchies by identifying democracy with a form of society, and it masks that [domination] of the economic oligarchies by assimilating their empire to the mere appetites of ‘democratic individuals’. Hence, it can [for example], in all seriousness attribute all the phenomena connected with heightening inequality to the fateful and irreversible triumph of the ‘equality of condition’, and so provide the oligarchic enterprise with its ideological point of honour: it is imperative to struggle against democracy, because democracy is tantamount to totalitarianism.” Where democracy is ‘coming together in equality…’ this equality is looked on as being forced and therefore intrinsically totalitarian. Therefore we cannot have equality of opportunity since that would require a forceful redistribution – that is, the oligarchs would have less – this is one example of the anti-democratic logic.
“Democracy is first this paradoxical condition of politics, the point where every legitimization is confronted with its ultimate lack of legitimacy, confronted with the egalitarian contingency that underpins the inegalitarian contingency itself.”
“The ‘government of anybody and everybody’ is bound to attract the hatred of all those who are entitled to govern men by their birth, wealth, or science. Today it is bound to attract this hatred more radically than ever, since the social power of wealth no longer tolerates any restrictions on its limitless growth, and each day its mechanisms become more closely articulated to those of State action.”
“Democracy is neither a form of government that enables oligarchies to rule in the name of the people, nor is it a form of society that governs the power of commodities. It is the action that constantly wrests the monopoly of public life from oligarchic governments, and the omnipotence over lives from the power of wealth. It is the power that, today more than ever, has to struggle against the confusion of these powers, rolled into one and the same law of domination.”